As a business owner, I understand the fear and uncertainty that comes with an economic recession. During such times, it is vital to find ways to cut costs while maintaining business continuity. One of the best ways to achieve this is by digitizing your business. In this article, we’ll explore how digitization can help your business survive a recession. We also give you 4 moves you can make today to start leveraging digitization in your business.
How Digitization Helps Your Business Survive
While it may not be your first thought when the future looks gloomy, making big changes to your business might actually be the thing that can help you to save it. There are a few reasons for this.
Firstly, because digitization can help automate many manual tasks, and help streamline your operational efficiency. Manual labor is an essential component of many businesses, from manufacturing to retail. It can involve tasks such as assembly, packaging, stocking shelves and more. But, even more creative fields such copywriting, or social media management don’t necessarily require a human in order to be completed anymore. Artificial Intelligence can be a powerful companion that can be added to any business at a fraction of the cost of the manual counterpart.
The automation of manual labor is not the only way digitization can help.
Digitization can also help increase the productivity of your existing workforce. Whether it’s by streamlining processes and workflows, reducing errors or simply by speeding up the actual work, there’s a few points to be made here.
Both cases are examples of how you can run your business more efficiently, which increases your competitiveness as a company. The only way we can get through the recession that forced us to innovate and rethink our business in the first place, is by attacking it head-on. Sell your way out of the crisis, and make your existing business run more efficiently as you proceed.
4 Moves You Can Make Now
We have 4 moves you can make in the next year to make sure your business stays relevant and competitive.
Run to the cloud: Running your own infrastructure seems like a great idea until you realize the hidden costs associated with this strategy. The experts needed for securely and reliably operating your own infrastructure is quite high already, but these costs are likely to rise even more in the next few years due to the increase in cyber attacks, and shortage of experts in the field. Cloud-based, managed solutions such as low-code or now-code platforms are a much better alternative if IT is not your core business. And even if you don’t trust Big Tech, the cloud still has many other players, including niche players with excellent reputations to choose from.
Hire globally: In order to achieve the results you want, you will need talent that’s probably not going to be available or affordable in your local area. Freelance platforms like Upwork and Fiverr have proven their value over the years, and hiring freelancers through these platforms to fulfill parts of your business operations is a very realistic scenario. Whether or not you’re looking for project-based or part-time labor, these platforms offer a very valid alternative to your local labor market.
Explore Artificial Intelligence: AI technologies, such as natural language processing and machine learning are here to stay. Learning about and experimenting with AI as early as possible will help unlock new value and opportunities and stay ahead of the competition.
Centralize your data: We’re tooting our own horn here, but Brinkee was built specifically to solve this problem. Storing all your company data and the relationships between this data is essential to collaborate effectively, to break down silos and to improve the decision making in your business. Now is a great time to focus on building the infrastructure that will power you business for the next decade. Whether you use Brinkee or something simpler like Google Sheets, what matters is that you have access to the information you need, when you need it. This is especially true in a recession.