How Technology Has Changed The Game For The Small Business Owner

Are you a small business owner ? Do you wonder how you can achieve the same level of efficiency as a large business, such as offering your employees personalized email addresses, designing a professional looking website, sharing files amongst employees across locations, tracking working hours and such other business solutions. Technology is the key to solving these common problems that are very efficiently tackled by large corporations. If you visit a store like Walmart, or Starbucks they have swipe cards for employees that 'swipe-in' so to speak and 'swipe-out' - this helps Walmart track the wages, the responsibility of the workers, and probably also which sales rep sold how much.

Technology has played a pivotal role in the world in solving problems faced by businesses, because of its ease of operation, and its speed of operation. Using technology as a tool is extremely critical to the success of any business. This can be done in two ways;

Controlling Costs

Technology can be used to control your costs - ie. by reducing expenditure, and consequently boosting profits. There can be various examples of this, a very basic example is the GPS system used very commonly in cars. There was a time when we would spend hours driving around trying to figure out where we needed to go. This caused a largely unnecessary waste of time, and energy. Along came technology to make this more efficient - now, a machine tells us the shortest and fastest route to go from Point A to Point B. Another example is using email. In the hay day, we sent out messages using telex and telegrams. This took forever, messages did not reach on time, and crucial work sometimes got delayed resulting is waste of resources. Now we have email - a message typed in one corner of the world, reaches the other side in almost an instant. Resulting in seamless exchange of information, saving of millions of dollars of costs and highly efficient business communications. Can you imagine, if a buyer of wheat in India, wanted to tell his supplier in Texas that he wanted to place an order - without email ? He would have to send out a telegram, the supplier may either accept or reject it - and reply - days later. Now, he can send an email, and receive an instant reply - cutting out all the time lag, resulting in a significant amount of time savings for both the parties, significantly better price discovery for the market and more efficient prices for the end user.

Revenue Growth

Another way to use technology is to use it to grow your business, by increasing sales. Prime examples of this are businesses that exist only by virtue of internet presence. Google's main source of revenue is advertisement based on the keyword auctions that it does. Google would not exist had it not been for the internet. Web hosting and web designing services would also not exist be it not for the internet. The internet can be a great tool for you to market your brand name, and make it out to consumers that you are a big business. After all, if you have a great looking website with flashy animations, there is no way for a consumer to tell that your annual sales are barely $5000.

Conclusion

Technology has changed the way we do business - in a very quick way. We must adapt to the changing business environment and use it to effectively manage our costs and boost revenue.