Top 5 Technology Secrets To Build Your Small Business

There are a plethora of articles out there focusing on technical advances to look for, but we wanted to take some time to give you a GURU analysis of the Top 5 Technology Secrets to Build Your Small Business.

1. Move your Business to the cloud.

As with any change to your company’s technology you need to consider all the possibilities and do your research before jumping in.  While the cloud is the trendy thing to do at the moment, your business will need to carefully consider which cloud technology you want to use.   Make sure you’re not just going to the cloud because you can, or because you THINK it might help.  Make sure it serves a purpose, like eliminating expensive infrastructure.  A good example would be to move your on premise Exchange server to Office 365 and remove the maintenance and upkeep for that server.

2. Ditch Pricey point-of-sale solutions

This is one point in the article I disagree with.  We believe that the features you lose, while may seem small on paper, tend to hinder you more in the appearance of professionalism when dealing with customers.  “What do you mean I can’t split payment between two different cards?”

3. Get on board with loyalty and rewards programs

Pricey POS systems have this ability built-in.  If you want to move to a cheaper POS system, this would be one of those feature that you could potentially lose in the switch.  Would you rather be running 2 separate programs, 1 for sales, 1 for rewards, or just have 1 system handle them both?  Chances are you can still virtualize any server requirements for that system and put it out in the cloud to save money.

4. Turn to inexpensive tools for back-end productivity

There is a saying tossed around all the time for lesser known software, “90% of the features for 10% of the cost.”  This sounds great but, make sure that the things you really need to run your business aren’t part of the 10% of the features that a lesser-known software, or app doesn’t support.  The best example I can think of would be the ability to monitor or report on the finances or productivity of your company.

5. Take advantage of marketing and sales plug-ins.

I can’t disagree with this statement but, I would provide an alternate train of thought.  Would you rather fight with multiple different apps and cloud technologies to run all the various aspects of a business?  Or would you rather just go with a trusted provider like Microsoft to run your business?  Chances are most of these apps are merely attempting to imitate something that Microsoft has already created, and while Microsoft products are typically more expensive, they don’t come with all the risks of a smaller product such as security holes or potential downtime with crashes and failures.