Superfast Business Wales digital adviser Emma Goode explains how software can help take the pressure off and provide extra resource.
How many hats can one business owner wear? HR, Marketing, IT support, Accountant? Oh and yes, some time left to actually deliver your services/sell your products. Small business owners have to wear multiple hats, and this can be a real barrier to success and progress. It’s a difficulty that many of the businesses we talk to struggle with especially at the moment when resources are scarce, uncertainty abounds, and times are generally difficult. It’s also a common plight of the start-up.
Mostly we look to extra resource as people to help, extra hands to pitch in but this is not always viable when money for salaries is tight and time for training means its ‘quicker to do it myself’ or the business is just at the stage where it’s not ready for staff yet. How do you move forward and overcome these barriers to greater growth and success or to just get back to where you were before?
Increasingly we can deploy technology and more specifically software to help take the pressure off and provide additional resource. Software can provide opportunities to automate processes & manage customers; to save more, to sell more, to provide solutions to problems.
Sounds good? Yep, but I don’t really know what you mean and where to start. Let’s focus on some common problems that businesses we work with have and see how software can help increase resource and save time.
Business one: Tourism business with self-catering accommodation
Problem: I have a website which takes online bookings, but I rely on OTA’s (Online Travel Agents) e.g. AirBnB, Booking.com, to advertise and provide bookings. I have a presence on four of them, each with their own availability calendar. When I take a booking on one, I have to manually update the other three and my website to ensure I don’t double book. This is hugely time consuming.
Solution: Consider an online booking system that includes a channel manager. This software allows you to sell your accommodation on all your online travel agents at the same time. It will automatically update your availability on all the sites including your own website giving you huge time savings by massively reducing administration.
Download our free Digital Toolkit for Business - to see what online booking systems are available
Business two: Management Consultant
Problem: I used to work from a serviced office but now I work from home full time. My IT skills are limited, and I have 2 staff members who are also home working. I have adopted lots of apps to work with clients and communicate with colleagues, however they are all over the place and we spend a lot of time looking for things. I am also worried about security and if I have set things up correctly. We are losing time and I don’t feel organised.
Solution: Multiple apps may work well for some businesses, but it may be time to take your home office set-up up a notch. Consider the benefits and efficiencies of ditching all these fragmented apps and investing in one productivity platform. This will allow you to work and collaborate with colleagues and clients, with files, calendars and comms in one place, so preventing worries about whether it’s all secure. Invest a bit more and you can access support for when setting things up is beyond you or you have problems that need to be resolved. Quite often you can build on the functionality as the business grows and you need to scale up too.
Download our free Digital Toolkit for Business - to see what productivity tools are available
Business three: Beauty Therapist
Problem: I am based from a high street treatment room. I have a growing customer base. I get some cancellations/no-shows and I am struggling to keep track of the treatments my customers have had and are due to have. Some weeks are very quiet, yet I still have fixed overheads to pay for.
Solution: Consider software that helps you both manage your customers and provide a superior customer service such as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management Software). Hairdressers have been using CRMs successfully for years, they just call it Salon Management. You can record all your customers’ details, treatments, allergies, appointments, send reminders and promotions, and customise beauty packages and new treatments based on client preferences and how much they like to spend. Get your software to tell you all the customers who haven’t had a treatment for the last month and automatically fire off a text (providing you have correct marketing permission) to invite them back, and perhaps offer a discount to make them feel valued. Refocusing on existing customers can be so much easier and more profitable than always chasing new clients. It can also be really useful when you have cancellations or quieter periods too.
Download our free Digital Toolkit for Business - to see what CRM systems are available.
Top tips when choosing software:
- Identify the bottlenecks. Think about which areas of the business take up the most time and if you can you solve this with software e.g. Booking appointments/reminders can be automated, as can generating and sending quotes/invoices, working together on a document and updating customer information when you are out and about.
- Check you don’t already have the power. Lots of software now offers a huge amount of inbuilt functionality. Do an audit of what you already use and do your research to see if you can get more out of what you already have.
- Prove the concept. Most suppliers will offer free trials, MAKE USE OF THEM. Put a small sample of data into the software and play around with the functionality to see if it is going to be easy to use and actually helpful to the business.
- Do the Maths. Weigh up the cost versus the benefit. Software does have a cost, but it also has some huge benefits: reduction in administration, automation of processes, greater opportunities to increase sales, customer retention. However, it has to pay. The reward to you as the business owner has to be more time and/or greater profit.
- Adapt to succeed. Make your processes fit the software’s functionality. Bespoke software can be expensive, so you need to adjust to work with the way the software is set up to avoid additional costs.
- Get help when you need it. You may have to pay for additional training or to help with implementation, this is not a bad thing, you will reap the rewards when you know how to use the full capability of your software solution and accept that whilst you may be amazing at what you do you may not be an IT expert and that is ok.
- Be agile. Most software has mobile apps so you can input info, create estimates/invoices, update client records, create promotions all on the fly, increasing efficiency even further.
- Does it play nicely with others? Is there any software currently in use in the business that this new solution needs to work with? If so, will they work together?
Keep an open mind: many business owners think their businesses are too small to benefit from these kinds of solutions, this simply isn’t true. Software solutions can free you up to do what you are best at. So maybe instead of trying to wear all the hats, use your head to see if there is a different approach.
Running a business is easier if you’ve got the right tools and systems in place. Our brand new Digital Toolkit for Business will help you find the latest software available and choose what’s right for your business.
Download your free Digital Toolkit for Business