You're lighting money on fire every quarter
If you're more than $100M in revenue, and you aren't investing in automation, you are lighting money on fire to stay warm.
I am here to tell you that if your business has more than $100M in revenue, and you aren’t investing in automation software and services, you are lighting money on fire every quarter that could be flowing to your bottom line. BP3 has saved our clients millions of person hours of work with RPA tools, we have built solutions with billions of dollars running through them.
And we also build solutions for companies that don’t have a billion dollars of revenue. I’m selling my own book in this post, so to speak, but I’m also speaking from experience - and the frustration of seeing companies adopt these technologies too slowly, or too cautiously.
Why am I lighting money on fire if I don’t Automate?
Right now, any business north of $100M in revenue likely has a few things going on at scale (relative to the size of the business):
Lots of manual data entry and copying of data between digital sources.
Even “digital” businesses have lots of manual work in their businesses that can be automated. This manual work is friction to your business: preventing you from collecting revenue, from capturing sales, from delighting customers.
We’ve made insurance producer onboarding 95% more efficient for one client. We’ve helped another client update tariff pricing in minutes rather than weeks. We’ve helped another client reinvent their revenue cycle management. The opportunities to remove friction from your business are too important to overlook.
Lots of inbound communication that isn’t automated at all.
We’re drowning in a sea of paper and digital paper. If you implemented systems to scan and process documents that are more than 5 years old, the world has changed in this arena and there are better mousetraps for your document processing.
Out with the old OCR techniques, in with the new machine learning document processing techniques. You’ll see labels on this like “Intelligent Document Processing” or “Document Understanding” or “OCR”.
Standard Evaluation Approaches are taking too long.
There are companies taking 6 months to evaluate solutions for these opportunities that cost them several million dollars in avoidable cost each month. The evaluation itself, therefore, could be said to have cost these companies millions of dollars by slowing time to market. With one prospective customer, we have calculated avoidable processing costs of $80M over the last 3 years, with what would have been an imputed ROI north of 400%. Another client with a 4 year-old implementation saved 30-40% per annum when they moved document processing to a contemporary platform with BP3.
We are not talking about research and development (R&D) projects here. The costs and accuracies are well-understood and provable with real data, documents, and communications. The old joke that - you call it “AI” until it works, and then you give it a name - is probably true here. And we call it Intelligent Document Processing - because it works.
There has to be a faster way to do that® - and there is.
You don’t have to kick off a big evaluation of technologies. At BP3 we’re all about a more focus, more foresight, more follow-up approach, and so we’ve already done the homework and research for you, and you can leverage what we’ve learned. We’ll get you started processing documents right away, so that you can compare to your status quo. We’ll help you build the business case, run in parallel to confirm accuracy in production, and flip the switch to flawless production. We’ll take care of validating and correcting when human intervention is required. You’ll be up and running in no time. We’ve done it all before.
Better yet, we’ll help you plug the results into your operational processes - which greatly increases the value of the document automation we build for you. If every automated processed document simply ends up in front of a person to read, we haven’t finished the job.
Now, for companies with less than $100M in revenue - you may still have automation opportunities that are significant enough to yield real benefits. No matter how big or small you are, we are going to make sure you aren’t spending a dollar to save 25 cents. We’ll help you sort that out so that you can make informed decisions.
Why doesn’t everyone move faster?
Why aren’t companies moving faster to adopt these technologies? Two reasons:
The mistaken belief that automation improvements are incremental. The returns for these automations are shockingly high.
The mistaken belief that automation and AI are still R&D projects rather than pragmatic projects. These technologies are ready for prime time.
We have seen opportunities to save clients north of $40M a year. The “not on my roadmap this year” decision, or the “let me see what the R&D lab comes back with next year” decision - could cost them $40M… That’s a high price to pay for waiting.
There’s just no excuse not to act, if you haven’t already. You don’t have to work with BP3 to get these results for your business, but you won’t regret the decision. I put my faith in this team every day, and so do our clients, for good reason.
In November, Horizon Capital invested in BP3, for what we have been calling our third act. We’re really excited about the opportunity to work with Horizon and our clients to build a great business together. Just after Thanksgiving, we had Thomas Maizels down to Austin to meet many of our team members for the very first time. At the end of the day we shot this video at our offices to share how we think about the market and the opportunity we have to create value for our clients and team members:
I think you’ll see why we are excited to be working with Horizon.
One more thing… Apple earnings. This time of year you often get some interesting results and commentary from the big companies of our time. We can look forward to annual shareholder letters from Bezos and Buffet. And we can also look forward to Apple’s typical blow-out Q1 performance. Given the supply constraints, and the tougher compares against pandemic tech buying, Apple turned in a pretty amazing performance. $124B in revenue for one quarter, and net income of $24B. The scale of that performance is just awe inspiring.
But underneath the numbers, it is even more impressive to me. The iPhones 13 are a clear step above the previous version, which is already 14+ years into an iterative improvement cycle. An even older product, the Mac, has been transformed by the M1 chip. I’m writing this blog on my M1 MacBook Pro. This machine is both amazingly fast and amazingly battery efficient. It is no wonder that Mac sales were up 25%.