Let’s face it, folks: in the immortal words of Dewey from Malcolm in the Middle, the future is now. And yet, even though 70 percent of small business traffic now comes from mobile apps, less than a quarter of these businesses have actually taken advantage of the incredible potential of custom software. And there’s a lot more to software than just mobile apps – here’s a few more ways that a development team like ours can benefit your small business:
You Can Perfect Your Process
The business world has never been more competitive than it is in 2017. There’s a few reasons for this: massive population growth, the relative ease of starting a niche business in the Internet age, that time a few years ago when we broke the economy and our subsequent efforts to put it back together. But the best way to gain an edge in this hyper-competitive market is to find ways to cut costs without reducing the quality of your product or services. And the best way to do that? Process perfection.
Time is money, and the time that you and your employees spend executing outdated processes is money that’s being thrown down the drain. This is why smart businesses are finding ways to use software to automate tedious tasks. Why waste hours collating sales data when a computer can do it faster – and better – than you can? Ditto the endless, tedious, time-consuming process of reporting. Does your online business not have the manpower to offer the same kind of 24/7 support that customers expect from Amazon? There’s software for that, too – and if there isn’t, even better, because with a custom program:
You’ll Have Room To Grow
Off-the-shelf software is all well and good for performing common menial tasks, but what happens when (not if) your business wants to start scaling? Let’s say you have some kind of application – external or internal – that you need to add more features to as you start expanding your business. You could issue a feature request, but unless it’s something that the entire customer base is asking for, that request is likely to be ignored – even then, the change might not go through. You could ask for the developers to make a custom suite just for you, but then you’ll have to pay insane customization fees. Oh, and depending on the platform you’re using, you may not actually legally own your software, so good luck getting around said fees without paying even more money to rebuild the product from scratch.
Unless, of course, you use a custom solution. Spreadsheets don’t scale, but databases do. Proprietary software may be more expensive up front, but it’s easier to support and maintain, growing at the same rate your company does. And this is really just a small offshoot of what really makes custom software great, namely:
You Can Tailor It To Fit Your Needs
It’s a no-brainer, we know, but there’s really nothing that a good suite of custom software can’t do to help your company. A lot of small businesses resist a software approach because they’re worried that it will be too difficult to learn, or that it won’t fit their specific needs, or because they don’t want to learn the skills to make it themselves. All of these problems disappear when you work with developers you can trust to produce software that’s right for you.
So what are you waiting for? Are you going to let the future pass you by? Or are you going to be a part of the technological revolution.