Are you using the right technology for your small business?
Three tips for making sure you’re getting as much as possible from small business technology.
E-mail management. Mobile security. Tablets. Webinars. And the 3,000 other technologies today’s small business owner could use to improve efficiency, cut down on redundancy, and make more money – if only you knew what tech tools to use and which to avoid. We have to admit that the title of this post is a bit misleading, as we can’t answer that question. You may never truly know if you have the absolute best technology for your business, but you can be confident in how you leverage technology if you follow these three pieces of advice.
1) Identify one or two key functional or operational areas within your business where you’d like to see improvement and quantify the improvement you’d like to see. Maybe a 10% increase in order accuracy would save thousands of dollars; perhaps freight fees are killing you and you’d like to figure out how to lower them 25%.
2) Next identify a couple of small business technology news sources, like Small Biz Technology, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, or BizTech, that you like and find easy to digest. Subscribe to their e-newsletters and follow them using social media to get useful small business technology every day.
3) Finally, monitor the news with an eye toward articles focusing on your identified areas. It will be hard, as there will be oodles of other tantalizing tech tidbits urging you to consider them your new priority. Don’t! Solve your existing issues and save other ideas to a “future list.”
And then repeat, and repeat, and repeat – with those “future list” items, and also with new problems and areas for improvement. There will never be a point at which you can say, “Whew! The tech stuff is done and done!” But you will have a system for managing both your technology needs and the constant flow of tech information.
Technology changes quickly, but that’s good for a small business owner like you. Rather than view it as “one more thing to keep up with,” embrace the opportunities that new tech advancements bring. Harnessing the power of technology: It’s not just for the big guys!
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