Business technology is an incredibly important part of any business’s growth. Technology helps you make certain tasks more efficient, and it also provides stability in the way you carry out your processes. The more predictable and efficient your business is, the easier it is to run. So in order to help you prepare for these different stages, we’ve divided them into three parts; startup,
Small and medium-sized enterprises, and large businesses.
Here are the considerations you need to keep in mind when growing your business technology at these three stages.
Startups – making use of outsourcing and determining how often you’ll be using technology
The startup phase of your business is arguably one of the most important when it comes to the proper use of technology. This is because the startup stage is essential for building the foundation of what’s to come in the future. For instance, if you use paper records because it’s cheaper and convenient as a small business, then converting those records is going to take time and money once you upgrade to a digital solution.
As such, it’s a good idea to establish those databases and functions in your business at an early stage to accommodate future growth. But that’s not the only benefit of setting everything up early.
Creating familiarity with your technology solutions
One of the big benefits of creating a solid technological foundation in your company is gaining familiarity with the technology that you’re using. Everyone learns at a different rate, but one of the best ways to ensure that you and your employees are comfortable using the technology in your business is to simply use it on a regular basis. So the sooner you implement those solutions, the easier it’ll be in the future to teach other employees, diagnose issues, and also identify upgrade paths to make things more efficient.
Familiarity is extremely important and should never be underestimated. When you’re growing a business, being able to practice using technology and getting accustomed to your processes will make a huge difference in the overall success of your company.
Outsourcing when it makes sense
Another good way to ensure that your startup gets the technological support it needs is to outsource things when needed. Outsourcing is one of the best ways to get the assistance you need for specialized processes or things that you currently don’t really understand. For instance, you might find it really hard to manage your business network because there are too many different functions and specifications to think about. If that’s the case, then you may want to hire a specialist by outsourcing the job.
Outsourcing is cost-effective during the startup stages of your business, especially if you don’t plan to hire an employee to take the role. However, do keep in mind that hiring someone is usually the better long-term solution, especially if you’re growing your business into a small or medium enterprise in the near future.
Preparing for your transition into an SME
It’s not like there’s a set of criteria that you need to meet before you can be considered an SME. In fact, the definition is pretty flexible, so how do you know when you’re ready to move on and upgrade or change your technology solutions? Here’s a simple list of questions to ask yourself.
So if you can answer these questions comfortably, it may be time to start upgrading your tech solutions or switching to scalable options so that you can be prepared for future growth.
SMEs – Building a team of specialists to manage your technology
As you move into small and medium enterprise territory, you’ll start to realize that you have more responsibilities to consider. How these relate to your business technology will depend on what kind of processes you have. For example, you might still be hiring IT support from your startup stages, but their role might have changed in the business because you’re starting to hire specialists to manage certain aspects of your tech.
For instance, maybe you’ve hired a web developer since your startup phase and they’re now working full-time to improve your website, fix issues, and also plan future upgrades. However, now that you’ve got more clients visiting your website, cybersecurity could be a much bigger concern now. You’re also a more successful and well-known company than before, meaning that hackers could see you as a lucrative target.
So what kind of considerations do you have in mind at this stage?
Replacing technology with full-time employees
One of the considerations to keep in mind is how you envision the future of your business technology. This is where you need to start cutting out technologies that you used to use for convenience, but now they’ve outlived their usefulness and require fully-fledged solutions.
A good example of this could be accounting. Many startups make use of cloud accounting software to manage things like incoming and outgoing money. When you only have a handful of transactions every week, this is arguably one of the best ways to manage it. However, once you start growing your business, it’s important to consider other solutions like hiring an accountant. It could even be an outsourced accountant that works remotely.
The point here is that you personally shouldn’t be handling bookkeeping once you grow your business. There are too many responsibilities for you to handle and at this point, technology like cloud accounting starts to lose its value. As such, you should be hiring employees to take over tasks that technology used to do in the past.
Understanding the role of specialists in your company
Once you start growing your business, you’ll realize that certain tasks such as web development aren’t as simple as they appear to be. In fact, developing a website involves many different tasks such as graphic design and content writing in addition to web development. Because of this, you’ll want to start hiring a team of creators to help you with making a website.
In addition to the creative side, you might also need additional services like search engine optimization. This is something that can be outsourced much like the other tasks, but you could also start hiring specialized team members to take over these roles. The goal here is that you’re creating a team of people to make a website instead of hiring just a single person. Delegating tasks like this and playing to each employee’s strengths will help you create a much better website, leading to a clean and efficient experience for all of your customers.
While this is specific to website development, it can be applied to everything else in your business as well. Teams will be required to perform tasks that were previously handled by a single person, and those team members have specific roles that you need to fill in.
Large businesses – creating custom solutions and dedicated teams to manage specific tasks
Lastly, large businesses should be focusing on creating custom solutions and dedicated teams to manage highly specific tasks. There tend to be fewer technological solutions at this stage that can handle enterprise-level use cases, which is why many companies turn to create bespoke solutions instead. This usually involves the use of an in-house development team, or even outsourcing the creation of bespoke software and technologies.
Custom solutions that are designed specifically for your business
There are a couple of reasons to use custom solutions and proprietary software when you’re a large business. For starters, you don’t have to pay large fees to other businesses in order to use the solutions they’ve created. This ends up saving a lot of money in the long run, especially if you plan to constantly update and fix your custom software and technology solutions.
Secondly, it’s a lot easier to communicate with the development team to get things fixed as they need to be. Instead of waiting for support from another company about their solutions, you can just get in contact with your staff.
Lastly, it’s also built to your exact specifications, meaning that you won’t be dealing with unnecessary feature bloat and you can create documentation that will help your employees learn much more quickly.
These custom solutions require planning and consideration that is based on your business needs. What those needs are will slowly develop as you grow your business, so it’s important to consider the past and the decisions you’ve made to help you create effective bespoke solutions.
