Leveraging Technology in Small Businesses

As a private business owner, you likely have considered ways of better leveraging technology in your small business. However, you may have reservations due to limited internal "know-how," potential costs, or expected reluctance to change.

Understanding these concerns, I ask that you instead consider the possible longer-term costs and likely impacts on your business by not leveraging newer technologies and practices.

Some of the benefits include:

A more efficient team, less focused on manual processes (e.g., no paper-pushing)
A purposeful sales funnel and better customer service
Better financial visibility and performance (e.g., cash flow, profitability)
Better practices to keep your company safe from fraud or cyber threats

Ok, so when is the right time to pursue potential upgrades? Great question! Using the example of taking out a business loan, the best time to do so is when you don’t need one, as healthier financials typically translate into better loan rates. The same logic applies to technology upgrades in a slightly different context. In theory, it's best to make upgrades during "calmer seas" (e.g., when your company is not under financial stress or when your team is not strained), but in reality specific pain points can become the catalyst.

Whether you are making proactive or reactive technology decisions, it is critical that you think holistically about your "technology stack." A painful error is to pick a software tool in isolation because of its great reviews, but to subsequently learn that the tool does not share information seamlessly with important software that you use to run other parts of your business. Let's say you leverage a new payroll software, but quickly realize that it does not work well with your accounting software.

Some companies have a particular industry-specific software that is critical to their business. In this case, just make sure that other software used to manage complementary elements of your business operations integrates well with your industry-critical tool. For companies that don't leverage specialized software, you still want to make sure that your various software tools integrate well.

Luckily, various software suites exist that inherently help solve this integration problem, such as all-in-one business management software suites (e.g., Microsoft Dynamics 365, Zoho One), core productivity + collaborate software suites (e.g., Google Suite), productivity solutions (e.g., Microsoft Office), or function-specific solutions (e.g., a CRM such as Hubspot), etc.

I am always happy to discuss ways your business might be able to leverage technology better. I also have a deep bench of technology experts for larger companies or more complex situations.

As you consider ways to leverage technology further to help your company become more efficient, profitable and adaptable, below are a few examples of specific technology use cases broken out by core function. Artificial intelligence now touches upon all of these functions, but we will save AI (inclusive of large language models such as ChatGPT) for another day.

Administration