As a successful award-winning business owner, mentor to female entrepreneurs and an all-round force to be reckoned with, we were eager to speak to Marsha Ward about how online technology can help businesses of all sizes adopt modern practices and support women in the workplace.
Being CEO and Founder of The Number Hub, Marsha Ward knows a thing or two about using the cloud, having built an award-winning accountancy agency which focuses on improving the user experience through a cloud-based approach.
The Number Hub was a finalist at Womenspire 18 in the FairPlay Employer Award alongside DVLA, Dwr Cymru Welsh Water and United Welsh. The award celebrates organisations which embrace modern working practices to ensure they harness the skills of all staff.
It’s fair to say that The Number Hub has digital at the heart of what it does. How does the business use technology to run day-to-day and support customers? What benefits do you see from using technology?
The Number Hub has been trading for 4 years helping businesses to start up and grow. Our business ethos and its operations were designed from the outset to future-proof and scale up with ease. The Number Hub offers a fresh and modern approach to accountancy.
Our cloud-based services have been developed in collaboration with our clients, designed with their needs in mind. From the outset, it was important to us to develop a less prescriptive offering.
By removing barriers to employment through modern working practices and empowering individuals to make decisions, we have been able to create something special.
We have nurtured, transformed and invested in the latest technology to improve the working lives of those who have been (and continue to be) a part of our journey. In return, in our second year of trading we grew our revenue by 96%, and in 2017 we grew by 182%.
How important do you think the cloud will be to the future of business (both big and small)?
Our business uses cloud based technology which greatly assists scalability in addition to the many other benefits previously mentioned. We can be entirely agile as a service provider and still offer service regardless of location.
With this approach, our opportunities to take this to a global audience is much simpler. The world is much smaller. The barriers much less challenging.
Our experience has led us to automate common and time-consuming processes, freeing up our team to focus on higher-margin areas of our practice. We have put together an integrated eco-system that manages the entire client process from proposal to cessation.
Already working with an outsource team in Mumbai we have started our journey toward an international operation, which is – whilst not without challenge – an exciting place to be.
I would imagine that any business, regardless of industry or size, should already be considering how they will adopt and adapt to technological advances in order to remain competitive.
As a champion of modern working practices which allow women to grow and thrive, how are you disrupting the norm to better support female employees? How can businesses use technology to provide better working patterns and environments for women?
Our approach to recruitment and retention has served us well for the past four years. As a small business it can be difficult to attract the right people and so we have been very clear about our offering from the beginning.
Attracting individuals with technical skills has not been an issue to date. Where we have to be cautious with our decision making is to find like-minded individuals both with a technical expertise and high functioning interpersonal skills.
Because we have to be agile to stay ahead of the latest technological advances in our field, our team has to be agile also. This approach has helped us to offer opportunities to women - as society’s identified care-givers - to utilise their knowledge and skills around their caring responsibilities. We hope that as society progresses, we will also attract men to our business for the same reason.
With a strong ongoing investment in streamlining via cloud app technology and such like, our team members, like our clients, can operate from anywhere and are managed through performance monitoring and regular communication channels.
Many businesses are apprehensive about moving into the cloud or using new software. What’s your top tip for those who are just starting to adopt digital for themselves?
Being innovative is a continuous state.
My advice to other business owners is not to become complacent but to observe new markets, new working methods.
However it is important not to adopt the 'new and shiny' just because it is the on trend thing to do. AI/Automation; the digital revolution. If it works for you and your clients then great. If not, move on.
Whilst making accountancy something that is more than its traditional self has been a major driver for us and we constantly look for the refresh, we ask ourselves; "What's new? What's missing? What's needed?"
Whether it’s technological processes, modern working practices or a new way of marketing ourselves... we will already be reviewing the opportunity, testing its capabilities and bringing it into our operations before many of our competitors have started talking about it.
Be disruptive and continue to be so.