Technology as a Driver for Growth – How Proper Tools Enable Growth

Technology as a driver for growth – how proper tools enable growth

November 18th at Staria's Slush Side Event, Anneli Aljas, VP of Finance from Starship Technologies, gave a keynote speech how proper tools can be what makes the growth possible, and lack of proper tools will slow you down and cause a lot of pain. 

If your intention is to grow as a business, you should consider the scalability of your tools from the very start. And by tools, I mean both systems and processes.  

The two go hand-in-hand. It’s impossible to have a good process with a bad system and vice versa. My 20 years of experience in working in the finance function of growth companies has made that clear. 

From a growth perspective, proper tools can be what makes the growth possible, and lack of proper tools will slow you down and cause a lot of pain. 

Tools enable automation, automation enables scaling 

In the early days of my career, I was one of the co-founders of an IT marketplace business. The idea was (and still is) that we brought together the buyers and the wholesalers on an easy-to-use platform. We took orders and sent purchase orders, and sent invoices and received invoices. All by hand. 

But as the business started to grow, we were faced with a challenge: To continue doing things the same way, we would have to hire more people. But we didn’t have the money for that. So it was out of necessity that we developed a system to automate the work we would have hired more people for. 

But that wasn’t sustainable. So we built a tech foundation that would scale with our growth, which is still in use today. 

Be prepared, automate as much as possible, enjoy the growth journey 

Often in growth companies, the pace is so quick that the finance department is not always aware early enough of the business launching new verticals or new markets. No one has thought about how the invoicing or accounting will be handled.  

Automation is the goal and processes and systems are the tools that will get you there. That is the mentality behind how we run operations at Starship.  

We’ve been growing steadily, and we know that we are about to hit the fast-growing sage. But we are prepared for it. We’ve taken our time, we’ve automated all we can in the finance function, we’ve mapped cross-functional processes, and we are working towards implementing a single-entry principle. 

So, when the fast growth starts, we’ve done everything we can. We won’t be held back by trivialities like how to handle invoicing. We are free to dream big and grow as much as we can. 

And that’s what I suggest you try to do as well.