Ryan Pollyniak:
The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it's taken place when it hasn't.
Anika Jackson:
Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success.
Something a lot of people don't consider as necessarily their first order of business when they're starting a new venture is all of their systems and processes, unless they're that type of person but, from my side of things, being in marketing field, that's usually something I get into later when I'm trying to make sure that I have everything set up really well. There's a lot of changes going on in this field as well, and so I'm really excited to bring on Ryan Pollyniak. Thank you for being here from Western Computer. You know a lot about this side of things. This is not my area of expertise, so I'm really excited to have you dive in and share a little bit about your background, your expertise, and help us figure out what we need to look for or questions to ask when we're thinking about putting better systems and processes into place, making sure that we are using cloud, what's going on with AI and systems. So, looking forward to getting into this conversation.
Ryan Pollyniak:
Yeah. Absolutely, Anika. Thanks for having me on. Glad to talk through this with you. And, you mentioned this is not your forte or not your expertise, and I would say that it's not most business owners' expertise either, right? As they're out running their business and growing it and taking those preliminary steps to drive towards where they want to get in the future, it's important to have some guidance from people and companies who have done it and who have your best interest in mind so I'm glad to give some unvarnished advice and opinions today. No problem.
Anika Jackson:
Fantastic. Well, before you were at Western Computer, what were you doing and was this the area that you always thought you'd go into for a career?
Ryan Pollyniak:
It's funny. I have three little girls and I tell them, "I want you to do whatever you want to do in life." And, they ask me, "Well, did you want to be a cloud transformation executive when you were a kid?" Maybe it's not exactly what I had dreamed of, no, but I love it now that I'm in it. I wanted to be a pro baseball player or an astronaut just like most other young kids and I wound up going to business school and getting into ERP and never looking back.
So, to answer your question, before Western computer, I was actually in the ERP ecosystem, really since I came out of college, way back when. You see the grays, it's the years are creeping up there a little bit. And, I came out working for ADP in their ERP division, which has long since spun off and no longer associated with ADP. And then, I got into Microsoft Dynamics through an add-on solution that is peripheral to the core ERP applications and then I moved into Western Computer and ERP accounting, finance inventory deployments for all different types of companies almost 10 years ago. It'll be 10 years in May that I've been with Western Computer.
Anika Jackson:
Yeah. Fantastic. And, how have you seen things evolve? And, let's start with, define ERP for those listeners who may be just getting out of university, maybe they don't have a business background, but they know that they want to be an entrepreneur or they have a business idea.
Ryan Pollyniak:
Sure. So, ERP, let's start with the basics, it stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. And, what it really is a connected system to help a business manage all of their various processes. So, you've got inventory that you have to manage. Well, you have to buy that from your vendors, and you have to put it on sales orders and sell it to your customers, and you have to invoice and accept payments and settle the invoices and create your financial statements. All of that requires a connected system.
Sometimes ERP means different things to different people, where you'll hear ERP as the operational side, the inventory and the manufacturing and the warehousing and then, you've got an accounting system as well. Typically, you're going to want that integrated into one system and all talking to each other to save yourself custom integrations and kind of a mess. So, having an end-to-end connected ERP is huge for a business as it grows.
Anika Jackson:
Yeah. What's the first thing that people don't think of when they're setting up their business systems? I know, for me, you think, "Okay. You can start a business, it's so easy," right? I mean it is, but it's not. You go out, you get your business license, you figure out what kind of business you're going to be. Maybe you just use whatever email system and the systems that you've heard about, but maybe you haven't really investigated.
Ryan Pollyniak:
Yeah. So, I see growing businesses tend to focus on the now and that is understandable. You've got to make sure that you're getting product out the door or servicing your customers, whatever industry you're in. And, there's sometimes a lack of long-term vision, right? If you're going to build a 10-story building and you're only building the first floor right now, you still want a bigger foundation that can handle the rest of it, otherwise you risk rework. So, I would say that having a long-term vision is one thing that I would encourage any new business owner to have from a technology standpoint, but also a broad vision in terms of all the different departments in your organization.
So, what I'll see very commonly is you've got somebody leading marketing and they'll go out and they'll find a marketing tool that they like, and you've got your sales manager who goes out and he's got some budget, or she's got some budget and they go find some CRM that they like, and then your production people who are making your product are going to find a manufacturing solution, and your accountants are going to run QuickBooks or whatever accounting solution they've got. What you end up with in a scenario like that is very fragmented technology and no holistic plan. And, as your processes start to become ingrained in these applications, ripping them out becomes harder. Your marketing manager doesn't want to give up their product and your sales manager doesn't want to give up their product.
But, there are solution suites out there. Microsoft is the one that I'm particularly educated on and fond of and represent and recommend to have a much more broad approach, a lot of interconnectedness so that if you could start with a long-term vision and then bring in the pieces you want, you tend to end up with a better final product as opposed to making decisions in silos by department and then trying to cobble it all together at the end.
Anika Jackson:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I even think about this in terms of... I work for a nonprofit and when I'm looking at the donor software that I inherited, and I'm looking at that of like, "Does it have full functionality? I know we have an academy attached to us. The academy uses this, this, and this. We're using this other system. They're not speaking to each other. Do I have to go through three different databases to get all the information I need pulled into one?" I mean, that's something I'm dealing with right now. And then, getting emails out and making sure we have the right campaigns going out and that we have the follow-up for customers, which in our case would be donors. And then, is this other software better for us to take donations than this one system that we are using as a CRM? So, it can get very complicated pretty quickly.
Ryan Pollyniak:
It can.
Anika Jackson:
How do you know what questions to ask and find somebody like yourself, like Western Computer? Because I don't think that's probably... I mean, I grew up in a family of people who taught Cisco Systems and different things, but I often see, I don't see that connection as strongly nowadays. I think a lot of people just start, they don't know that there are experts like yourself out there to go to.
Ryan Pollyniak:
Yeah. Sure. And, everyone's going to start online these days, right? You're going to start Googling or Binging or CoPiloting or whatever search tool you have at your disposal, and you're going to have a flood of information. I mean, Microsoft Dynamics, you've got hundreds of partners, you've got Microsoft, thousands of people writing blogs and posts and articles, and you've got 15 different applications. It's not reasonable to think that you're going to take a few hours off your day job and navigate this and figure it out on your own. What I've told some clients is you need a Sherpa to guide you up Mount Everest. You can't Google it and figure it out on your own. And, that's what you need from a technology standpoint as well.
I think it's important to talk to a variety of companies and know maybe you talk to a Microsoft partner and you talk to some competing systems and get a general consensus and don't let anybody speed you up and tell you, "Hey. Sign by the end of the month and get this big discount." That's not in your best interest. It's not how you should be doing business, right? Take your time. This is important stuff and you'll pay for it more in the long run making a short-sighted decision for a short-term discount. And, if a company really wants your business anyway, they'll continue to offer you those same available promotions or whatever they might have. But definitely talk to a variety of companies, talk to references customers and find out how those companies have treated them.
Here's a big one. Don't rely on the top level, i.e. Oracle, even though I love Microsoft, Microsoft, SAP, whomever you're looking at, but they do have small business solutions too so not necessarily with the big SAP. But, you want to talk to a partner who is going to be the person that will do the work for you and implement you and give you an unvarnished opinion of what's required to make things a success. That's very important. And, a lot of that will be glossed right over talking to the top level company. So, you may go to a Microsoft or an Oracle or one of these companies and they might provide some partners for you to go talk to. That's where the real rubber meets the road, right? Who is going to be understanding my business, implementing the software, standing behind their work, making sure we're happy. That's always a partner. You have to get down to that level for sure.
Anika Jackson:
Yeah. Yeah. You brought up a lot of good questions and ways to look at things. Don't just count on the Google reviews or the whatever reviews, actually talk to people. Which I think people also forget to in this day and age.
Ryan Pollyniak:
You're right. And, g2.com. That's an unbiased independent review site for consulting firms. Go find your partner on there, see what they're... Here's what it asks you. "What do you like about Western Computer? What don't you like about Western Computer? What do you like about X company? What don't you like about them?" And then, you can go read all of their customers' actual words that they can't go out there and edit or inform in any way. That's a great way to go get a really true opinion of how clients feel working with a company.
Anika Jackson:
Yeah. And, you talked specifically about managing enterprise solutions and right before we jumped on, I was saying I think a lot of my listeners probably aren't that level. They may be someday, but do they need to consider the same things because they may not be able to, like you said, look at the really big solutions that might be what they need in the future, right? But, for right now, it might be unaffordable, it might offer too much capacity, it might cause a little more friction or confusion when they're not sure how to exactly implement things into very simple systems.
Ryan Pollyniak:
Yeah. Absolutely. And, for our company now, I'm working with some bigger companies, absolutely. I still have a long history of working with small businesses. I mean, we've got clients $5 million to $10 million in annual revenue who have very important decisions to make. And, I think it's even more important for them.
Going back to having a long-term plan, the earlier you have that plan, the better. Because, as you grow... I know of one company that everybody on this call would know, I'm not going to mention them by name, we started working with them when they were targeting about $15 million in revenue for the year. By the time we were done with the project, which continued to lengthen and ended up taking nine months because they continued to grow, they were targeting to do about $200 million that year. Okay? So, they started in out of various silos and let their processes grow into those applications. And, they're still using a lot of that stuff today because it was so painful to rip it all out, they were growing so quickly, that they couldn't. So, get beyond the features.
You can't just see a demo and say, "Okay. This is great. This meets my marketing requirements and it's going to be wonderful for marketing," and then have somebody else look at a feature-based demo. You need a more holistic view, like what's the platform like altogether? If I wanted to set a foundation and then plan out the landscape in my backyard and then put some trees in this year and some bushes in next year, and some sod in at the beginning, well, at least I've got a holistic plan and I've got elements that are going to work together, if that makes sense. And then, you implement incrementally.
And that's important for small business too. Keep it small. I tend to have to talk the small businesses down and say, "Listen, let's start smaller. Let's not boil the ocean to use..." An analogy that you hear out there, because the tendency is, "Well, I'm making these changes. Here's everything that I ever dreamed of." Start with the boring foundational stuff. No offense to the accountants. You need GL, you need AP, you need AR, you need to have your inventory in your system. It should be an auditable gap compliant system, which a lot of these systems out there are not, right? You can go delete an invoice and have no record of it. These are the foundational things that you need to get in place. With a solid foundation, then you can build the nice to have stuff on top of that and have a much more successful long-term plan that you can grow into.
Anika Jackson:
Yeah. Now we're in the world of cloud, and now we're also in the world of AI. So, I'd love to hear a little bit about your thoughts on that, because obviously now you are a cloud expert. One thing, and just to piggyback on this is, I'm on this Intuit small business council, and two years ago we spoke to Congress members. We spoke about the needs of small businesses to bridge the digital divide, right? Because a lot of them, before the pandemic, weren't really there. And, that probably includes having the kind of systems that you can help put into place for people and for small businesses. They didn't have everything where they needed to be to understand that they were moving their businesses online or they were going to falter. Now we're talking about AI powers main street and helping small businesses understand the next level is how to use AI technology appropriately as a tool to help streamline your business processes and systems.
So, I'd love to hear a little bit about your thoughts on how did your role change when the world of cloud computing came about, and then what changes do you see now with AI and then future project for us if you can. I know that's a lot.
Ryan Pollyniak:
Yeah. How long do we have? Great question. So, let me back up. You asked me at the very beginning what changes have I seen the most, and I didn't answer it, but you just nailed them, right? Cloud and AI. First it was cloud, now it's definitely AI and it's been a massive transformation even in my 15 years. I mean, it's huge. So, it used to be that you bought software and you put it on a server in your office and you remote desktopped in if you need remote access, and you crossed your fingers that it was secure.
And then you started seeing move to the cloud mid... Really the first decade of the two thousands is when that really started to happen and get your systems into the cloud. And, there was a lot of fear there. There's a lot of, "Hey. I need my data to be secure and it's secure in my closet. It's not secure in some place where I don't really know where it is or where it's hosted." That was the general opinion of it for quite a long time and you've seen quite a shift there as the information has panned out that far more secure in the cloud and it's not even close. And, that would be my number one reason and is actually.
We wrote a blog on seven reasons to move to the cloud recently. Number one, security, security, security. It is huge. And so, Microsoft, in our case, they're the ones hosting your data behind a black curtain. It is untouchable. You don't see ransomware attacks, you don't see systems go down. Everyone that we see is a customer on an on-premise SQL server somewhere, and they're ransomwared and their data's held hostage and they can't ship and they can't invoice and they can't pay their vendors, and it's a disaster. So, the cloud security, it used to be a fear of moving to the cloud, and now it's really the main advantage to move to the cloud.
Now, that's the main advantage in terms of risk mitigation. If you want to talk about the main advantage in terms of potential opportunity, right now, it's AI. It's funny. I saw a cartoon, it was like something to the effect of a boss telling his director, "We need AI." And the guy said, "Great. What do you want to do with it?" And he said, "I have no idea, but we need it right away." And so, I hear that all the time, "What's AI going to do for me?" And the answer is, nobody really fully knows. I mean, it's bleeding edge and it's changing every day.
We see concrete use cases all the time from predicting your cashflow to optimizing your inventory, which is critical for distribution companies to tactical based AI. Let my sales reps quickly compose an email or find information or let me get some marketing content together. What I mean by tactical is it's saving one of my employees time and making them more productive. But the big data stuff in terms of how have my customers paid over the last 18 months and what can I expect for cashflow, that kind of thing requires discipline and structure in your data estate, if I can call it that.
So, you can't have your aging on-premise ERP with some data, and half your data is in Excel because that's how you run half your processes. And, some of your data is in your disconnected CRM. And Joe in sales has got all his customers and opportunities in a notebook in his briefcase, right? You need an aggregated data model that makes sense if you're going to use that data to inform AI and to help you make decisions. So, it's foundational, right? You can't just say AI. You have to first take those steps.
Now, sure, you can use ChatGPT or I like Bing Enterprise Copilot to go find information and quickly aggregate it and put it in front of you, no problem. But if you really want the long-term benefits of AI as a business, and some of them we don't even realize yet, they're coming though, and the companies who have their data aggregated in the cloud and in an organized model all in one place are going to be able to take advantage of those coming AI advancements more quickly and beat their competition. And, there will be companies that get left behind because they didn't have that long-term vision. And, when this next latest and greatest AI comes out, if you don't have the data to feed the beast, so to speak, you're not going to get anything out of it.
Anika Jackson:
