It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is. Running a small business is never easy. Not only do you need to find customers, you also need to win their business and then keep them happy post-sale. There’s always so much to do! And with limited time and resources, you’re forced to juggle multiple tasks and roles, so it’s easy to get distracted from the most high-value activities. If only you could find a way to be more efficient and make smarter business decisions, while staying on the path for growth. Good news, you can! Here are 5 ways your small business can work smarter:
Think “easy.” When you’re this busy, there aren’t enough hours in the day for tools that take a long time to set up or require complex deployment efforts. When you purchase new technologies, you need to prioritize solutions that are easy to maintain so you won’t have to use your precious time upgrading and keeping them up-to-date. And it’s not just easy set up and maintenance that’s important. You need easy, intuitive products, so you can quickly onboard new users without a lengthy training process.
Go mobile. When your team is small and everyone wears a lot of hats, you never know when you might be needed. With today’s smartphones we can take care of almost everything for our personal lives from anywhere — and your business needs to be just as mobile. But there’s a big difference between viewing spreadsheets on a mobile device and technologies that are designed with mobile in mind. Find a solution with a mobile-first mentality and you’ll future-proof your business.
Automate. Do you ever find yourself doing the same things over and over? If you could only find a way to eliminate repetitive tasks, you could focus your time and energy on impactful activities that will help grow your business. Many of today’s technologies are designed so that even the most technically-challenged people can set up workflows and automations that can save huge amounts of time. Automation is also key to scaling your team easily through growth.
Connect apps. When you’re running a small business, it’s easy to feel like you’re constantly moving from one fire to the next. But if you purchase technology solutions to solve the problem of the moment, you may find yourself six months down the road with a set of point solutions that don’t connect with each other. Your data is now siloed and you can’t get the kind of customer visibility that you need to fend of the competition. Investing in a platform can make it easy to integrate and share data across apps. It can also make it expand your business and be ready for the future.
Embrace AI. This may sound like some kind of 2001: A Space Odyssey, sci-fi kind of thing. But artificial intelligence (AI) is here and it’s going to be the next big thing. AI tools can discover patterns in your business and predict what will happen next, recommend best actions, and even take care of some of them for you — perfect for small businesses who are strapped on time. Even as a small business, it’s never too early to start thinking about ways to let technology do the work for you, or risk being left behind.
Even as technology advances, small businesses continue to have the same challenges, no matter the industry. They need to do more, sell more, and work faster — all with fewer resources. Luckily new technologies can help you work more efficiently and keep your business focused on the activities that will really move the needle for you. What are your own secrets for working smarter?