Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: How Businesses Evolve to Stay Competitive

It’s not easy to completely change your way of thinking. If you’ve been using the same old paper system to manage your client information, then you know it works and it feels like there’s no reason to change. However, what happens when you recruit a new employee and teach them your old methods, completely invalidating their experience and everything they were taught in school about business?

We can all be hesitant towards change. After all, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? It could only lead to problems if you tried to improve on something that simply just works. But that’s not the issue here. The problem isn’t improving something that already works. The problem is “what happens when that old system fails?”. Instead of viewing change as something optional, think of it as adapting to a constantly shifting business landscape.

Take your employees for example. A loyal worker used to be rewarded with benefits, raises, and other positive things to motivate them to work. However, employees can easily be replaced due to the availability of freelancers and outsourcing. You need to constantly communicate with employees to ensure that they aren’t fearing for their job security and that they are motivated to work via other methods, not just with money and benefits.

Advertisements Will Change

It’s not necessary to be at the forefront of new advertising trends if you want to be a competitive business. However, it is necessary not to fall behind and completely lose your main method of exposure. If you’ve been relying on something like handing out flyers, then you might be satisfied with the number of customers you reel in. However, what happens when your consumers get fed up of receiving your flyers?

You always need to prepare alternate platforms to advertise on—it’s what makes the internet so powerful. The internet itself can’t be considered one avenue of advertising because there are so many components that make up how the internet works. You essentially have a digital world with dozens of different forms of advertisement, and that number grows by the year. You can enable your sales team with SalesHub so they can learn the best ways to adapt to new marketing strategies so your business remains competitive and doesn’t shut down due to a lack of exposure.

Preparing for Failures

Let’s say you still run a paper system for your business. You write down bills, you record your income and expenditures in files and folders, and you keep it all stored in your office. Now let’s say an accident happens, such as an innocent coffee spill or a fire starts, destroying your office and your documents. What then? We can’t predict when these events happen. If you could, then you would simply prevent it from happening in the first place. While prevention is the first action you take to stop a problem from occurring, you ultimately have to prepare for the worst.

You could create hundreds of photocopies or backups and store them in different locations, but why not just switch to a software solution? Cloud services will let you manage finances and write invoices, and you don’t even have to worry about your computer failing or catching on fire. All the data can be stored in the cloud so you can retrieve it at any time and from any smart device.