When you are a start-up, solopreneur or small business, you continuously look for a productivity breakthrough so you can grow your business faster and further. You have to run a lean operation, proactive and highly responsive, steering it towards a your ambition. You wish for simple and flexible tools that help you push the boundaries and achieve your goals. Fortunately today you have a myriad of options; your only problem is that there are so many to find and from which to choose! All you need is help with making those choices, and the early learning phases, simple and free-of-headache.
Remember when Mr. Whippy was cruising our suburban streets in our childhood? When you heard the crinkly recorded tune through the summer haze, you’d run in to mum, get some small change and buy an ice cream. Wasn’t life great? In those "good old days", Mr Whippy himself was some old guy. I wonder what he thought about himself and his business... His world was self-contained and he probably was not desperate for a productivity breakthrough.These days, if you own a Mr. Whippy van, you’re not “some old guy”. You’re a hipster – a “food truck” entrepreneur. Pushing the boundaries in hospitality, retail and personal service delivery. You’re a player in our modern economy, and your one truck or two is just the first step on your expansion plan. Your expectations, the nature and the pace of the operation are vastly different and you want to eliminate the frustrating roadblocks you encounter as you drive forward.
Through my business featurepower.com, I’m having a lot of fun working with clients with very modern, or simply re-invented, business models. We’re brought together by their need for genuine productivity breakthroughs. We all say we want to be more productive, but for many it’s the difference between being viable or not. Or it’s the difference between handing over three Mr. Whippy vans to your kids when you retire, or selling your national food truck network to private equity. That is a very different and dynamic business model and you need innovative productivity solutions.
Whether you are selling a product or a service, to consumers or to businesses, you have to find your market niche and then shape your business to meet the needs of your chosen market. You may be like many of our client businesses who are single purpose, single idea operations. Keeping a business simple is one important way of supporting productivity and profitable growth. A small dynamic business like yours can thrive with the help of simple, focused Solutions linked in a lightweight and affordable yet powerful "system".Like our clients, you can use smart single focused cloud apps very effectively. That’s the beauty of the cloud “ecosystem”. You can subscribe to a product that is the best at what it does (or most appropriate to you) in a specific function, and link it up to other apps best at their own functions. The discerning user can link together a powerful operation, without needing any infrastructure except a device with internet access.
Sounds easy right? Well, it is in a way. Most of these apps are “do it yourself”, and many are also household names. But pulling it all together is not the core focus of your business. We help clients to know what they don’t know.We focus on business process (work flow), and progressively lock it down together. Then support it with the right cloud apps. And importantly, get the apps to speak to each other and share information to innovate the workflow – creating a genuine “productivity breakthrough”.To discover how to power your business one feature at a time, ask Peter for a free online consultation PS: Members of The NCP can view the slides of Peter Borg's presentation at the Forum Of The Network Of Consulting Professionals in November. They are on the Handouts page in the members' area of the website.