The medium-sized business occupies a unique niche. If you have one, you probably know all about the challenges you face. You’re big enough to have some issues that a mom-and-pop business entity doesn’t deal with, but you’re also not large or ambitious enough to take the company national or international.
As a medium-sized business, there are some technologies that should help you grow and thrive. Let’s discuss some right now.
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Single Sign-On
Single sign-on can help your business grow. The term refers to a way you can check the identity of anyone who tries to use your computer network. This is always vital, but it’s even more critical if you have a remote work or hybrid work setup.
With single-sign on, a user only signs in once, and then they can access many different IT resources. This might make perfect sense for your workers if you have a medium-sized business.
Once you have it in place, you won’t need a worker to sign in again and again throughout the workday. They can log in once and then switch rapidly back and forth between apps.
If you think about how many apps a worker can use during the day, you’ll understand why single sign-on matters so much. You can hire an IT team to set it up for you, or you can ask your current IT department to look into it if you have a full-time staff already.
Tablets or Smartphones
Many medium-sized businesses want to give their employees perks. Those might include gym memberships, fitness wearables, or 401K programs. However, you might also consider giving your employees a smartphone or tablet for work purposes.
Many workers may not have a high-end smartphone or tablet. If you offer one of these as an incentive when someone signs on with your company, that might attract some of the top-tier talent. If you’re recruiting individuals right out of college, a company that offers an excellent-quality tablet or smartphone might generate some interest.
You can get the latest iOS or Android models and mention them when talking to a potential employee. You can stress that you’ll need them to use the tablet or smartphone for business-related tasks, but they can also use it during their downtime.
A Payment Processing System
Medium-sized businesses might also want to look into different payment processing systems. As a business owner, you need to make it as simple as possible for someone to pay you. Consumers who can’t pay with their chosen method might decide to take their business elsewhere.
You can use a setup like Secure Pay or PayPal. These online payment gateways exist to make your life easier, and they pay for themselves many times over, even if you need to give them a piece of every sale. It’s worth it when you see how many shoppers use them in 2022.
You might also use a cloud-hosting platform like Braintree. There, you can accept payment forms including credit cards, Venmo, and various digital wallets, including Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Remember that the more payment forms you accept, the more likely you can rope in some potential customers who would otherwise not impulse-buy one of your products or services.
Project Management Platforms
Project management platforms are places where you can check in with anyone on your team doing remote work. Since more medium-sized companies let employees work from home now, these platforms are more popular than ever.
You have options like Asana, Trello, and many more. You pay to use the service, and then you’ll know that your workers can communicate with each other easily. You can host meetings using these platforms and remind workers about what you want them to do and what direction you want to take the company.
You can check in on a project in real-time to see if it’s progressing the way you’d like. You can even send a worker a private message if you want them to move away from an assignment to focus on a new task that has come up.
Project management platforms streamline the chain of command if you’re hiring new middle management workers to handle some of your daily tasks. You might decide to go this route at some point if you’re thinking about a merger or an IPO that will take your company from medium-sized to a larger entity. Even if you didn’t start out planning for that to happen, success might lead you to reimagine your original idea.
