Don't just Survive... Thrive!

These are trying times for all businesses. Uncertainty in the equity markets and the tight credit market is putting a great financial strain on individuals and businesses. As consumer spending decreases businesses are seeking ways to reduce costs and tighten their budgets. The natural reaction is to get into a survival mode thinking "how can I ride this out?" Most companies that manage to ‘survive’ downturns arrive at the other end at or below the competitive position they were at prior to the downturn. However a few emerge significantly stronger than were they were before - how can you be a part of this group?

The companies that ‘thrive’ are the ones that look at the downturn as an opportunity to re-evaluate every aspect of their business processes and identify its contribution to the business’ success. They eliminate the ones that don’t work, fix the ones that are broken and strengthen the ones that work.

One such area that begs review is a company’s use of technology as a business enabler. Here are a few steps that you as a small and medium business can take to evaluate how your use of technology can determine if you just ‘survive’ or ‘thrive’:

• Reduce the cost of commodity services like email, intranet, hosting, storage etc. If you host your own email servers, intranet, business productivity applications etc., evaluate alternatives such as Software-as-a-Service to minimize capital expenditure and maintenance costs.


• Identify business processes that can be re-engineered and automated to use technology to replace expensive manual processes. You can save money and apply your valuable people resources to tasks that grow your business.


• Look at ways to minimize costs associated with new information technology investments, rather than completely eliminating them or putting them off indefinitely. If you think these investments will help your business be competitive, putting them off or eliminating them, gets you prepared to ‘survive’ rather than ‘thrive’.


• Consider Open source software and technologies like Cloud Computing to as alternatives to proprietary software or hardware. These eliminate expensive licensing costs and heavy capital expenditure.


• Consider outsourcing non-core technology functions including maintenance of business critical systems. Answer the question – ‘Am I in the business of software development & maintenance or Am I in the business of providing a unique product/service to my customers?’ If you answer ‘no’ to the first question and ‘yes’ to the second, you should consider outsourcing.

These are just a few steps you can take today to reduce your costs, conserve cash and to invest in your business so that you can emerge strong from this downturn.

Learn more about how Tripod can help your small/medium business thrive and

Stay Tuned…