Despite having innovative ideas, great teams, and heaps of funding, why do over half of European start-ups fail within the first five years? Having digital fitness is the answer as to how to help this not happen.
Businesses must have an innovative mindset and be digitally fit to take advantage of innovation opportunities.
Sanjib Sahoo, the Chief Digital Officer at Ingram Micro, recently discussed the value of digital fitness and the elements that make it up at the CCE conference. As an organisation that assists businesses in utilising technology, including over 22.5 million SMEs in Europe, Ingram Micro is familiar with the difficulties that start-ups and small businesses face.
According to Sahoo, entrepreneurs must assess their digital capabilities at every stage to combine this smart and customer mindset while growing and developing their businesses.
“The first point is that digital fitness requires a lifestyle change, just like physical fitness,” Sahoo explains further. “You don’t go from being overweight to running 10 miles the next day,” but you must constantly improve your fitness. The same is true for start-ups and their mission to survive and thrive. So instead of talking about digital transformation, companies should first figure out if they are actually digitally fit and then set up a program for incremental change.
Sanjib Sahoo
Digital Fitness Is About The Mind, Soul & Attitude
So, what does it mean to be digitally fit? And what should start-ups and SMEs look for to improve their digital fitness?
Being digitally fit (having digital fitness) is about having the right mentality and drive. For an organisation to be successful with digital transformation, the key is having the right mindset and mentality, where everyone is on board with performing and transforming together. This requires a shift in the corporate culture and a change in attitude.
Digital fitness is more than just a physical state – it’s an attitude. To be successful in the digital space, start-ups need to prepare themselves to commit over the long term, making small alterations and advancing bit by bit. Once you believe in how digital can transform your business, it’s about getting everyone on board with how it can empower users, from internal processes, like automating the onboarding of new staff, to automatic credit control for collecting overdue client bills.
What’s next?
Remember, you have to become digitally fit. Think Blockbuster.
Sahoo recounts Blockbuster’s stronghold on the video rental industry but was unable to adapt to digital streaming. In turn, it was beaten by Netflix, which has since created a successful streaming industry.
Speed is essential when it comes to digital fitness, but it’s also important to recognise that this is a never-ending process. Once your organisation becomes digitally fit, there is no going back.
It’s time to become digitally fit in your business, and if you already embrace the digital world, keep going and improving. Think about the time-consuming processes or tasks that your staff do daily that you can automate. Don’t stop there; your business’s digital fitness needs to be continually improved.
Bonus Tip:
Automate your employee onboarding, use a system such as Bamboo HR and integrate it with Zapier to automatically send training documents, welcome email and initiations to tools such as Office 365 or Slack.
Use an Application Tracking System (ATS) for posting jobs to multiple job boards, handling applications and arranging interviews. You can even integrate this into Bamboo HQ, so when an applicant gets the job, Bamboo HR is notified, and the onboarding process begins automatically. Smart.
