building a cloud business is hard, Building one that scales beyond the startup phase to profitability is far harder.

For those Entrepreneurs that don’t possess a legendary degree of foresight but also don’t want to want a costly lesson in hindsight there is always the hard earned learnings of others to guide you through the pitfalls of scaling your Cloud business.

I’d like to discuss how to architect your business systems right from the start to not only scale beyond  handling your early adopters but get you closer to your actual goal of creating a cash generative recurring revenue business. Do this without having spend big on re-architecturing your systems because they are creaking.  I’ve been there, and I’ve worn the bloody T-shirt that goes with it.  I promise you that having a thriving business which is being held back by non-scalable architecture is not a good place to be.

The last thing any business needs when it is gaining traction or closing the cash gap is to have to shell out cash on re-architecture projects or redirect valuable product development resource to the task.

When you think about your new business, or new product, think about the Customer System that needs to go with it.

The Customer System in one sentence is:

Interconnected process across each area of your business which create high quality, scalable and consistent experiences for Customers and Staff.

No matter how tedious, time consuming and irrelevant this may seem to you, this will be the single most important business foundation you will create (beyond actually developing your product/service in the first place).

The Customer System spans across your entire business but first I’d like to start with your product or service  area because this is probably the main revenue generator and value creator for your business.

Map each step a customer will take and this means mapping every possible request, delivery, upgrade and general contact point (in and out) for any new and existing customers. Think about the flow of information, what possible information will give you, what you need from them and what format you will follow up. Make it super easy for Customers to exchange information with you. You will need a flexible and customisable CRM system and  third party cloud services like email/marketing automation, SMS and telephony integration. Choose the best of breed providers and plug them into your Customer System.

Define a product/feature release system for your service. Create a sub-committee (consisting of various stakeholders across the business who will be connected to your Customer and Service departments) who will be responsible for voting the priority of features for the following quarter’s roadmap and ensuring the product/feature specifications have covered all angles. If is also the job of your committee to ensure communication is fed into your departments and be the ‘go-to person’ within their department for product related questions.

The quality of your documentation is part of your Product and is paramount to the success of of your entire business. You need to educate your staff and your customers very well so decide on the system to do this and ensure that any system you choose has an API so it can be easily integrated into your overall system.

Automate as many tasks as possible, including the core provisioning of customers services. Use this mantra – “Where a robot will do – use a robot” (aka software scripts). Automation costs less and is more accurate than a human –  plus they don’t have days off.

Where there is a-lot of complexity in a process, a human may be necessary. Use a human but ensure this costly resource is trained to an inch of their life – don’t forget they are carrying the company brand. ensure than any manual process has a system wrapped around it so you can create metrics – dashboards or reports, showing you the performance of the employee and/or process.

The diagram below represents my view of The Customer System plus a the core components for a product department handling feature releases. This has been used successfully in our business, copy it, change it and improve it (if you do, please send me a copy:)

The next article in The Customer System series will  be the Sales and Pre-Sales system where I discuss in detail the idea of systemising your Sales and Pre-Sales Processes and how they integrate into the overall Customer System to create great upsell opportunities and reduce churn.