By Matt Brown, Founder of Wherefour. Wherefour were finalists in the ‘Best SaaS Product for Small Business / SMEs‘, ‘Best SaaS Solution for Manufacturing, Engineering & Industrial Applications‘, and ‘Best SaaS Product for ERP‘ categories at The 2025 SaaS Awards.
Launching a business has a predictable trajectory no matter what product or service is being sold.
At the beginning, there’s plenty of excitement and passion, there’s seemingly unlimited energy behind the mission, and the future is bright — even if it seems far away. Somewhere down the line, whether it’s a month or a decade, you look around and realize that your business is growing and you and your team are experiencing growing pains.
Growing pains are common, but there are strategies and tools that are proven to solve, or in some cases, prevent them altogether.
In my decades of experience in the SaaS sector, I have seen businesses identify and approach these challenges in different ways. Those who do not face them head-on are either no longer in business or stuck with a never-ending failure to launch. In order to navigate this growth spurt stage, it is helpful to divide the challenges and solutions into three categories: People, Processes, and Profitability.
Identify common early growing pains
Like I said before, it doesn’t matter what product or service you’re selling. Growth challenges arise in three distinct categories for everyone.
YOUR PEOPLE
At some point in your journey from startup to scale, your people (and you are one of those people) experience burn out. People feel stuck. People experience conflict, struggles to delegate, and struggles to cooperate.
And here’s the biggest red flag: People are so busy working in their job that they don’t have any time to work on their job.
This head-down mentality appears when people feel burdened by their daily tasks, and they don’t have any energy or time left to look up, look around, and address “big picture” issues.
YOUR PROCESSES
Some of these “people challenges” emerge in your operational processes too. Whether you’re a manufacturer of goods or a consulting firm providing services, you have multiple processes in place that fit together into your operational workflow. When people are burdened, processes do not automatically evolve to handle a higher volume of work. The workflow that was designed to handle a small volume of production or service is at or over capacity. You start to experience bottlenecks, traffic jams, or worse — the inability to fulfill orders or meet your clients’ needs in a timely fashion.
These process challenges begin to affect an additional category of people: Your Customers.
YOUR PROFITABILITY
And when your people and your processes are maxed out, your profitability is what ultimately suffers. Financial management — all the financial activities associated with planning, directing and controlling your capital — gets messy. Your books are in constant survival mode. Money comes in and money goes out, and if you’re lucky you break even, but if you’re unlucky, you’re in the red.
When your People, Processes and Profitability are struggling, you realize that you started your business with a “We’ll figure things out as we go” mentality, and now you’re going and you’re not figuring things out.
SaaS is your solution
Software as a Service (SaaS) has revolutionized business operations and is a proven tool for smart growth. Subscribing to a cloud-based platform unifies all aspects of a business and meets many — if not all — of the challenges faced by your People, Processes and Profitability.
How SaaS Benefits PEOPLE
A SaaS subscription eliminates the installation, maintenance and troubleshooting faced by your IT Department. Security, access, storage and performance issues are handled by the SaaS purveyor and software upgrades are automatic. It also unburdens users from the time-consuming labor of manual data entry, inventory reconciliation, and other administrative tasks associated with local networks as opposed to cloud-based storage systems.
Workplace flexibility — both in matters of time and place — is also a benefit felt by your people when data is accessible from anywhere at any time. And with all of that freed up time, your team can begin to work on big picture projects instead of feeling burdened by day-to-day minutia. There is more time for R&D, CRM, and strategic growth efforts.
How SaaS Benefits PROCESSES
When your operation is managed by a SaaS platform, all of your processes are standardized. There’s no more “One user does it this way, and another user does it this way.” Your database is a single source of truth with real-time data accessible by all departments. Especially beneficial for manufacturers, SaaS operation unifies all departments and standardizes inventory control, production, procurement, compliance, integration, and platform functionality. What used to be a manual process of checking the physical inventory in order to make a purchase or fulfill a sales order is streamlined into an accurate virtual snapshot of your entire operation.
How SaaS Benefits PROFITABILITY
When day-to-day operations are improved by SaaS management, your financial wellness is already improved. Time is money after all, so increased efficiency and accuracy leads to increased profitability.
Additionally, having a centralized source for company-wide data streamlines your CFO’s tasks. Budgeting, planning, forecasting, payroll, AR/AP and tax management all rely on the same data points, so eliminating the need to reconcile multiple sources is a huge advantage. Handling your company’s assets — both real and invested — is a big job, so when your finances are visible, accurate and unified, there is a clearer path to profitability.
Scalable growth in manufacturing: Benefits of an ERP platform
A cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform is the SaaS solution for manufacturers. When manufacturers integrate their critical functions into one platform, day-to-day operations and financial data are more connected, more accessible, and more beneficial to the people on your team. And it’s not just daily functioning that is improved. Your operation’s growth potential is unlimited because an ERP is designed to grow with you.
Here are the five ways that a cloud-based ERP platform allows you to scale without growing pains.
- STANDARDIZATION
Getting busier either means increasing production volume for your small team or increasing your team to handle bigger volume. Often it means both. Your ERP platform standardizes your processes and doesn’t put that increased volume onto the shoulders of your people. Formulas, picklists, work orders and production schedules are standardized, so the guess work is removed from your team and everyone can rest assured that data is being recorded the same way every time.
- BUILT-IN TRACEABILITY
And speaking of data, an ERP platform allows you to track precise data points about every item in your system. Quantity, status, cost and all pertinent lot/batch codes follow all of your inventory items from start to finish. There’s no need to rely on manual record keeping (or deal with the inadvertent errors and wasted time that goes along with it); end-to-end traceability is built-in.
- REAL-TIME DATA
Because data is secure and immutable, you can always access a real-time snapshot of your inventory and associated costs. Download reports, initiate transfers, schedule production, and autogenerate purchase orders according to your needs, and trust in your operation’s data. Your data is at your fingertips, your lot/batch codes are traceable from raw materials to finished goods, and you don’t have to rely on spreadsheets or filing cabinets for anything. Access to real-time data is paramount during compliance audits no matter what industry you’re operating in. Food manufacturers will find that ERP operation meets the requirements of the FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act Food Traceability Rule (FSMA204). Having access to real-time data is great in day to day operations, and it’s absolutely essential for your regulatory affairs.
- DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING
Forecasting is a foundational component of scaling up, but it can be hard to do when you’re feeling at or over capacity. A smart ERP platform with Materials Requirements Plan (MRP) capabilities is an essential tool for knowing what is possible. Don’t just guess, use your data to inform your smart growth business decisions.
- OPERATIONAL STREAMLINING
In addition to those specific features, operating with a cloud-based ERP platform streamlines all of your operations, prevents chaos, and breaks down the silos that can hinder growth. In matters of personnel, connecting your departments has similar benefits as connecting your data does in matters of profitability. Your people benefit by collaborating and eliminating information isolation. Having transparent data and standardized processes sets the stage for increased productivity and improved morale.
ERP management offers scalable growth
Growing pains are inevitable, but there are proven solutions that can usher you through the difficult stages or prevent them altogether. So whether you launch your business with an ERP platform or you introduce it at the first signs of growing pains, there’s a straightforward path to scaling your business when SaaS is your solution.
About the Author: Matt Brown
