MAJILLO VIRTUAL

Most businesses today are coming to the realization that in order to reach and retain more customers, be more productive, and focus on their main service or product they must undergo a digital transformation that allows their business to be managed from any location. Luckily, there are many tools and services available that can facilitate the migration from a traditional brick-and-mortar, localized, and centralized business to a more virtual or remote business. Depending on a business’ budget, many of the services are available for free but also offer different pricing options per month or per year that add more convenience, automation, support, or features to their products. When considering going virtual or remote, a business owner must consider the following:

1. How does going remote make business management easier?
2. How will my digital transformation help my employees be more productive and provide better customer service?
3. How can the efficient use of technology help in marketing to my target audience?
4. Are there areas of my business that can be handled through video conferencing as opposed to face-to-face?
5. What are the security implications of going virtual? How can data be protected that is easily accessible in the cloud?

Office/Productivity Suites

When people think of business management software, the category of software that usually makes the top of the list as absolutely necessary is office suites. These software packages include word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation slides. Having these tools is critical for remote business owners as well as their employees to access, modify, and create documents whether they are in the office or sitting at the baseball fields waiting for their kid’s practice to finish. There are plenty of companies that offer cloud-based office suites at various price points. Some of the popular offerings today are G-Suite by Google, Office 365 by Microsoft, and Zoho Workplace.

Accounting

Being able to manage financial transactions, create invoices, and track customers is a must especially on a mobile device. It is not ideal having to tell a customer that getting back to the office is a prerequisite to getting them an invoice or letting them know their balance on their account. The sooner customers know their balance, the earlier a business can get paid. Most financial software packages provide an online option. Some of the more popular options are Quickbooks Online, Zoho Books, and the open source option, Akaunting. Using other services like PayPal or Square can give businesses a reliable way to accept any kind of payment that customers want to use to pay for goods or services. In addition, these online accounting packages allow business owners to provide credentials for customers to log in to their account to view all their invoices and pay online.

Storage

Many of the office/productivity suites mentioned above allocate storage with their offerings. Google Drive is especially generous providing unlimited drive storage with their paid subscriptions. Another nice feature of G-Suite is all the products provided with G-Suite integrate nicely with Drive. However, if Google does not sound appealing, there are other options. A common alternative is Dropbox. Amazon Web Services also offers a variety of storage options, including their S3 and Glacier offerings. The nice thing about these storage cloud offerings is that they negate the need for small businesses to have to maintain their own file server for themselves and employees.

Communications

The times of having face-to-face meetings is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Today’s video teleconferencing options have advanced features that allow users to share their electronic device’s screen, collaborate with virtual whiteboards, see each other’s faces, and converse clearly despite being in remote locations. There are many options available in the communications world. Zoom seems to be leading the pack currently but other viable options exist including Google Hangouts and BlueJeans. Internal team discussions and planning can be done using virtual dashboards like Trello.

Marketing

Everyone knows the benefits of using social media to market in today's world. Having these platforms to post about business and educate potential clients about the business' offerings should be part of any marketing strategy. However, having technology that is also able to identify and target a business’ audience or niche, and later, being able to track those customers and measure where a business is earning their sales is imperative to small business success. This allows small businesses to focus their marketing dollars on where they are getting their biggest impact and stop spending time and money on less effective marketing strategies.

Technology allows a business to track customers via Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, such as Salesforce. These packages can automate many features including generating email lists, tracking customer issues, managing customer contact information, and generating reports for determining where to target the next round of advertising for a business.

Having a well-organized website is also important. Potential customers want to find the information they want quickly. If a website is not well designed, customers can get frustrated and ultimately leave the site. Technology for business owners should reduce friction. Business owners need to carry that thought into their use of technology for their customers as well. When a business makes transactions and interactions easier for their existing and potential customers, they are making good use of technology to market their business.

Security

The main concern with moving to a virtual and remote business is security. However, even in the traditional office space, security is still a major concern. Weak passwords, lax security procedures, lack of Information Technology know how, and the fact that mistakes happen can all cause security breaches.

Remote businesses in particular have concerns with keeping passwords secure, providing Virtual Private Networks (VPN) for their employees to securely access internal company resources from outside their company network, and making certain that employees keep their work computers updated with the latest operating system and program updates, which fix and mitigate many security bugs in the software.

Password security has been discussed in my previous two blogs about LastPass and two-factor authentication (https://www.majillovirtual.com/blog_listing.html).

Conclusions

These are just some of the considerations that businesses need to consider when moving to a more virtual work environment that allows business to be conducted in any location at any time. Many of these tasks can be completed by any ambitious entrepreneur but having assistance in some, or all, of these endeavors can make a small business’ digital transformation smoother and more scalable for the future.

With a computer engineering background, 20+ years as a software developer, technical project leadership, and customer relationship management experience, MaJillo Virtual can provide assistance in any of these areas.