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Running a successful small business is not for the faint-hearted. Owners of small businesses often struggle with many aspects of their business like: increasing revenue, creating innovative products and ensuring customer satisfaction. While some businesses struggle with talent retention, others may face cash flow issues.
While challenges will be part and parcel of building the business, here are five areas within your business that can be improved through the use of technological solutions and the internet.
1. Visibility: See Your Businesses Direction with Ease
Lack of visibility across operations, especially as a small business grows, can cause many issues. Critical information is spread across disparate systems; there’s no timely access of the information and data could be incomplete.
If you are faced with these issues, you may not be able to see the direction in which your business is going and hence not be able to make appropriate, timely decisions. There are technology platforms available that ensure that all accounting and finance functions appear on one platform.
2. Mobility: Work Anywhere, Anytime
For a small business, important details of a lead or a customer could be recorded on post-it notes, in emails or noted on some employee’s remote device. Proposals and other documents may be stored in many different places. Even with the mobility options available to all today, many small businesses still manually gather and update records.
You cannot lock your employees down in an office space and only have them work out of their cubicles if you want to be competitive in this market. Cloud-based software as a service is accessible via a browser and allows business owners and their team to work from anywhere and anytime.
3. Data Security and Access to Information: Protect Your Customer
For any business, protecting customers and their data is of utmost importance. However, with a growing mobile workforce, businesses are under a constant cyber-security threat.
While small businesses understand the need for protecting critical information and providing controls that limit access, they typically do not have the budgets for state-of-the-art data security. As technology has evolved, affordable tools for password and email protection have become available to the SME market.
4. Collaboration: Make It Easy and Effective
With different geographical locations, workplace flexibility, remote workers and a small window of time for collaboration, effective communication between all employees is imperative to running a small business.
But small businesses continue to face issues with lost customer opportunities, not having the right tools for calls and documentation and not enough storage facilities. Online tools exist to conduct meetings with team members, live chat for customers and online document storage for easy collaboration.
5. Time Management: Priorities and Focus
“I do not have enough time” can often be heard from a small business owner and its often because they are wearing many different hats. Teams are lean, and often this means that staff are very busy doing many different functions.
Recording how time is spent assists in prioritising as well as being present. The good news is that there are great online time management and recording tools available, that are affordable and easy to use.
Technology to the Rescue:
Adopting newer technologies, innovating and devising new strategies around it can help you in different ways to streamline your business. If you want to drive growth and gain a relative advantage over your competitors, then you cannot let the emerging technologies slide. Here are a few examples to consider:
- Time management killing you – Don’t worry! There are great tools out there to improve your time management. Setting up and managing tasks and appointments, planning and reviewing timesheets and even automating repetitive tasks like monthly invoices or generating reports.
- Don’t have time for Marketing – Don’t fret! Just sign up for any of the free marketing automation systems and integrate with your CRM to easily market to your customer base in less than half the time. You might even pay for the advanced features once you see the leads coming in.
- Communication issues – We hear you! Critical communications, document sharing, notifications and alerts can be done with ease, and all team members can have access to the information they need in one simple cloud-based CRM. Another great thing – all the information about your customer will be in one place with full access from multiple devices (desktop, tablet or mobile).
- No business visibility – No problem! Use a task management software to capture all your information within a single platform and use the data for reporting across your whole business. Drive decision-making with ease.
Although building a small business from the ground up is one of the hardest things you can do, it is also one of the most rewarding. Technology can be the enabler. Running a successful small business means using the best system or process at the right time in the right way. Want to get started on your journey, click here to find out more.
“The opinions expressed by BizWitty Contributors are their own, not those of BizCover and should not be relied upon in place of appropriate professional advice. Please read our full disclaimer."
