Top tips on how to grow from a local company to a global provider
Just over four years ago Webexpenses was a 10 man operation based in Witney, Oxfordshire. Fast forward to 2019 and Webexpenses is a global provider of ‘Software-as-a-Service’, adding over 60 new faces to the workforce, opening offices in the USA and Australia and providing for over 1,500 individual clients at a growth rate of 600% across 66 countries, while helping manage over £200 million worth of expenses in 2018 alongside.
In light of this development, we are now building on our specialist foundation of expense management and establishing ourselves as a global provider of a wide range of smart solutions that automate traditional manual finance processes.
Within the wider suite of finance tools come:
Invoicing processing: a solution designed to improve and automate invoice processing by reducing resource wastage, increasing visibility, and streamlining data access and retrieval for approvers and finance teams.
Travel management: Obtain the ability to book corporate travel through an exclusive internal platform that falls within your businesses T&E policy, while offering competitive rates and discounts.
Payments: Gain access to an instant payment platform for fast expense reimbursements and business payments.
Expense auditing: As an extended module of expense management, Webexpenses expense audit provides users with a 3rd party audit checker that aids in the validation and adherence to the internal policy of expense claims while ensuring max opportunity for tax reclaim.
In tandem with an expanding finance suite, Webexpenses also has a solution for HR teams with its sister company Webonboarding. Webonboarding provides an automated tool to fully manage the new starter onboarding process, ensuring a smooth transition from job offer to the first day.
Each of these new modules will provide a dedicated solution that is focused on increasing workplace efficiency and providing accessibility to automated processes - freeing up your employees to be focused on parts of their role that they are actually interested in. The expansion of solutions falls under a strong desire set by Webexpenses to further contribute towards the growing expectations of an ever-changing workforce, and the increasing demands of business efficiency.
But this growth has not been without its trials, tribulations and careful planning. Adam Reynolds, the CEO of Webexpenses has explained that any business looking to expand their offerings should consider some critical viewpoints. Here are his top 5 pieces of advice for anyone looking to take their business to the next level:
Group effort
The challenges of any company looking to grow are knowing what is the right level to take on. We’ve asked people to grow as the company has, and that invariably means taking on more and delivering more. And the main challenge is not overloading yourselves, responding to opportunity and looking for elements that can help our clients. I think the main piece is still keeping a good collective together. Communicating well to the company what we are trying to achieve and then moving forward that way. All things that appear as challenges are just opportunities that we have to solve.
Keep it realistic
Ultimately, look at what you’re trying to achieve. Make realistic aims. If something isn’t working, look at why, and reset based upon the why. The most important thing we did was sit down 2 years ago and really look at what we wanted to achieve, why we wanted to achieve it, and what we needed to do to get there, and this hasn’t stopped.
Where are you going?
I think the biggest mistake a lot of businesses make is that they don’t look at where they want to get to. So invariably you never get there, it doesn’t happen by mistake. I think you’ve got to set realistic yet challenging aims. And it will never happen as fast as you think it will. You need to give yourself time to both plan and execute.
Carefully plan and execute
You’ve got to plan, you’ve got to execute. You’ve got to have the right people owning the elements, you’ve got to make sure that doesn’t detract from what you’re doing at the core. But it is eminently achievable.
The bigger picture
It is all about learning from wins and losses and moving forward. What it eventually comes down to is rather than one big growth, it becomes a small amount of iterative circles that then come together to achieve it. Sometimes it’ll go quicker, sometimes it’ll go slower, but I think you’ve got to go for it. If you feel it is right for your company you’ve just got to go for it. If you’ve got a good group of people, if you’ve got a good foundation it will be the right time.
2019 is set to be a progressive year for Webexpenses, with an even larger array of services being added later in the year to further provide forward-thinking businesses with an increased network of efficient and time-saving tools to transform their ways of working.