In a recent blog post over on Cloud Ave, Ben Kepes quoted a “friendly SaaS vendor CEO who shall remain anonymous” as having said the following:
The app is to SaaS what the hamburger is to Macdonalds – people forget that. The app is a small part. To go global the BUSINESS MODEL and INFRASTRUCTURE and SYSTEMS need to scale… The actual application is the least of your worries. That’s why we have an average product but profit and high revenue wheras some slick apps out there have no money in the bank.
An insight well worth re-visiting every now and then.
No matter what line of business you are in, if you ever want to scale it up beyond a one or two man company then the processes and systems you have in place are just as important as the product or service you are delivering.
Can you make a better burger than McDonalds? Sure you can. But you can’t build a better burger-making-and-delivery system than McDonalds have.
McDonalds didn’t get so big because they make great burgers. It was because of the system they have for consistently delivering the burgers the same way everywhere in the world – quickly and efficiently.
Before you ask, no – it wasn’t me that was quoted. I think our product is anything but average!
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This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Couldn’t have said it better myself! I think many business managers forget that scaling up the business means outsourcing or hiring – either way it will take you away from the creativity that made you start the business in the first place and into the management of the beast you have created. Of course, you could try outsourcing the administrative management but then you’d lose control, or would you?
Very true. Of course, if you had an amazing burger, I’m sure you’d do pretty well – but scaling up/out a successful high quality enterprise is far from easy at the best of times!
[...] 2 – Role Reversal Before I launched KashFlow, there was another company in the UK also providing web-based accounting software. Hardly anyone outside of the industry has heard of them as they’ve not done particularly well at marketing themselves. Nor do they have a great hamburger. [...]