A Modular Business: Using Cloud Services to Help You Stay Lean

Running a business doesn’t have to be difficult or straining. There are a lot of third-party services, resources and tools that can help you perform the tasks associated with running your own business easily. Over the past couple of years, more start-ups and smaller businesses have been turning to a more modular setup, outsourcing different parts of the operations to services available in the cloud.

How Can You Benefit from Outsourcing to Cloud-Based Services?

There are a number of benefits to be gained from making a business as modular as it can be. By outsourcing different parts of the operation to cloud-based solutions, you can focus on more important matters as a business owner.

SalesForce is a good example. The suite automates a lot of tasks associated with maintaining good customer relationships. It can also help generate quotations, maintain sales reports and support sales officers working outside the office.

Using SalesForce to power your sales department, it is easy to recruit freelance sales officers from different parts of the country. This allows you to expand your reach and acquire new customers without substantially increasing your overhead costs.

This type of modular approach also helps protect the business itself. Thanks to low overhead costs and the redundant nature of cloud services, your business can survive even the most catastrophic problem. Recovering from such a problem will also be very easy to do.

Which Parts of the Operation Should You Outsource?

There is an endless array of cloud services and third-party solutions to use. Determining which parts of the operation to move to the cloud involves looking at the things you do best and outsourcing those you don’t.

For example, you don’t have to worry about HR-related tasks if you have no experience in the field and don’t want to have an internal HR department. Services such as XCDHR.com can help you with the tasks in hand, from recruiting the right employees to managing payroll and tracking employee performance.

By offloading these HR-related tasks to XCDHR, you can redirect the time and energy you would normally spend on those tasks to other things, such as formulating new strategies to grow the business or finding new clients to approach.

A Cost-Efficient Approach

As mentioned before, this type of modular approach to running a business can help keep overhead costs at minimum. There is no need to maintain a big team to handle different parts of the operation. This means you don’t need a big office or other supporting infrastructure, making the costs of running the business to be even more affordable.

But the benefits of having a cost-efficient operation don’t just stop there. You are getting experts and a vast amount of experience behind third-party solutions and cloud-based services. The HR service we talked about earlier, for instance, is usually backed by a lot of experienced human resources experts.

The true cost savings actually come in making fewer mistakes, thanks to the expertise and experience you gained from third-party service providers. This, in turn, helps your business stay lean without increasing operational risks or hampering growth; this, is the true advantage of going modular with your start-up.