Home > Columns > CRM Columns

Serving Time or Time to Serve

Contributed article by Mikel Lindsaar, CEO and founder, StoreConnect  

Most small business owners genuinely feel like they are imprisoned in their business, chained to the metaphorical wheel of day-to-day drudgery. It feels like a life sentence even though they have done nothing wrong.

But it didn’t start out this way. Most small business owners love the product or service they deliver so much that they decided to have a crack at delivering it in their own business.

They don’t love fighting fires - jumping from one problem to the next and feeling like they can never get ahead of the game. They never have enough resources to buy themselves a little freedom to actually do what they started their business to do - serve customers who need or want what they’ve got.

In this article, I’ll share some thoughts on how you can get out of ‘time jail’ and move from serving time to giving yourself time to serve.

Although there are many areas that force business owners to be servants of time, we’re going to focus on one area of business that is frustrating many.

It all starts with the promise of technology. The same promise was made to housekeepers in the 1950s with kitchen and laundry machines that were supposed to free them from housework. 

In the past decade or so, a proliferation of software as a service (SAAS) solutions have promised to allow small business owners to service their customers in the online world through E-Commerce.

What they got instead was a series of tools that whilst useful in isolation, don’t actually work well together - requiring the small business owner to invest money and valuable time in paying humans to get computers to talk to each other. These tools often operate on different data models and override each other with each trying to be the boss. Meaning it takes time to find a single source of truth about the customer, tying up valuable resources and not actually servicing the customer.

The exciting developments of E-Commerce 3.0 - systems built on one source of truth that requires little integration will finally result in Time Well Spent for the small business owner. They will free up not only the staff, but also the owner to do what they want to do, when they want it, and not waste time on meaningless and ultimately fruitless busy work.

But, like anything worthwhile, getting on board with eCommerce 3.0 will take some work. The good news is that the time investment done will compound on itself, buying back more and more time as each new piece of the puzzle is completed.

For example, the first part tackled might be moving the website and CRM to an eCommerce 3.0 platform, then from the time saved with this done, the support system can be migrated and consolidated, and then the marketing system, and then the point-of-sale system. Each additional system consolidated in this way will reduce the amount of time spent to keep each separate system communicating with each other system and simplify the overall business operations.

In this way, the Small Business Owner can cope with the day-to-day and set aside some time daily or weekly to organize their way to a calmer and happier business existence.

CONCLUSION:

Small business owners can look forward to taking back control of their time with E-Commerce 3.0 solutions. The promise of online marketplaces and data automation is now here. Literally giving them time to serve.

About Mikel Lindsaar

Mikel Lindsaar, CEO and founder of StoreConnect, is an experienced technology entrepreneur whose mission is to infuse small and medium-sized businesses with the power to be successful in eCommerce 3.0 and scale to meet growing demand. Small businesses can't waste time setting up their business on a platform only to repeat the process by changing platforms when they want to scale, nor do they want to waste time figuring out how to integrate multiple platforms. StoreConnect (built on the World's Number 1 CRM, Salesforce) gives clients a complete, powerful, configurable eCommerce and CRM solution where they can manage their website, online and in-store sales, provide amazing customer service, run all their digital marketing campaigns, and have up-to-date detailed metrics, reporting and full understanding of their customer. They were awarded Salesforce's 2021 International Partner Innovation Award of the year for the Retail sector and are changing the ease with which small businesses are run ─ with a manageable price tag. StoreConnect is Time. Well spent. Visit getStoreConnect.com.