The digital age and its accompanying technologies and innovations have made many things modular and distance-compatible. There is no reason that businesses should not take advantage of this and become decentralized and adaptive. Businesses do not need a shopfront the way companies in the past had to have. Your website is your shopfront, and it requires a lot less overhead and staff to run.
Small businesses should especially take the modular approach to run a business that digital technologies are making possible. Websites, online payment options, and the range of freelance services give a small business a competitive edge that it needs to provide for a wide customer base.
Talented graphic designers and experienced writers offer quality freelance services that can make a real difference to a small business. Combining these separate talents under the umbrella of a CMO as a service can allow you to produce a cohesive message in addition to its thought-provoking and attractive content.
In a world where a small business owner has the ability to work with vendors in other countries who are connected via the internet and manage employees from across the world via collaborative cloud-based management tools, there is no limit to the possibilities.
Train and Empower
A small business relies on its employees’ dedication to their work to a great degree. When your business is small, every employee becomes the face of it. You must give them the appropriate training to do their job well and then empower them to get creative and take the right steps where needed.
In the beginning stages, the success and growth of the business depend on the positive interactions of every customer. Empowered employees will know they can take extra steps or go further to deliver this exceptional customer service because their business will back them up.
Facilitate Integration
It can be tempting to segregate each department in the business as this is how things were done in the past. This may have worked well before, but in a digital age that requires quick response times and creativity at every step, this may be a hindrance.
Motivate your employees and reward them for finding creative solutions by working across departments. Teaching employees that the company’s success is their success will keep them dedicated and ensure that they produce well in collaboration with each other and without constant supervision.
Consult and Seek Mentors
Most successful entrepreneurs are encouraging and want to see new business owners succeed. Go to seminars, business luncheons, and upscale charity events to make contacts with important people who can give you valuable advice. A mentor can help steer you away from lessons that would be difficult to recover from and guide you towards making good choices.
Where possible, hire consultants with great reputations to help you set up systems of function within the office. A great consultant should help you build a system that any employee can come into and become functional. This will ease a great deal of burden on you as you can ease away from doing that job yourself. The system in place will guarantee that it gets done the way you want it to be done.
Let Go
The hardest part of being a small business owner is to realize that you have reached a point where you need to step back from the daily tasks of running your business. It can be a bittersweet moment as it means you have achieved enough business viability to begin thinking about expansion or growth or even selling. But, it also means that you have to let go of certain duties so that you can take up new ones.
Sometimes, you are too close to the business to see how well it is doing or what it needs to do better. A good way to determine which jobs you do that can be better done by a professional is to consider them. If your company can afford a full-time accountant and hasn’t hired one, you are missing out on a myriad of opportunities. Take a step back and try to evaluate your company from a remove. Ask yourself if it is time to focus on growth and let someone else handle the routine.
Letting go can also be applied to every other area of the business. When you have a small business, it is easy to get emotionally attached to every aspect of it. But the future for your business requires you to think along more commerce-first lines.
If a software can do the work better than an employee, it is your duty to purchase the software and re-organize the employees’ duties. A good employee is always worth keeping, so look into re-training them. A bad employee needs to be excised from the company immediately. Beware of employees who have no work ethic. A small business cannot handle the drain of someone who is not dynamic and involved.
In this same way, be willing to let go of customers who are more trouble than they are worth. Clients who need additional resources are always complaining, or create an unsafe work environment for your employees is not needed. The revenue they bring in may not be worth the toll they exact on your employees and your business.
