How Clio is leveraging know-how to optimise enterprise operations in Africa

Proper on the coronary heart of the startup ethos is quick progress and scalability. Traders are elated, founders are proud, and person communities are all the time excited to see the numbers develop. However quick progress is rarely a miracle. From the within, it’s a deliberate course of that comes from optimised inner processes and environment friendly folks administration. 

Startups which might be unable to hack this find yourself shedding money and time, and this, in response to serial entrepreneur Joshua Oguntade, is pointless. “Why not leverage know-how to optimise your inner processes by at the very least 90%? Then you may concentrate on constructing,” he asks. 

Joshua Oguntade is the CEO of Clio (previously Onboardly), a software program firm that gives optimisation as a service. Clio bundles the back-breaking handbook processes related to payroll, hiring, onboarding and worker administration, and leverages know-how to simplify and optimise the processes for corporations. It’s mainly enterprise operations made simple. 

When founders consider constructing unicorns or world-class options, they largely think about hitting an enormous market with an irresistible product that finally turns into the holy grail for folks or companies. What many would possibly fail to grasp, although, is how dependent such visions are on the inner operations of the enterprise. The place hiring, onboarding, and worker administration aren’t prioritised, the enterprise would possibly as properly kiss its large desires goodbye.

Oguntade, an skilled software program engineer, remembers his onboarding expertise when he landed a job at GitHub. “The onboarding course of was seamless!” he instructed TechCabal over a name, with palpable pleasure in his voice as he reminisced in regards to the moments that in the end birthed Clio, his newest answer for fast-growing African startups.

“It took solely three days for me to be onboarded. Every part was automated in order that inside my first week, I used to be already acquainted with each instrument I wanted to work and was virtually prepared to start out pushing manufacturing code,” he added. 

In keeping with a latest global report, poor onboarding is a significant explanation for worker turnover, which may value an organization 100-300% of the worker’s wage in whole. Nonetheless, this isn’t the complete image of the corporate’s loss, which in the end consists of the milestones it couldn’t attain on account of sub-optimised inner processes. 

Africa is a main marketplace for fast-growing corporations

Africa is storied because the continent of the long run, and it would very properly be. Africa is projected to deal with 1 / 4 of the worldwide inhabitants by 2050, and one can solely think about the extent at which companies on the continent will function within the subsequent few a long time. As such, companies that can survive sooner or later should start scaling now, at the same time as they re-imagine how enterprise operations ought to work. 

Thus far, a number of early-stage corporations in Africa nonetheless manually handle folks operations duties similar to monitoring worker time-off requests, managing worker efficiency, recruiting new abilities, and dealing with payroll. This sometimes results in errors in worker information and delays in processing wage funds. 

As a few of these corporations develop, they undertake a mix of various software program options to simplify their folks operations workflow; BambooHR for worker data, Bento for payroll, DocuSign and Google cloud for authorized paperwork, and Okta for IT, whereas the remainder continues to be managed manually. With these fragmented processes, not solely does it take corporations days to carry out duties like sending supply letters, onboarding new staff, and organising their payroll, it additionally prices them money and time as they have to pay for a number of software program subscriptions and replace worker data throughout quite a few platforms. 

Clio’s distinctive proposition is in its one-stop-shop answer for startups. With its trendy platform, it simplifies historically advanced processes like hiring, worker onboarding, offboarding, payroll, and efficiency evaluations. The corporate believes it’s constructing the next-generation worker administration system which is able to assist HR, Finance, and IT groups work collaboratively by sustaining a single document of worker information. 

“We’re targeted on serving to corporations of all sizes create a optimistic worker expertise for his or her folks by offering a central system for his or her folks to search out the appropriate folks, data, and instruments they should get work completed,” CEO Oguntade mentioned in a press launch seen by TechCabal.

“Once we say corporations of all sizes, we imply corporations with 2 or 10,000 staff can use Clio, and that’s the reason we made it free for corporations with as much as 7 staff. Now, each firm can all the time concentrate on placing their folks first,” he added.

Though Clio continues to be in its early days, the startup is betting on Africa’s financial promise and fast-growing startup ecosystem. As of 2022, near 3500 startups have been reported to be operational in Nigeria alone, all of which may leverage know-how to shoot for higher internalised operations. Clio is betting on this imaginative and prescient, and with an skilled Oguntade on the helm of affairs, it’s thrilling to see what occurs as this startup takes root in Africa’s fast-growing know-how ecosystem. 

Chatting with TechCabal in regards to the rebrand from Onboardly to Clio, Oguntade maintained that the corporate needed to undergo a deep restructuring course of almost about its merchandise and worth choices.

“It’s not only a identify change, we took the teachings we learnt within the final couple of years about folks operations and needed to construct the product from scratch to deliver the seamlessness and automation we did with worker onboarding to each a part of folks operations,” he mentioned.

“By doing this, we outgrew the identify Onboardly with the brand new platform as a result of we aren’t simply fixing worker onboarding anymore. We’re automating the entire folks operations workflows and it’s important we mirror this in our model,” Oguntade additional defined.