As a consultant I often see businesses struggle with inadequate systems. Without sounding critical, the origin of many small businesses is often a trades based individual with an entrepreneurial mindset but no real technical skills and sometimes no real business acumen. Business longevity will depend on those skills being introduced at some stage either by some up skilling of the proprietors or through the introduction of a third party. YouTube Thumbnail Grabber

I see for example, the typical case of a very talented and skilled electrician working for a "Boss" who eventually decides he should be in business for himself. So out he goes, starts is business on the back of some loyal customers and, through word-of-mouth he grows a business to the stage where he employs a dozen or so staff.

He employs administration staff, an external bookkeeper and because he knows little of those processes relies on them to set up systems and business. Of course the quality of those systems will be entirely dependent on the commercial and operational experience of his staff. Given that, it is very likely that the systems that are used may well be effective but they may also be far from optimal.

Regardless of the internal systems used it is almost certain that there are some vastly superior products available. For example, web-based applications now exist to manage employee time sheets, job costing, appointment scheduling, accounting, project management, in fact almost anything you could name. These systems will bring to small businesses the resources normally only available to much larger enterprises. Until now small businesses had to rely on relatively unskilled individuals and less than adequate internal systems.

These on line applications not only dramatically improve communication, information and operational processes within your business they also dramatically reduce the cost. Implementation is generally exceptionally fast and requires only minimal skills. Cloud-based software also has the added advantage of record security as many small businesses are guilty of poor data backup procedures which often results in record loss and interruption to business processes.

More than 65% of businesses are small businesses employing less than 20 staff. In my work as a consultant I would estimate that 50% of those businesses have inadequate assistance and would benefit enormously from the introduction of one or more cloud-based software applications in one of the key areas of staff Management, Project management, on line scheduling or accounting.

Possibly the most difficult barrier to many of these small businesses given the non-technical nature of the proprietors is the adoption of what at least on the surface appears to be a quite technical product. It is only in the comparison of traditional software applications and the more advanced web 2 applications that one can see the relative simplicity of applications in the cloud.