There was a time when starting a business in America was a herculean effort. Those times are long gone, but it hasn’t been the politicians who made it easier for businesses to blossom in America. We can thank our own economy. It has been recast with speed and flexibility calculated to provide new businesses with whatever they need in services and products in the least amount of time. In a certain sense we now have an instant economy where all it takes to start a business is a little cash, a good idea, and lots of nerve.
What you don’t need is a huge technical department, long established vendor relationships, or lots of time. A combination of things have changed the dynamics of starting a business in America and many places around the world. The good news is that right now, we just might have the right mix of elements to give us the edge over the rest of the world.
In the mid-eighties desktop publishing revolutionized the way that information could be printed. On the one hand it allowed large corporations to bring their publishing in house. On the other hand gifted small organizations which could afford a laser printer could with end up appearing as professional looking as larger corporations.
During the Internet boom at the turn of the century, this went a step farther. Anyone with some geek in their soul and a modicum of design talent could put up a website. This was a big step in the trek to our instant economy. Unfortunately many companies were just a website with little more than an idea behind them. Often they had no clue how to make money.
Today, the equation has changed. The idea of how to make money seems to come first, then the company is built around it. Now services designed to make building companies easy are part of the everyday fabric of America. An idea can be transformed into a company with a core of talented people and lots of outsourced services. No longer do you need a whole cadre of professionally trained technical people to carefully put together you information technology architecture.
You can easily use one the very reliable managed hosting facilities that have sprung up. They’ll build your servers, house them, back them up, manage your bandwidth, and make certain that you have multiple redundant Internet connections to host your website and business. You can even control the servers remotely. There’s a likelihood that you might never even see your own servers.
Of course you’ll still need Internet connectivity for your office. That’s just a phone call away. Often you can decide exactly what kind of connection that you want and have the connectivity in a few days, sometimes even the next day. There can be glitches, but still connectivity is not months away like it used to be.
Now there are some amazingly sophisticated Internet phone systems that allow you to take one phone number and ring through whatever complex phone tree you can imagine. You can even get your voice mail delivered in an email or listen to it through a browser. Some companies have been known to run off of cell phones.
If you need a customer relationship management tool or CRM as it is often called, you don’t have to build one or buy it along with hardware to run it. You can use something like Salesforce.com or even the Open Source based SugarCRM.
In fact if you are creating a business that requires software, you can often use Open Source building blocks like Apache to create robust systems without ever having to reinvent the wheel. The stability and reliability of these solutions give new businesses that have the right mix of technical skills the ability to compete on even footing with much larger competitors. In fact the agility of these new players often allows them to out maneuver established players.
No longer do you even have to host my own email. You can take your domain name that you’re using for your company’s website and point the email records to the servers of company like the one where I work. Within four to six hours, the company email can be live. Now through webmail interfaces it is even possible to get company or customer email from any computer.
There are a raft of accounting packages that make it relatively simple to manage your company’s books, and of course accounting advice along with legal advice has been readily available for years without having to build large departments within a company. There are also companies that do your payroll and manage your benefits along with health insurance.
On top of all this, and this is where we probably have the edge, a good number of our college students graduate more technologically aware than ever. They all know how to use and manage email. They’ve even made instant messaging an integral and highly successful part of many new companies. They know how to build spreadsheets. Some even have accounting, presentation, database, and website design skills. The killer advantage of these new employees is that many often even bring their own computers to work.
As to advertising, these days you can use a company blog to get in front of many potential customers. A hosted blog is the Internet equivalent of desktop publishing except that it is even easier. All you need is a browser and a service like TypePad. It you want to drive traffic to your website or blog you can hire firms who specialize in managing your pay per click advertising with search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
If in setting up your office, you do end up needing new computer equipment, an order placed by midnight will get it delivered the next day. Setting up wired or wireless networks these days is something that most semi-technical people can do with their hands tied. Digital cameras, scanners, fax machines, and cell phones are now ubiquitous.
We are in a new world order for businesses. It’s no longer a television fantasy to bring a new business in a matter of days. There can always be some hiccups, the reality is that we have massively transformed our ability to create and supply new businesses.
The start up costs for these new instant businesses is reasonable enough that they can devote more dollars to being creative and providing exceptional customer support. The dollars that were once required to fund and own large pieces of infrastructure can be redirected to the core competency of the business.
The new instant economy can serve America well in the world where your customers are on all continents, your IT department perhaps in another state, and your workforce carrying their own computers.
Comments