Avoid flashy features: build your tech stack with confidence

Entrepreneurs and small business owners need to have the right tech in place and they need to be able to rely on that tech.

When those software solutions and apps aren’t working, entrepreneurs feel the effects sharply. If you’re under severe time pressure or wearing a second hat as the business’s IT helpdesk, you add a significant load to the challenges you’re already facing. Having the wrong technology in place can negatively impact growth and limits opportunities you could be exploring.

Patrick Stepanek is a Swiss-based entrepreneur who has leaned heavily on “tech that works” to successfully found and scale multiple businesses.

He’s currently CEO of Anjuna Airline Solutions, providing specialist services to the aviation industry, the COO and founder of healthtech startup BIOS Medical and the founder and board member of med tech company Spine Nuances. Leadership and mentoring are important facets of his work, and in addition to being a board member of Saturo Foods, Stepanek consults and mentors with other entrepreneurs looking to grow their businesses.

“Actually, my main job is having a family with two kids!” laughs Stepanek. “Of course, it’s not a job, but it’s something I never want to suffer because of all the things I’m doing.”

Stepanek is only able to juggle everything on his plate and put his family life first by having hassle-free tech solutions in place for himself and the teams across the different businesses. For example, today Anjuna is a stable, profitable small business with a team of highly knowledgeable specialists that work across the world and different time zones. They need effective solutions that allow them to communicate and work closely together so the business runs smoothly each day.

Start with clarity, not features

Too often, we let flashy tools lead the way. But the best tech decisions start by defining the problem first.

Over the years and after some trial-and-error, Stepanek focuses on an approach which keeps things simple and ensures there is laser-focused clarity on what the technology needs to achieve.

“My approach to technology or my experience with it is when you do something new, you have to first understand what's going on and understand what you're trying to do,” Stepanek says.

Having absolute clarity about the business problem you want the solution to tackle will help ensure you choose the right software. Stepanek warns that when you select your tech it is all too easy to get diverted from your main objective by the array of features that you don’t necessarily need.

“There’s always a risk that you get lost in the software and its capabilities drive what you’re doing rather than the other way around. The problems that we need to solve are often simple. It just takes time to break them down. By introducing a complex tool with a lot of options it’s all too easy to get overwhelmed and then get excited or sidetracked by some functionality.”

Getting seduced by all the “bells and whistles” in an application can waste significant time and effort. It’s something that Stepanek has observed over the years as platforms have become more feature-packed and modular. It remains an issue in this age of generative AI.

“You see these millions of AI-powered apps coming up? It takes time to understand if an app is solving your problem or not, which means you’re not going to be doing something else which might be more valuable. Your people are also going to have to focus on learning the tool instead of developing your business. There is an opportunity cost there.”

Map the process before you digitize it

So how can entrepreneurs focus on ensuring they choose the right solutions that will result in tech that just works? Start with flexible solutions to help you define your real process first.

Stepanek advises that understanding the details around your core processes puts you in a position of strength to implement technology that wraps itself around the way you work. Trying to change your process to fit the solution—and potentially using all those exciting bells and whistles—not only leads to problems and bottlenecks, but staff find it harder to use.

However, one significant problem for entrepreneurs and startups, particularly in the rush of the early days, is many are still actually trying to figure out their ways of working and what the best process is.

Stepanek advises that some simple, flexible tools can help entrepreneurs to figure out their process.“You can use a flexible tool like Excel where it lets you adapt to what is happening. You map the ‘real life’ process that is happening in your business into the tool. Once the process becomes stable and you've actually understood what you're doing on a repeating basis then you can think about either evolving the process or implementing a solution that will help you.”

Stepanek advises that this kind of activity–where you are simultaneously mapping out and implementing a process–can take between three and twelve months, but this will depend on what stage your business is in. That sounds like a long period, but it can save a lot of effort further down the line,

Having a process nailed down and being able to understand all the steps will not only help you implement the right solution but also get any members of your team and even external partners,to adapt to it more easily.

“If your people are familiar with the process, when they go into a new tool, they can more easily mentally map how they did it before to how they do it now. They don’t have to learn a new process on top of new software.”

Build your tech stack like you build your product

As your business grows, your tech needs will change. But don’t upgrade everything at once—treat your stack like an evolving product.

Whether you're a solopreneur expanding your team, or a scale-up startup, growing your company can put real pressure on the technology solutions you use. Tech that works can quickly become inefficient and ineffective. Stepanek remarks that the tipping point usually becomes obvious when occasional issues start to become more frequent.

“As soon as an issue becomes repetitive then you may want to make a change. If you’re trying to do something that can be done easily, but you actually see a problem happening all the time then the decision is very easy.”

With most software available on a SaaS basis, sometimes an option is to move up a subscription level and unlock new features. Stepanek cites one of his businesses that uses a CRM tool which has all the future features they might need, but currently are still on the lowest tier. Stepanek also uses Microsoft 365 where he has been able to adopt more tools as time goes by to replace other tools which are no longer working so well.

If you do need to introduce a new solution or extend the use of an existing one, Stepanek advises taking baby steps around the implementation, similar to a minimum viable product (MVP) approach. This involves testing and configuring the solution with the minimum features required to meet your needs, iterating the configuration based on real world feedback from employees and making sure it all works, before extending the features used.

“You don't want to start five things at the same time, push them all forward and then put them together to see whether they work. You want to start with one thing, see if it works and iterate to a point where you're happy and add something else to it. You should always get feedback as quickly as possible, because that lets you move forward faster.”

You can build it, but will they come?

A tool only works if your team actually uses it. Adoption depends on ease, timing and clear personal value.

This is a major question you have to answer: will you and your team adopt it? Sometimes we think the tech isn’t working, but it’s because we’re not implementing it in the right way.

Rolling solutions out and managing the change takes time and effort. This can impact the timing of introducing new software or features and even the decision to roll something out in the first place.

Stepanek mentions a recent example of where he was considering integrating a business development process into the CRM tool used by one of his businesses. However, the time spent setting it up and then teaching people how to use it was too great.

“Usually, the biggest challenge is adoption of technology. Training people and getting people to use it is sometimes not really worth it and you stick with the old one. In my experience change can be painful!”

Stepanek also believes it’s important that there is an element of “what’s-in-it-for-me” across the team in order to drive adoption.

“Your team members have to find value. The technology has to do something for them. It cannot be perceived as an extra task. The sooner the team realizes this is helping them they will use the software.”

Evaluating AI solutions

Tech options for smaller businesses aren’t slowing down any time soon and the injection of generative AI is bringing new powerful capabilities.

Like many business owners today, Stepanek has gotten mixed results with AI. He experimented with Microsoft Copilot and found the results disappointing, mainly because his business doesn’t have all the base data in place to drive meaningful output. At the same time, Stepanek sees exciting possibilities to concept, test and even build applications within AI itself.

But even with the mind-bending capabilities of AI, Stepanek still applies the same principle of knowing exactly what you want to achieve in order to introduce hassle-free technology.

“Even with AI you still have to think about the questions you want answered and what the software needs to do. You can’t put the cart before the horse.”