A New Member of the Team
Businesses are run on the decisions we all make. And unfortunately, for some businesses, a distinct lack-of decision.
When we formed UtilityClick coming up to two years ago, we knew that decisive calls would be the make or break of our software baby. And this is no different to any other business which those reading this article are involved in on a daily basis.
Sometimes, the path is just a two-way fork. A ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ decision. Big or small, a binary decision like this can change the fortune of a business substantially. The butterfly effect of taking one path over another is a compounding factor which, in turn, ends up defining 10, 100 or 1000 future decisions. ‘Hire’ or ‘Don’t Hire’, ‘Sign’ or ‘Don’t Sign’ are a few basic examples – each leading to a web of decisions and outcomes that are impossible to predict.
So decisions are important. How many examples can you think of where a business decision hasn’t been made by your superiors, only to negatively impact the business a week, a month or a year later? Fortunately for me, as a director of UtilityClick, I’m very lucky to be able to work hand-in-hand with my co-director Andy “Energy” Hunter in a productive and decisive way. This might come down to the design – or priority – of a new system feature, a financial decision or any other of the hundreds of decisions we end up making every month. Sure, we don’t always see eye-to-eye – but agreements are always, always made. And in my view, that’s key.
Sitting across a table back in December, planning through our first calendar quarter for 2018, we must have made 50 such decisions in the space of a day. Some small, some big. Some binary, some complex. Decisions which we have persisted with and have seen for ourselves the benefit it brings to our customers. One of these examples was to set in stone a monthly incremental release of new features and upgrades for the system – to complement the CRM functionality. In January and February, we stuck to our guns and released numerous additions to the system which our brokers now enjoy using on a daily basis.
March is no different, and decisions have been made. Alongside the improvements we’re making to the customer portal, and an upcoming reporting upgrade (we can’t help ourselves!) we’re working through another set of incremental items requested by the very people using the UtilityClick platform. The biggest decision was whittling down the hundreds of exciting options.
There’s no shortage of decisions to make in this business, and since day one, it’s been thoroughly exciting seeing them come to fruition.
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