When considering the most exciting elements of entrepreneurial life, you probably don’t immediately think of the word “infrastructure.” Foundations, wiring, plumbing — surely, these aren’t the things that provide a startup with the innovative spark it needs to grow.
But infrastructure goes way beyond pipes and wires; it’s your startup’s internal road map. It’s your HR systems, sales processes, and marketing protocols. It embodies some of the most vital and creative parts of your operation, and it helps you achieve your biggest goals.
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As you begin to grow your business, you need to ensure your infrastructure can expand alongside you. Investing time, money, and resources into it early on will help your team work together more productively, improve your efficiency, reduce your costs, and ultimately drive sales and revenue.
Here are four tips on how to boost your startup’s infrastructure and propel your business into the future:
Be proactive. We all rely on technology for our daily operations, but most of us don’t approach our IT with the care it needs in order to fulfill that role. We treat our networks and servers as household appliances; when they break, we bring someone in to fix them, but until then, we assume they’re fine.
You need to be more proactive about your startup’s IT infrastructure. From the first day of operations, be diligent about maintaining each device and making sure your network is as clean and streamlined as it can be. Install updates and upgrades in a timely manner; IT issues quickly become very expensive if they aren’t taken care of.
Prioritise internal processes. Internal processes are the bones of your business; if they break down, everything will stop moving. These systems include everything from HR management to internal communication to accounting.
Invest in tools to keep your internal processes in motion. A good one I’ve found for HR-related endeavors is a cloud-based system called BambooHR. It helps you assign goals, assess progress, and manage your payroll accordingly — and this streamlined approach is especially vital as your team grows in size.
Another great cloud-based tool is Basecamp. You can use it to organize communication between teams and departments, as well as to manage projects.
Put your head in the cloud. As you may have guessed, cloud-based tools are hugely helpful for boosting infrastructure. These systems allow leaders to access their company’s data from anywhere in the world, making it easy for them to make intelligent decisions on the go. For example, even if you’re traveling on the other side of the globe, you can access your company’s stock levels and make purchasing decisions with a tool like NetSuite.
In addition to inventory management, your HR, accounting, data storage, and marketing platforms are all prime candidates for cloud-based tools.
Listen to your team. How do you know what your startup needs? Does it need new equipment? A program update? A new method of communication? The only way you’ll know the answers to these questions is by listening to the voice of your startup: your team.
I’ll be the first to admit that I know very little about technology. So instead of trying to figure things out myself, I turn to my IT team for advice on what pieces of our internal infrastructure we can update. For example, IT team members were the reason my company recently switched to Google-hosted mail services. Our internal email system kept crashing, and I truly had no idea what to do about it. But after speaking with my tech-savvy teammates, I was able to make a timely decision that saved us money and drastically increased our productivity.
Whether it’s carving out time to listen to your team, heightening your awareness of internal processes, or investing in new cloud-based tools to help you be productive, proactively maintaining and upgrading your infrastructure should be at the top of every founder’s to-do list.
Those who follow the above four tips will take their startups from surviving to succeeding.
