Why I believe SMEs in traditional industries are sexy?
First of all, in order to bring context, I’ll go back to the time when we started our entrepreneurial journey back in 2012. At that time, I was coming back from an internship at a Copper Mining Company in the north of Chile, in the middle of the Atacama Desert, to start the semester at the school of engineering.
Some of my friends were interested in competing at a startup tournament, and we started to research in order to start a sexy, disruptive application, using the latest technology, in order to make our lives (and the lives of others similar to us) better.
So we started our startup journey, playing it cool and trying to bring the best of us to deliver the best product to our potential customers, with Twable… we failed.
But what we learnt allowed us to build the next startup, and this is where it started to get interesting. With our previous startup we got some media attention (yes, I’m talking about TV, Newspapers and others, the classic stuff). And that was, at the time, really important for us, because it gave us credibility. So, some SMEs (and some big companies too) in traditional industries started to contact us, as the crazy innovators they thought we were.
Thanks to that we started to learn a lot, and I repeat, a lot! This gave us the opportunity to take a look into their operations. My background is Industrial Engineering, and I hold a Master’s Degree in the same area, I also like to code software, so imagine how it was for me, to have access to all those processes and realize that there were lots of potential tweaks everywhere, that could be brought to reality with the use of technology. With that idea in mind (and a lot of measurements) we started the first (rudimentary) version of what is now Eskuad.
Why did we build this app for those traditional SMEs? Because we realized that they were competing globally, companies from overseas where coming to compete on their markets, and some of them (most to be truth) were better prepared. This is basically because they dispatch a lot of workforce to perform tasks on the field, their technicians or engineers need to perform the main task and report it. But this field workers, though not all of them, tend to have a love/hate relationship with their mobile devices. So even if they have a software that supports their work, whenever they work in places where the internet service is less than optimal, they tend to go back to take notes on an old-fashioned piece of paper. This means they end up wasting around 20% of their time (basically one lost day, every single week!). This inefficiency quickly propagates up the chain of command, leaving managers waiting for the information as it arrives in an old-schooled batch process (writing to paper in the field, going back to the office, transfer paper data into a fancy excel, proof-read, and then finally send the report in). This translates into a painful 50%-80% of lost time, and 10% of rework on the field, all thanks to not having timely insights from the field.
Under this conditions, even the most most committed teams in a SME are still losing valuable productive time (and yes, time is money!, we’ve measured losses around $60K a year on relatively small companies that operates with less than 10 people workers on $15/hour wages), we don’t care what they can do with those additional savings, but imagine the possibilities, you can raise salaries, invest in new technology, or whatever, else they seem fit, as they are, of course, free to choose.
At the end, what I think is really sexy of working with these organizations, is that they are the core of the local economy everywhere you go, they offer jobs to a lot of people that surround us, and I find it really sexy giving them that additional competitive advantage!
Also, when you realize the kind of problems that they have, it forces you, as a problem solver, engineer, innovator, call it whatever you like, to work under more constraints and to find better solutions, allowing you to compete globally too.
So, in conclusion, I encourage you all to work with SMEs, you’ll develop tight relationships, you’ll learn a lot, and you’ll become a better problem solver, and that’s basically what an entrepreneur should be.
