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One of the primary responsibilities of a manager in a company is to make important business decisions that hopefully result in a positive outcome for your company. While making a decision may be easy, your ability to make the correct decision with confidence is highly dependent on having all the relevant information available when you need it.
When simple questions suddenly become very complicated
To illustrate this point, let’s run a little experiment: how confidently could you answer each of the following questions, using only what you know or remember:
- What side of the road would you drive on?
- What side of the road would you drive on… in Sweden?
- What side of the road would you drive on… in Sweden… back in August 1967?
I bet it wasn’t long before you started thinking, “It’s the right side, but if only I could Google it to check”. In each case, making a decision is quite easy, but your confidence would have dropped each time, and the consequences of making the wrong decision could have been very significant.
Now let’s translate those questions into a real-life situation I found myself in when I was tasked with improving our financial efficiency. As part of that process, I had to review our service subscriptions and decide whether to renew or cancel them:
- What are my service contracts?
- What are my service contracts… that renew this year?
- What are my service contracts… that renew this year … and it’s currently the end of May?
I had just joined a new team, and the contracts in question had already been in place for many years and worked on by different employees, but I didn’t know where they all were. It took weeks of back-and-forth with other teams to find them all. Then it took several days to read them and record renewal and notice dates, which allowed me to decide on the correct priority order in which to address each of the contracts. Luckily we had not missed any notice deadlines, which could have resulted in very expensive auto-renewals for services that were no longer wanted. But now that I knew all this important information, I had no system in which to record it and make it available and accessible to colleagues in the future. If I wasn’t there to answer the question the next time it was asked, someone else would have to go through the same process, consuming weeks of valuable time to recreate my work.
Understand what you need, not what is being offered to you
The situation I just described will be very familiar for many professionals, yet my search for a solution in the market always ended in disappointment. The options normally created additional work rather than reducing it. Or implementation required a long and involved project to migrate and simply set up the system. To use the systems required changing how you work. They looked and behaved like programs from when Microsoft first introduced Windows. It shouldn’t have been that difficult.
I knew what I wanted from a solution — something that let me search through all the documents, highlighted the relevant clauses and provided a summary of the results. An ability to distribute the work of reviewing and recording important data to my team, but capturing the data in one centralised location. A solution that helped accelerate the incredibly important (but mundane) administrative tasks of filing documents and calendaring renewal dates, allowing the team to focus on more strategic projects to help grow the business.
My decision to help you making yours
This is where the story of Aerofiler begins, and we’re excited to share the journey with you. I left an incredible company, to build a solution that I hope will help many, many professionals keep track of what’s important, allowing them to make confident, timely decisions.
If you have experienced any of the challenges I’ve described, and you’d like to discover a better way to manage your signed contracts, please get in touch. We’d love to have you join us for the journey.
