The simple change helping small and micro businesses reduce burdens and streamline growth

“When you’re a small business owner, you could wear countless hats on any given day. Whether you need to be the CEO or the coffee maker, if there’s a role to step into, you do it,” says Taryn McLaughlin, a small business owner (who also happens to be the Regional Vice President – ANZ at Docusign).

Taryn is one of four key contributors to a new eBook called Reducing Burdens, Streamlining Growth, which explores the many pressures that small and micro businesses face in today’s tough economic environment — before looking at ways to alleviate them. 

If you’re a small business owner looking for tips on how to lighten the load, then the eBook is a helpful read. But, we get it, you’re busy wearing all those hats … so here’s a quick summary.

Small businesses face a range of pressures

According to the ACCI, there are five things causing the pressure on small business owners to mount: increasing costs, skills and worker shortages, government regulations, shrinking profits, and general economic conditions.

These findings resonate with what we hear when speaking to Docusign customers. Small and micro businesses voice concerns about issues like those listed above, and also say that, in the face of these macro challenges, it can be hard to keep up with basic administrative tasks. Put simply, time-intensive paperwork and admin is something that overloaded business owners don’t have time for.

The Agreement Trap is real 

Docusign and Deloitte did some comprehensive research into the problems businesses face when managing agreements. The findings were sobering. In APAC alone, AU$770B-930B in economic value is lost each year due to the ‘Agreement Trap’ — that is, the problems caused when poor agreement management and systems lead to lengthy delays and missed opportunities. 

And, according to the research, the impact of the Agreement Trap is magnified for very small to medium-sized business owners. Anything that small businesses can do to avoid the Agreement Trap will pay off.

This is where Docusign IAM comes in

Docusign IAM (Intelligent Agreement Management) is a portfolio of applications that transform how organisations around the world create, commit to, and manage their agreements and the relationships they define. Small business owners can use it to replace time- and cost-sinking processes with smarter, faster, and more profitable agreement processes. Plus, it helps them find and capture the critical business value hiding in agreements and use it to their advantage.

Features of Docusign IAM that are proving most popular with small and very small businesses in Australia include:

• Tailored applications built for the bespoke needs of different individuals, teams, lines of business, and industries (like IAM for Sales or IAM for Customer Experience).

• Modular capabilities that enable businesses to build agreement process solutions to match their needs in an easy-to-use, no-code workflow tool.

• The ability to seamlessly connect agreement processes with critical systems, enabling the flow of agreement data across solutions to boost productivity and accuracy.

• A centralised, smart repository to store, manage, and analyse agreements across the business — driving efficiencies, uncovering opportunities to lower costs, and reducing risk.

Features like these clearly work. Here’s what some of the contributors to the eBook had to say about the platform:

“When we transformed the 90-page PDS from a physical document to a digital one using Docusign, the impact was staggering. We’re saving $286K and 2,650 hours annually by switching paper agreements to digital. It was one of the simplest ways our business could become more sustainable while saving on printing costs and saving our team’s time, who were previously physically carrying these cumbersome documents to the post office and back.

—Dean Koutsoumidis, Managing Director of Equity-One

“In the credit score industry, a few days’ wait can mean the difference between your customer closing on their dream home and losing it. We can get up to in excess of 200-250 leads each month, which adds up to a huge amount of time manually going through paperwork for our small team of four. With Docusign Maestro helping us automate the agreement population, we have condensed the sign-up process to just five minutes. Instead of our team wasting time on manual data entry, we can invest that time into educating our clients so they can take ownership of their own credit scores and find financial freedom.”

— Daniel Walker, Co-founder of Bon Voyage Credit Repair

“Our Docusign journey is just beginning, and it’s already saving us around 40 hours monthly. For a team of just three people, this is huge. The biggest impact so far has come from building templates that can help automate our agreement and compliance forms. Many of these are complex documents, and I was impressed with how simple it was to set up our own bespoke settings that could populate a lot of the agreements for us. We used to spend $12,000 each year to store our physical, paper agreements in Adelaide. Our agreements are now almost 100% digitised and we can reinvest this money into growing our business instead.”

— Elizabeth Kraft, Owner of E K Conveyancing

Want to tap into savings like these?

As the eBook explains, Docusign IAM is delivering significant opportunities for Australian small and micro businesses — from enabling more effective collaboration with counterparties, to mitigating risks and empowering easier access to invaluable agreement data. 

Elizabeth Kraft calls Docusign IAM a “game-changer”. Could it be the change your business needs? To find out more, read the full eBook or speak to our sales team.