Originally appeared in the Sunday Times, March 2025.

An IT consultant from your local enterprise office can use technology to help you save time and money, and throw paper-based business processes in the bin.

Vaishali and Nik Mehta brought in a digital consultant to transform their stock-keeping at Nutty Delights

Even the most traditional of businesses can understand how digitisation can add real value to a company.

Nik and Vaishali Mehta set up Nutty Delights in 2016, as Ireland’s first and only dried fruit and nut retailer.

Today they have two shops in Dublin, in George’s Street Arcade and Jervis shopping centre. They also sell direct to 27,000 regular consumers online and in recent years have developed a fastgrowing wholesale business.

Nutty Delights sells to more than 400 convenience stores across Ireland. It is adding new outlets at a rate of 15 a week.

Working across three different business models, with 400 different stock-keeping units — individual products and pack sizes — allied to rapid growth, meant the couple’s inventory was getting harder to manage. So they turned to their local enterprise office for help.

It provided them with the services of a digital consultant who, having ascertained their needs, went on to develop a digital inventory management system. It gives them an instant bird’s-eye view of stock levels across their retail outlets and those of their customers, as well as their warehouse.

The couple, who employ eight people, reckon the new system has stripped between 30 and 40 hours of manual processes a week from their overall workload — the equivalent of a full-time member of staff.

That’s very good news as, says Nik Mehta, “being a small business, it’s difficult for us to hire”.

Digitisation is also providing a better customer experience. “When it comes to wholesale distribution, the normal way of doing things is to have someone out on the road going to different shops to drop stock and merchandise it,” Mehta says.

He has taken a different approach. By working with a digital consultant, he was able to develop a system that enables store managers simply to take a picture of their Nutty Delights stand and send it by email or WhatsApp to the company.

The company’s software immediately identifies what fresh stock is required to replenish the stand and automatically creates the order, which is then sent out by courier. It enables management to see what lines are selling best, restocking in such a way as to boost sales. “It’s much more efficient,” Mehta says.

For anyone looking to see how digitisation could help their business, the LEOs’ Digital for Business programme provides the services of a digital consultant to conduct a digital audit, identifying where it could save time and money.

Once the areas are identified, business owners can then apply to their LEO for a Grow Digital Voucher, worth up to €5,000 in matched funding, to help cover the cost of making the changes. Even the smallest business can benefit. Gary Lawlor has an auto garage near Mallow in Co Cork. Because skilled labour is so hard to find, the mechanic is running the business by himself. To say he is busy is an understatement, which is why the Grow Digital initiative has been so fruitful for him.

“The digital consultant worked with me to develop a package that just makes my life so much simpler,” Lawlor says.

For example, when he serviced a car he used to put a sticker for its next service on the windscreen. “Then customers would ring to say they’d got a crack and had to have the windscreen replaced, and [would be] asking when were they due to come back. I’d have to get all my diaries and go through them page by page to find it,” he says.

Thanks to his new system, every car serviced is logged on an app, via his smartphone, so he can see such information at a glance. Lawlor can also send out appointment reminders. Best of all, the system generates and sends invoices automatically — and follows them up, boosting cashflow.

He can also send his invoicing information to his accountant at the touch of a button. “More than all that, it just looks smart. I deal with a lot of companies and the days of sending handwritten paper invoices is gone really. Just being able to email them looks much more professional,” he says.

John O’Shanahan is the founder of LeanBPI, a technology firm that works with small businesses on their digitisation journey. The key to its success is making a business owner’s existing systems easier, not different.

“You have to allow people to work in a way they are comfortable with. In other words, let them keep doing what they are doing and have the digital solution fit into their work practices. When you go in saying, ‘You’re going to have to change loads of things,’ [that] is where it can fall off the rails,” he says.

This way people see the benefits quickly and their confidence grows. “They feel, ‘I can do this, I’m getting digital and I’m getting more efficient.’ There’s a feel good factor because it’s about managing their business better,” O’Shanahan adds.

That is certainly the case with Lawlor, who says his success has attracted interest in the trade. “I’m in circulation with four or five other mechanics locally and they’re keen to meet me and see how it’s working because they’re mad to change too,” he says. “That’s because we all fall into the same trap — it’s five o’clock, we need to finish a car, so we’ll send out the invoice tomorrow — then all of a sudden you’ve a load of cars due for invoicing. Now I can go have my dinner and, at a click, send out four or five invoices while I’m eating.”

Nicole Langan’s wellness business, Irish Apothecary, started as a result of her work as a therapist, and today includes a range of therapeutic products such as natural medicine, organic skincare and personalised fragrance.

She wanted online customers to have the same customer experiences and opportunity to formulate products as visitors to her studio in Ballyconneely, Co Galway.

With Grow Digital support she worked with a technologist who transferred the entire experience online. Not only has the business, which employs three people, seen revenues grow by 30 per cent as a result, but it has opened international sales.

“We now have customers from all over the world, researching and shopping from the comfort of their own couch,” Langan says.

“I think small business owners sometimes think they don’t have the head space to understand all the intricacies of coding or whatever — but they don’t need to. Once you understand that your business model can be digitalised, that’s all you need to know,” she says.

“After that you just have to find a company you feel comfortable with, one that will hold your business model sacredly, so that it can operate efficiently on a digital level.”