Running a small business used to feel like you were standing in the shadow of hulking corporations, but the opportunity to leverage corporate technologies in the SMB space has made it feel like you’re standing on the shoulders of giants. More and more companies have been undergoing their digital transformation but the pain involved has been diminishing. Small mom and pop shops can utilize the same technologies as multi-national conglomerates for a fraction of the cost.
The first advantage is that they lack the legacy technologies and infrastructure that big companies have been towing behind them for years. In the late 90s, I was a bench technician for Future Shop and the Best Buy take over took place before I left. The point of sale system was an ancient Unix platform that hung around for years after I was long gone from there. But the task to upgrade the entire organization’s POS system was monumental, costly and complicated. For established small businesses, the barrier to entry is minimal. They don’t have to convert global business processes with thousands of endpoints and dependencies; they just need to get their 10 employees set up in the new system. There are even fantastic migration tools to assist in the process (I’m looking at you CodeTwo). It’s even easier for new companies to adopt cloud technologies and grow into them organically. The costs scale with the company size so it’s a minimal expense for a startup to set up a website, email, phone system and some basic CRM.
Like many things on the “Huh, we didn’t think that would work” list, the pandemic forced everyone to just give some things a try. Lo and behold, many of them were a smashing success and smaller companies that had to move to remote work, hybrid environments and the like did so with generally very little pain from a technology standpoint. Again, large organizations had to scramble to meet the demands for hardware and other technologies at scale so along with that came ballooning costs and interruptions to workflow. I guess it’s much easier to pivot in place when your footprint is smaller.
If your company hasn’t gone through some sort of digital transformation in the last few years, what are you waiting for? Have you gone through it but the smoke hasn’t quite cleared and you’ve got questions? Give us a call (416-646-1690) and we’ll give you the clarity needed to march forward into your digital future.
