How FileMaker can make your business more valuable
When it is time to sell your business, FileMaker can help you to get a bigger payday!
There comes a time when every entrepreneur thinks of selling his or her business. After all, you have put in tons of blood, sweat, and tears into your business. It is natural to hope that someday you can recover some of that “sweat equity” in terms of real (read “dollars”) equity.
How can software developed with FileMaker help you to sell your business? There are numerous factors which make a business a sale-able commodity, not the least of which is that it is profitable. But for our purposes, we will examine those factors in your business which can be enhanced with business automation software developed with FileMaker Pro.
What are the factors that enhance your business value through software?
- Encapsulated Business Processes
- Automated Workflow
- Integrated Data
- Coordinated Employees
If you build a business system using FileMaker Pro software, you will vastly increase your business resale value. The time and money you invest in automated business software will come back to you in terms of increased business value. Let’s look at each of these:
Encapsulated Business Processes
What do I mean be “encapsulated”? Consider the usual process which many businesses pursue. They know that they need to have checklists of all their business processes. (“This is how to make our widgets. This is how we do our billing”, etc.). Problem is, they just write them down on a piece of paper, maybe put it all in a nice, big three ring binder, make a great cover sheet for it that says “ACME Business Processes”. But then they put it up on the shelf in the manager’s office, and almost no one ever looks at it again. That is “not” an “encapsulated” business process.
By “encapsulated”, I mean business processes that have been merged into your daily business practice. They have become a regular part of your routine. Your systems are intertwined with these best practices, and they are part-and-parcel of how you do business. That is an “encapsulated” process. And what is the best way to encapsulate a business process? You build it into your business software. So that there is no way to do your business, except by following the best practices which you have built into your software.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say your company makes widgets, and customers often come to your offices to get a load of widgets onto their pickup truck. Your company rule from accounting is “no one takes off with a load of widgets until they have paid for them”; (that is, we don’t invoice after the fact for our widgets; you have to pay up front.). That is a company best practice. How do you encapsulate that? We know that the shipping/delivery department prints up a receipt for the customer whenever anything goes out the door, but they keep forgetting that unlike all their other products, you can’t just print up a receipt for widgets and let them go; they have to pay up front. So they have to remember to tell every new person in the department, ‘oh yeah, although we invoice for everything else people pick up, if they come for widgets, they have to pay for those first.’ What happens when someone forgets to tell the new guy that? (After all, it is written in the operations manual, sitting in the managers office up on the shelf. What more do you need? ). So instead of this failed process, you build it into your company customer software using FileMaker Pro. When shipping/delivery prints up an order, if one of those line items on the receipt includes ‘widgets’, and they are not listed as paid for, then the “print” button never appears. And a warning tooltip may pop up that says, “Widgets must be paid for before customer pickup.” There; you have just encapsulated a company best practice into your software. They workers cannot even screw this one up because the software won’t let them.
This is called encapsulating your business rules. Your business best practices have been captured by your software. End result is that your business runs more smoothly, makes more money, spends less time and stress chasing down payments for widgets, and everything is just better. The value of your business has just increased because you have encapsulated your business rules into your software using FileMaker Pro.
We have several products to enhance your business value right now. We have our FREE PowerStart Software. We have our HighPower Freelance Software to run your freelance agency. We have our inexpensive HighPower Data Suite software. Any of these will get you started on increasing the value of your business through captured business systems.
Ok, there are three more ways that using custom business software built with FileMaker Pro will increase your business value. But we will look at those in future blogs. Stay tuned, and sign up for our newsletter, if you haven’t yet.
Best to you, William Miller, Founder, HighPower Data Solutions