SASS has eaten the world. Everywhere you turn, software providers are hounding you to sign up for their free trials. Followed by another automated monthly bill. Many of these tools are extremely powerful. And if you get lucky enough to find a product that fits your companies workflow, you feel like you've hit the jackpot.

The problem is that every company is different. Even within your industry, the way that you operate is different than your competitors. And in our experiences, the way you work is what differentiates you. How you take care of your customers, treat and incentivize your team, manage, and maintain company assets. They are all tiny detail in the collection of processes that runs your business.

So that leaves you in the situation you are in now. You likely have five to ten different software products you've tried to tie together with middleware or Zapier, but it ends up being clunky. You have duplicate data entry, virtual assistants who are copy and pasting data from one system to the other. And in general, you are hamstrung by the limits of this technology.

Here's the good news, you aren't alone. Most growing companies are struggling with these same challenges. Some of those companies have successfully transitioned away from the SAAS merry-go-round. And they've done this by taking ownership of their technology stack. Here are a few upsides to building your own software to run your business.

Direct API Integrations - Trash the duct tape and wire

Most SAAS tools have some integration points. Like offering APIs, you can interface with directly. Others work with tools like Zapier. This is great when you have small integrations that need to be done. But as you grow and your workflow becomes more complex, these integrations fall apart. You end up with a house of cards that works some of the time, but if any glitch arises, the whole thing falls down.

When you build your own tools, you have control of all the data in your workflow. There are most likely software tools you aren't going to replace, like your accounting software or project management suite. So we build direct, robust integrations with those tools. This allows us to access all of the data in your business, in one place. Bringing all that disparate data together turns your team into informed strategic thinkers instead of bogged down with endless data entry.

New Possibilities

This is one of the first questions I ask when I meet a potential new customer:

Are there any ways that you feel like you could better serve your customers or grow your business if you had better software?

This is an essential line of questioning. When you are looking to replace a tool, we want to make sure that there's a ton of value on top of the current use case that it's serving now. Here's an example:

In the industrial service industry, a customer of ours brought us in to help with some significant challenges they were facing with performing audits and inspections in the field. We discovered that the technicians were finding parts and services that the customer needed. But that information was never making it back to the Account Executive to convert that opportunity into a sale.

We created an easy way for the technicians to send them the data they needed to make the sale. After just three months in the field, this feature had driven over $200,000 in sales. Small features bridging communication gaps like this can bring tremendous added value. We are really good at spotting these opportunities so you can capitalize on them.

Post COVID World

The changes we've all had to make during the COVID pandemic have exposed the essential tools for keeping our business running. But it's also given us all a good reason to reassess every line item's value in our budget. There are many ways to measure the value of these tools. But now is the time to reassess and see if they are delivering enough bang for the buck.

Not only does their cost add up significantly over time, accounting for the lack of interoperability and the strain that puts on your whole organization is the most important. When times get tough, you need tools that are reliable and robust. You can't afford that house of cards to fall down in times like these.

You might be feeling that undertaking a project like this is too daunting. As we've stated before, there's never been a better time to build than now. Your risk exposure is now much lower than the opportunity costs of not acting. Great software can take your business to new levels and give you peace of mind as you've never felt before.

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