Move forward – or go under: are you a digital master?

In my last blog post I talked about the fun factor in digitalising your own business: discovering and using new possibilities, offering advantages, acting faster – and taking manual work off your hands.

If you embrace this attitude, there is basically not much standing in the way of you becoming a digital master. You surely bring ambition, a love of innovation and clever entrepreneurship with you anyway if your business is on the road to success.

So now it is about mastering digitalisation. Becoming a digital master sounds good, doesn’t it? In my case it is a prerequisite, so to speak, but it can apply just as much to everyone else. After all, digital and automated structures are entering every part of our lives, our consumption, our work.

Yet for many it is still new – and now they are supposed to become masters straight away? That sounds modern, important and right, but how do you put it into practice?

Standing still can no longer be an option

Before we look at the topic more closely, let’s briefly consider the opposite: how conservative are you as a business owner if you don’t become a digital master? What effect does it have on your business if you don’t move with the times? Do you want to be old-fashioned? Nobody really wants that, it seems. And in reality there are plenty of business owners who have already decided in favour of the future.

So what does it mean to develop into a digital master? If you look up the term in the information commonly found on the internet, it is about using the new media and tools to become even better, to keep up and to stay competitive.

The internet, smartphones, mobile applications, digital service, the automation of almost every process. With digital or electronic business processes you open many doors – if you seize these opportunities and can handle it all with ease. Just as a professional does in their field.

Accordingly, it is also about finding the motivation to break out of the conservative rut and set off on this new and promising path. Change always takes energy, but be clear about this: it will come anyway, whether you go along with it or not.

Keep in mind that automation and the move from analogue to digital always bring improvements: they can and will strengthen your business. After all, when computers were introduced – what feels like ages ago – processes in companies improved considerably too.

Mastering digitalisation – and winning on every level

As a digital master, your task now is to bring many more areas of your business – whether small, medium-sized or large – into the digital age. Not as an end in itself, but to benefit from the advantages of this change on all the many fronts. Internally as well as externally.

Why? The well-known advantages mentioned everywhere are huge in themselves: automated and more efficient processes, time savings, more features for less effort, ongoing savings and scalable processes with fewer breakdowns are just the first.

Throw these into one pot with advantages that are entirely your own, and they add up to an enormous sum of benefits. For you and your business they hold economic gains, for your customers extra value – and for your competitors one more challenge. If you are willing to hold on to this competitive edge, every door is open to you.

From this perspective, being a digital master in your business is a hugely worthwhile goal. So what is still stopping you from shedding everything conservative and pinning on the badge of digitalisation?

Investments in the future that pay off

Yes, that’s right: all these steps towards digitalisation take knowledge, time and upfront costs before they take effect and bring the advantages mentioned. But the decisive point of view can be summed up in the words of the well-known “screw king” Reinhold Würth:

“Standing still is going backwards, and the first step into the grave.” According to this quote, there can only be one direction for a successful business owner: forwards.

With this insight in mind, a business owner can, wants to and must seize the virtue of entrepreneurial thinking once more and fight an intelligent way through the thicket of the digitalisation jungle.

Because today’s and tomorrow’s technologies are all wonderful, but our task must not be to digitalise everything at all costs; rather, it is to look out for smart solutions and individual steps on the market with a clever touch.

What brings advantages for my business and for me? What do my customers want, and how can I offer it to them? And how can I act so that I follow a path that carries me into the future steadily and as a whole, not just in self-contained modules?

Masters do it themselves!

Once you have answered these questions and found the answers good, both rationally and intuitively, it is time to put them into practice and let them work. And the best part: it is easier than you might think at first.

Even if it all sounds very theoretical, it shows a rough path into the future. For you, it means becoming able to act and resilient again. And being able to keep up and move along with digitalisation and its advocates. In the end, that is exactly what makes a true digital master.

Finally, I would like to point you to an interesting article on the topic by Dr Holger Schmidt. Because digital transformation and rapid change call for exactly these steps out of an ever-threatening standstill into a world of advantages and constant change. Let these thoughts sink in – and then move along with it!

So – will you become a master? Or perhaps you already are one? Write to us and let us share in it!