By Levi Lapp, founder and CEO of Atlantic Outdoors, an outdoor living company that builds structures for your lifestyle.
Building a business in today’s environment can be overwhelming as you try to stay on top of everything from expenses and new hires to closing deals and growing your sales. Thankfully, there are many tools and applications available that can help.
When we started our business almost nine years ago, we thought we were on the cutting edge of technology with websites and email. Looking back, we took advantage of what we could at the time to automate our business. But the technology available in today’s world is outstanding. Nowadays, you can find support in just about every aspect of a business from hiring a new team to taking that team out to celebrate.
Here are some of the areas you may be able to improve with a little help from outside resources:
Hiring
Once your business takes off, you need to hire employees. But just putting an ad in the paper isn’t enough anymore. Many online tools can help you post an available position, but what do you do when you have multiple candidates who interview well and have impressive resumes?
There are now online tools that can help you choose between good candidates and great ones. For example, there are several online versions of the DiSC assessment that can help you evaluate people based on their personality. Such insights can help you determine how someone would react and respond to unforeseen situations. This may be particularly useful when you already have a team and are looking for someone who would complement existing employees’ strengths and weaknesses.
Cybersecurity
Just as you lock up your office to protect your equipment, you should consider cyber security to protect everything you store online. Ensuring your employees’ social security numbers or customer information is protected is critical. With proper data security in place, your technology tools and systems are more likely to be safe from digital attacks.
As our business is growing and we’re hiring more people, it has been critical for us to focus on some of the basics, such as including firewall security to protect our website, WiFi network and internet connection. Another big one: maintaining control of any devices we provide to our employees.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM tools have been around for a while, but have become increasingly essential. These tools allow members to safely share notes and ideas, in addition to passwords and secured documents. For many businesses, it is an essential way to track sales and leads.
CRMs serve as a client contact database and can keep track of all communications, including adding reminders about when to contact customers. With the correct data, some can even offer potential outcomes based on the information provided. These outcomes can help your team determine if a lead is worth the time and effort needed.
Most CRMs also include calendar features that allow you to prioritize projects, schedule deadlines and even factor in personal time off and holidays. You can input your events with reminder notifications to keep you on track for meetings, appointments and other important dates.
We use Monday as our CRM because we like how it allows us to collaborate within our office and also share projects with people outside of our company. Now, our contacts are all in one space and, as the owner of the company, I can see what everyone is working on—whether they are an employee or contract worker—and how projects are progressing. It really sets the tone for keeping everyone on task and helps us meet deadlines.
Business Travel
If you need to go out of town for work, the high-tech world has come a long way for business travelers. For starters, many apps keep your work/personal life in balance regardless of what time zone you are in. Some of those common travel stressors like finding a place to work out or a healthy lunch spot can now be a thing of the past with informational apps powered by businesses like ClassPass and TripAdvisor. And how about returning to the office with all those receipts from the road? Not to worry. Apps like Expensify and TripIt can help you streamline your itinerary, expenses, miles and more.
Running a business today can still have its challenges, but it is a lot easier with these tools to take some of the burden off your shoulders.
