If the National Federation of Independent Business Owners survey is anything to go by, only 33% of business owners are able to get credit to run their businesses. we can safely assume that very few people get into that lucky well while most others have to bootstrap and find other sources of funding.
Why, if you may ask, are we talking about credit and funding for businesses?
It’s because everything to do with business is getting expensive – from office space to staffing; from equipment to infrastructure; from vendors to technology. The assumed need for cost cutting a few years ago is a reality today. It’s a burning need that all businesses are looking to address. No matter what size your business is, here are a few steps you must take:
Hire Smart
Have you been using recruitment consultants, career drives at colleges or universities or other such traditional hiring practices for your business? The cloud did not extend itself to just virtualization, ERP, CRM, and PaaS, and other such techno-centric uses.
The cloud also rendered itself to non-IT components of business such as hiring from a global talent pool. If you are a new age business looking to retain a competitive edge, you can almost find any kind of talent using Recruitment solutions from LinkedIn or from telecommuting hubs such as Elance or many other such platforms. The key is to hire smart. LinkedIn solutions cost about 75% than traditional hiring costs.
Use Smart Tech for your Business
Avoid spending on servers, equipment, routers, and switches. Work to make your business lean. If it weren’t for our habit to invest in office space and equipment, we’d have had really operational expenses. Given what we have available today, you can do away with offices, business travel, equipment, computing hardware, and pretty much everything else that businesses traditionally invest on.
Technology mocks you. How do you want to go about it?
Keep Backups for Everything
Losses that construe from losing business data are enormous. According to a study conducted by Reuters.com, businesses stand to lose a whopping $1 Trillion from loss, theft, or mismanaging data. The stories of fortunes lost due to IT attacks, server hacks, and data mismanagement are numerous. If you are headed out into the business wild, keeping multiple layers of backup is a no-brainer.
How safe is your data?
Go to cloud, when it’s time
Not all business functions plug into the cloud, at least not for your business. Some functions automatically render themselves as perfect matches for cloud management such as marketing, sales, inventory, order management, order processing, finance, human resources, etc. Some functions might not. The call to go to the cloud depends on your business and it’s strategic outlay. Yet, you can’t escape the fact that the cloud is here to stay and taking to it only brings those ever-increasing costs down while you reap the advantages of flexibility, lowered costs, and scalability hitherto unseen or unheard of.
If you’d like our help with moving to the cloud, reworking your business infrastructure, backing up your data, get a security assessment done, etc., please feel free to shoot us an email and we’d be glad to attend to you