When AINA Wireless started using Dear Lucy, CEO Maximilian LeRoux quickly noticed improvements across three areas of the business: financial reporting, employee morale, and operational efficiency.
Background
AINA Wireless develops Bluetooth, IoT, and smart devices for critical communications. The company’s typical customers range from public safety to logistics, and their products help people stay connected no matter where they are or what they’re working on.
What started out as a transatlantic two-person operation is now a booming business with offices in the USA, Canada, Finland, and Australia.
The Starting Point
CEO Maximilian LeRoux explains that AINA has been a global company from the start. And while keeping track of the company’s financials was easy back when there were only two people, one product, and one customer, over time the business has grown not only in size but also in complexity.
“When we were only working on one thing at a time, Skype calls worked just fine. But as we got more people, more customers, and more products, suddenly things weren’t that easy anymore. We needed to introduce more efficient ways for our team to serve the entire planet.”
Efficient Board Reporting With Visual Dashboards
In an attempt to streamline reporting and make business-critical information available to the whole team, AINA Wireless turned to Dear Lucy.
“Before Dear Lucy, reporting was all about taking bits and pieces where we could find them. That was very difficult because we have so many different types of income streams, locations, suppliers, and customers. It was basically impossible to get everything into one simple view without wasting a lot of time,” LeRoux sums.
“We tried different software where the provider would manually update the dashboards every month from different sources. However, that wasn’t great because we’d sometimes have to nag them about the deadline and the data quality wasn’t that good.”
With Dear Lucy, AINA has been able to visualize data much more efficiently than before. Instead of having to stay awake until 3 a.m. on the night before a board meeting, LeRoux can sleep soundly knowing that he can pull up visual dashboards on a moment’s notice.
“The visual side of Dear Lucy is very nice and the data is well prepared. I don’t have to spend time selecting a graph to see where my business is going, because it’s already there. Instead, I can focus on analyzing the data and monitoring our key performance indicators together with the board of directors.”
Managing Costs and Bringing The Team to The Same Page
LeRoux is especially pleased with how Dear Lucy has helped him get a better grasp of the company’s cost structure.
“By using Dear Lucy, we’ve been able to pinpoint where we waste money and where we make the most money. We have not only saved a lot of time using Dear Lucy but we have also saved a lot of money. We’ve also been able to make business decisions that will help us streamline our operations going forward.”
However, LeRoux is not the only one at AINA Wireless who benefits from using Dear Lucy. In fact, everyone in the company can access the dashboards. So far, this radical transparency has worked wonders.
“Everyone in AINA Wireless can use Dear Lucy to see where our sales are going and how our marketing is performing because we want them to see that we’re all doing our part to achieve the same goal.”
“For example, our engineers can look at the dashboards to see that people are really buying the products they make. We no longer have to have a company update meeting to share that information.”
And when it comes to the team’s initial reaction, it’s been overwhelmingly positive.
“Usually when you introduce any kind of a tool that tracks performance, people don’t feel all that comfortable because they don’t like to be watched. But after using Dear Lucy for a little while, everyone noticed that it was actually useful to follow their own performance. At the end of the day, everyone wants to take credit for their own work and so we don’t use Dear Lucy to micromanage people but to motivate them,” LeRoux clarifies.
Name: Maximillian LeRoux
Title: CEO
Company: Aina Wireless
Industry: Telecommunications