5 New Economy IT Strategies

Hey, how're you doin'?

Nice to meet you.

Say, if you're a small business owner and if you and I were to connect for the first time on the street, here are the kinds of problems I'd guess you're having.

Just bear with me for a minute.

• Rising energy costs. You're watching the events happening in the middle east and may feel a bit uncomfortable about oil and gas prices. And as the economy heats up, there's going to be even greater demand on scarce fuels, further driving the price up. Experts are talking about $5-gallon-gas next year. You're concerned and you want to be prepared for it.
• Mobile. Your workforce (if not your customer base) is mobile and wants greater access to information systems using phones, tablets, and from home. You want to accommodate but you're not sure where to start. You're not even sure if your stuff can be used or seen on mobile devices.
• Mixed Messages. Your team's probably tired of juggling cell and company voicemail, email, and instant messaging across many mediums and platforms. Diversity in communication might be up but effectiveness might be down - the right message ain't reaching the right people at the right time.
• Social. You've caught up with social media fad but you're not certain what it's doing for you, or, how it's extending value to your customer relationship. How is this Social-stuff translating into favorable behavior or more work anyway?
• Acquisition costs. Obtaining more capability is expensive. There's an inherent barrier-to-entry with a lot of this new IT stuff. It' not like this economy has made you flush with cash to spend frivolously. You need proven solutions without guesswork.

Wow. That's hitting the proverbial nail on the head.

Now, we'd chit-chat about these issues and I'd eventually come around to showing you 5 new economy IT strategies to address each of these concerns.

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1.  Cloud Computing. If you still own a server the server forces your team to be sitting next to it to access information. You're absorbing and paying for the risk in managing that asset. Own nothing. Own a server? Ditch it! Own a phone system? Why? Buy software? Seriously? Lease capability from vendors and shift your risks to them. Replace your expensive hardware with inexpensive appliances that access web-based resources. Instead of paying for tech services you have to manage and pay for yourself, you'd be using a utility - it's time to think of your technology like water, electricity, or plumbing: it's a service you use and not an asset you maintain. Cloud licensing is subscription-based so you only pay for what you use - lowering that barrier-to-entry for immediate capability.

2. Telecommuting. It's time to sit down and honestly talk with your team about this. The bandwidth's there, the infrastructure's there, the Cloud is there, now it's just a management decision.  Why pay anybody to drive 30+ miles for the privilege to type in your building? Can't offer your team raises or other benefits? Give them the benefit of self-direction and time management, and, the ability to lower their own energy costs by driving less often.

3.  Integrated Communications with Relationship Management. Your land-line, toll, cell, voicemail, email, instant messaging, copies, fax, and social interactions can come under one software, one view, one channel. The capability's there - you just need to implement. What that creates is a single inbox for your players where there's no distinction of medium. Further, all of this content can be married with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems built in to that inbox. Why have your team running around with their heads cut off wondering where something is? Give them the gift of a single virtual inbox.

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4. Shrinkwrap. This is a term I like to use for corporate downsizing in a cool, necessary, and strategic way. You see, with more efficiency, more Cloud, more Telecommuting, you can stop paying those outrageous property taxes you've been complaining about; you don't need to renew that lease; you can rent office rooms when you actually need them; you can shrink the corporate presence to a smaller - and more economical - footprint. Why pay for a facility that's mostly empty? Here's your chance to make structured, strategic changes to your fixed expenses: get smaller.  Become more agile. Think faster than you're competitor who're stuck with buildings, skyscrapers, and other structured/expensive costs they can't get out of.

5. Extend Value. Social media gives you a way to connect with your customers in amazing ways. Now's the time to see how technology can not just automate your workforce but empower your customer to do business with you - how are you making it easier to contact, work-with, and use your product/service? How're you using Social to listen and respond to your customer? Hey - heads up: you're a media company now! "Hi, Channel 5: what's up?" How're you building and cultivating your audience.  How can you use social to attract attention?

Now's the time to get curious as a business owner: what's possible under the budget constraints you have? Can you implement two or maybe three of these strategies to prepare for the new economy? Maybe all five? Whatever. Now's the time to start asking questions. What you don't want to be is just like everybody else, scrambling for options when there's no more time to implement.

That's right: money for nothing and chics for free.

Thanks for reading.

R

5 Small Business Predictions for 2011

Okay, every year I've offered some insight into the year ahead for small businesses. In fact, I think it's quite common for any consultant and would-be psychic to demonstrate their astute prowess and outline clear bets. And this year is no different!

So - in a very envelope-to-forehead moment - here I go: my five predictions for the small business in 2011.

1. Lean. Call me a nattering naybob but I'm still not convinced that postponing tax breaks is going to eliminate uncertainty, nor is sustaining the current level of taxation going to put more money in people's pockets. I mean, it hasn't already so...? Economists are forecasting flat employment growth throughout 2011. So I think the small business is going to stay lean. They might even get leaner, employing some of the trends and tech below to reach even higher economies of scale and automation. Small businesses are learning - must learn - to do more with less, consistently, to survive. Look for some small businesses to fold whereas others take more drastic steps to achieve profitability: fire bad customers, lay-off entire regions or divisions, or, eliminate the need for a building.

2. Cloud. Why own when you can rent? That's really the idea being tossed around in the housing market but it's also applicable to small business computing! Why own a server, or, an application, when you can rent it for a period of time? And when you don't need it any more, ditch it? Efforts by all of the major vendors is making the cloud easier to reach and use by everyone. More small businesses will adopt cloud-based technologies and abandon the use of local servers. Look for more small businesses raising their hand and asking about the maturity of some of this technology, and for developing a migration strategy.

3. Social. If mass media is too expensive and budgets are tight, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to believe small businesses will start looking at social media as a viable alternative. Social networks allow businesses to get closer to consumers than ever before and to personify their brand. Yeah, we're going to see more of that. Look for small businesses to out-pace enterprise adoption, and to apply this technology more creatively, winning-over tight-wad consumers and convincing them to spend their scarce dollars locally! You just watch ... look for a substantial shift in marketing expenses away from television, radio, and print as traditional media continues to writhe and die a horrible, prolonged death.

4. Mobile. Next year will bring a gaggle of new gadget tech. The new iPhone 5 that'll feature 4G; a new iPad 2; a bunch of Android competitors; more eBook readers. Personally, I don't know where consumers are going to find the funds to invest in all of these disposable toys but, hey, the demand seems to be there. Look for small businesses to start leveraging Cloud and Social strategies across Mobile platforms to offer themselves greater flexibility in staffing and building expenses. Watch for people who passed on the iPhone 4 to scoop up the iPhone 5, and Apple - whose being fiercely eaten alive by Android in terms of market share, will announce some really cool features and enticements to retain their customer-base and pull-in defectors from the Android camp.

5. eBooks. Everybody's getting into them. Amazon, Google, Apple. This whole decade will be about transforming the distribution channel for books and video into an electronic medium, just like last decade was about music. Everybody, including you, are changing your consumer preferences! Self-publishing is here. Also, self-service is here because of plentiful low-cost bandwidth. Look for downward pressure on growth for large chain booksellers and video outlets; look for small/niche/specialty sellers in local communities cropping up to take their place. Look for our consumer habits to shift with more people consuming digital media over paper.

Predictions? Or perhaps I've just a command of the obvious? Meh, you decide.

By the way, I really liked this article from the Business Insider articulating 10 ways every small business should be preparing for 2011. Really good read!

R

5 Ways to Sabotage Your Small Business

So on the drive home from a networking event today, I was thinking about the ways you could kill your business. Here are my ideas:

• You Place Too Much Investment in One Person. If your business is critically dependent upon one person then there's darkness on the horizon. Spread the knowledge around. Don't make one person the linchpin that you can't live without. Not only is it a bad bargaining position but it could hamper business continuity should that employee go on vacation or get hit by a truck. Don't deliberately make your business dependent on anyone, especially you.

• You Fail to Automate/Outsource Routine Business Processes. Why is your company still processing anything by hand? Take the low-hanging fruit and get rid of it: payroll, invoices, payables, and receivables - classic business processes - can be entirely automated. Think about cost-shifting to providers who can manage these processes for you at a stronger economy of scale. BBSI out of Vancouver, WA is a great example of a payroll processor for small businesses. The faster you get the invoice out the door, the faster you get paid, the more likely you can take advantage of early payment discounts, and why not take advantage of electronic funds transfer instead of depositing checks? Companies who're not doing this will comparatively spend more in labor, make more mistakes, have a longer cash-flow cycle, and be more difficult to work with.

• You Ignore Self-Service. Transfer labor away from you and push it to your customers. Really, they don't mind. They expect it. Empower your customers with web-based tools. Heck, empower your employees with similar web-based capabilities. In what ways can your business put nearly everything a customer (or even an employee) needs to do business with you online? Or even mobile, like a smartphone app?

• You Ignore Search and Social Media. It's time to start thinking about SEO/SEM/SM strategies. If you don't know what these concepts are and what they mean to you in terms of being found by consumers, and retaining customers, start asking questions now: you're behind the curve. A great local guy that can help is Matt from Fringe Media Web Design in Vancouver, WA. Your customers are most likely to find your company through search engines and by asking friends on social networking sites. If you're not planning for this, your competitors are, making them easier to find and interact with than your company.

• You Assume the Best. Right. You should be planning for the worse. I've written about the state of the economy numerous times. You may already know that, in August 2010, the nation added approximately 26,000 private sector jobs; and you may also know that the country needs to add ten-times that (250,000) new private sector jobs consistently every month for three years to just re-employ the 8 million unemployed... bringing us back to where we were in 2007... and that's not even counting all of the newly unemployed added to the ranks since that time. This is all very unlikely to happen. Thus, it's time to face the music: barring some economic miracle, if you're not already learning how to do more with less consistently (indefinitely), you're at a competitive disadvantage to those who are. Your competitor is learning how to be more productive and efficient, and how to be more profitable. If you're optimistic and waiting for the tides to change, and just waiting, you may be waiting too long on the shore as the ship sails away. It's time to go on the offensive and to consider how to drastically reduce expenses while extending the highest value to your customers, and, achieving the highest efficiency.

R