How Clio is leveraging technology to optimise business operations in Africa

Right on the coronary heart of the startup ethos is quick progress and scalability. Investors are elated, founders are proud, and consumer communities are at all times excited to see the numbers develop. But quick progress is by no means a miracle. From the within, it’s a deliberate course of that comes from optimised inside processes and environment friendly folks administration. 

Startups which are unable to hack this find yourself dropping money and time, and this, in accordance to serial entrepreneur Joshua Oguntade, is pointless. “Why not leverage technology to optimise your internal processes by at least 90%? Then you can focus on building,” 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 guide processes related to payroll, hiring, onboarding and worker administration, and leverages technology to simplify and optimise the processes for corporations. It’s mainly business operations made straightforward. 

When founders consider constructing unicorns or world-class options, they principally 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 realise, although, is how dependent such visions are on the inner operations of the business. Where hiring, onboarding, and worker administration usually are not prioritised, the business would possibly as nicely kiss its massive goals goodbye.

Oguntade, an skilled software program engineer, recollects his onboarding expertise when he landed a task at GitHub. “The onboarding process was seamless!” he advised TechCabal over a name, with palpable pleasure in his voice as he reminisced in regards to the moments that finally birthed Clio, his newest resolution for fast-growing African startups.

“It took only three days for me to be onboarded. Everything was automated so that within my first week, I was already familiar with every tool I needed to work and was almost ready to start pushing production code,” he added. 

According to a latest international report, poor onboarding is a significant reason behind worker turnover, which might price an organization 100-300% of the worker’s wage in whole. Still, this is not the complete image of the corporate’s loss, which finally contains the milestones it couldn’t attain on account of sub-optimised inside processes. 

Africa is a main marketplace for fast-growing corporations

Africa is storied because the continent of the long run, and it would very nicely be. Africa is projected to home 1 / 4 of the worldwide inhabitants by 2050, and one can solely think about the extent at which companies on the continent will function in the subsequent few a long time. As such, companies that may survive in the long run should start scaling now, whilst they re-imagine how business operations ought to work. 

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

As a few of these corporations develop, they undertake a mixture of various software program options to simplify their folks operations workflow; BambooHR for worker info, Bento for payroll, DocuSign and Google cloud for authorized paperwork, and Okta for IT, whereas the remaining is nonetheless managed manually. With these fragmented processes, not solely does it take corporations days to carry out duties like sending supply letters, onboarding new workers, 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 info throughout quite a few platforms. 

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

“We are focused on helping companies of all sizes create a positive employee experience for their people by providing a central system for their people to find the right people, information, and tools they need to get work done,” CEO Oguntade mentioned in a press launch seen by TechCabal.

“When we say companies of all sizes, we mean companies with 2 or 10,000 employees can use Clio, and that is why we made it free for companies with up to 7 employees. Now, every company can always focus on putting their people first,” he added.

Although Clio is nonetheless in its early days, the startup is betting on Africa’s financial promise and fast-growing startup ecosystem. As of 2022, shut to 3500 startups had been reported to be operational in Nigeria alone, all of which might leverage technology 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 is thrilling to see what occurs as this startup takes root in Africa’s fast-growing technology ecosystem. 

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

“It’s not just a name change, we took the lessons we learnt in the last couple of years about people operations and had to build the product from scratch to bring the seamlessness and automation we did with employee onboarding to every part of people operations,” he mentioned.

“By doing this, we outgrew the name Onboardly with the new platform because we are not just solving employee onboarding anymore. We are automating the whole people operations workflows and it is essential we reflect this in our brand,” Oguntade additional defined.