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The Modern Tech Stack is the New Modern Office (Modern Office Series, Part 1)
The office, as we know it, is literally vanishing.
According to the Brookings Institute, “Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, median square feet of occupied office space per worker across the top 10 U.S. metro areas by population was down 22% since 1990. (Now) vacancy rates are over 20% in some submarkets (like Dallas).”
The research revealed rapidly declining numbers before 2020, when most of the world evacuated the physical office for the virtual.
To grasp just how seismic the modern office has changed, contrast the declining occupied-office stats with what’s happening in tech, because tech is a mirrored reflection of how we buy, sell, and work.
In 2020, e-commerce in the US exploded at a burst of ten years growth in 3 months’ time. The cloud computing market in the US is expected to grow over twice its size in the next 3-4 years, from 371 billion to 832 billion by 2025. And in a recent global survey of executives, the average share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has accelerated “by a shocking seven years.”
This radical overhaul to virtualize the modern office is not due solely to the pandemic, the pandemic was simply fuel to a fire, or as researchers with McKinsey put it, the COVID-19 crisis created, “a tipping point of historic proportion.”*
So while the physical office is shrinking right before our eyes; the virtual office is growing.
The Bad News
This shift is more than a swap of physical real estate for virtual real estate.
McKinsey’s research revealed that in response to the need to build a virtual office in place of the vanishing physical one, and because of the increasing client demand for digital interactions, the majority of companies have already accelerated their investments in digital tools that power their business. They are investing digitally in every area: customers, supply chain, and team (internal ops). The majority have already improved their tech stack, to the degree that “digital adoption has taken a quantum leap at both the organizational and industry levels.”
Why is this bad news?
Because if you’re not numbered among those who have doubled-down on the right tech stack to modernize your office, you’re already a few years behind. And at the rate tech is climbing, you must pay attention and act now, if you don’t, you will forever play catch-up with your competitors, or worse, left standing still.
The Good & Better News
The good news is that it’s neither difficult nor expensive to invest in the modern office for you, your team, and your customer. Modernizing the office today isn’t like a physical home makeover. You are not paying Chip and Joanna Gaines to flip your cubicle-laden 80’s office maze into a mid-century-mod hipster space.
Modernizing your office today takes place almost exclusively in two areas: beneath the hood (ops that are running your day-to-day operation) and -most importantly- the places where your clients interact with you digitally. Compared to old infrastructure investments, you can invest cheaply and deploy quickly.
The better news is that every investment in modernizing your office leads to rapidly accelerated sales growth, faster than ever before. An investment in new marketing tools, new sales platforms, new order infrastructure has an immediate payoff. “At the organizations that experimented with new digital technologies during the crisis, and among those that invested more capital expenditures in digital technology than their peers did, executives are twice as likely to report outsize revenue growth than executives at other companies.” (McKinsey)
Those who modernize their tech are twice as likely to report more revenue growth.
Most importantly, it critical for all of us to remember, that because the modern office is now largely comprised of the tools that power our virtual offices, our “corporate growth strategies and digital strategies are now the same.” In other words, it’s impossible to have a sales plan separate from a digital plan. So much so that when the CEO of Quora declared that their team would now work from home, he went so far as to state, “our HQ will be in the cloud.”
If the modern tech stack is now the modern office, the question for you is: How does your tech stack stand up? Where do you stand among your peers? Do you have best-in-class solutions for your team, your supply chain, and your customers? Are you leading the pack with technology or lagging behind?
Since the modern tech stack is now the modern office, in this new series, we’re going to look at what the most progressive businesses are using in every area that powers their business, plus, why these tools matter, and how to harness them to power your drive.
For now, we’ve created a checklist for you to review, a list of the tools that make up your current stack. Key questions to ask yourself before you begin:
Do you have best-in-class, updated tools for your best-in-class team?
Are you using too many tools to power your business, causing a ridiculous (and unnecessary) amount of friction for you, your team, and clients?
Are all of your tools in the cloud? (The safest option that powers work from anywhere).
The Quiz: Is your modern office (TEch StacK) truly modern?
Take this small quiz below and list your answers, then, grade your solutions on a scale of 1 to 5, (from 1 admitting “we suck and it’s time to fix it” to 5 being “we’re so damn modern we’re already post-modern!”):
Your engine:
What do you use to power your business for order management?
Does it power your entire supply chain? From suppliers to decorators to customers?
Does it facilitate easy collaboration with your team (sales and support) as well as with your suppliers and customers, all in-app?
Is it in the cloud so that it’s accessible from anywhere and does it allow transparency for everyone in your organization to see what’s happening in your business at all times?
Sales:
What tools do you use for sales presentations? How many? How slow/fast is it? How creative?
Order acknowledgment, proof, and order approval process: How easy is it for your customers? Do you live in email hell or do you have a seamless system that flows through these aspects quickly?
E-commerce? Are you using multiple e-commerce systems to manage your business? Are they modernized for today’s buyer?
Marketing:
What’s your CRM? (And do you and your team actually use it to grow sales?)
Email management: Do you use an email marketing program and if so, do you use it regularly? How can you improve it?
Social media platform (like Hootsuite or Buffer): Can you manage all of your social media in one simple place?
Website/CMS: What’s your website? Is it a search site? A CMS? Can it be easily customized and updated?
Webinars: Do you host webinars and if so, are you using one primary tool or multiples?
Communication:
How do you and your customers communicate primarily? Through your order management system? Through Slack? Email? Do you use VOIP? Zoom or Google Hangouts? Text? List all the ways you communicate by order of priority and team/client preference.
File management/Artwork management: Dropbox? Google Drive? Driving you crazy?
How about team communication? What do you use to communicate with your team? (Same list as above): Slack? Email? Text? Zoom? Google Hangouts? Text? All of them?! List each by order of priority (client/team preference).
Accounting system:
List your primary accounting system, is it Quickbooks? Xero? Abacus?
Bill paying: Are you using bill.com or any other bill paying service?
Taxes: Are you using something like Avalara to simplify taxes?
As economists are predicting substantial economic growth on the horizon, now, now, now is the time to reenvision your company and reimagine how you and your team can free your time, simplify your work, and free your creativity.
Join us as we walk through building the most advanced tech stack possible and thereby creating the best modern office experience for you!
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