All businesses have a connected series of nodes within their operation, and all of them contribute to the daily progression of their servicing and workflow. We might consider a business to be at the center of an enormous interconnected web, even if the outfit is relatively humble in size. We often fail to realize just how many levels of magnification we rely on in order to stay profitable. For example, we assume that the roads will be in good condition for our logistics to work that morning, or we hope that a hidden business will not burst onto the scene with a product ten times as innovative as anything our industry has produced thus far, effectively nullifying our existence as something left in the dark ages.

However, there is no way around relying on the industry and certain services in order to stand tall as a business. Even the coolest, most fashionable person is one hundred percent reliant on their physical and mental health to sustain themselves, to expound that metaphor further.

For that reason, taking the true complexity out of this equation can be an incredibly freeing prospect. And we would recommend the following tips for doing just that.

Use Services With A Comprehensive Offering

Sometimes, you may need to utilize a service that fulfills a very niche purpose, but that will often be in terms of how you manage or develop a product or service, not how you run your operation. In fact, many different businesses in many different industries run using strikingly similar methods, and so for the most part there is some amount of universal wisdom necessary to apply to our daily workflow efforts.

Using services with a comprehensive offering can help you achieve a more standardized format, to increase sanity within your workflow. For example, it is better to deal with one set of managed IT services than several. Through one firm alone, you may be able to perfectly manage your security, improving your digital infrastructure, complying with mandates and IT legal codes. On top of hiring a couple of IT specialists to oversee everything, this could help a business both small and large alike stay completely connected and interlinked between all of its developments. This also has the benefit of finding quick and remedial support whenever you need it. On top of that, it can also increase the likelihood of a support issue being fixed. If an IT service has the fullest picture, they can enact the most administrative control by definition. This could potentially help your firm out of a sticky self-made bind one day.

Simplify Your Points Of Contact

When it comes to keeping your team on the same page and communicative, there are many options out there. Businesses use Skype, Hangouts, certain email providers, and many other workplace apps such as Telegram or Slack. It’s important to know how to use these services correctly, and how to find the best one for your firm.

What works for one firm might not work for another. Some might wish to keep standardized emails with digital letterheads and signoffs as common practice, while others are happier to implement Instant Messaging solutions. However, it’s important to simplify points of contact immediately. For example, when ascribing your staff email addresses, keep the address to a common format. Instead of allowing users to distinguish between what email extension they have, such as johnnylakeman@businessexample.com, use a common variant, such as full stops between letters. Also, use full names where appropriate. In this case, johnathan.lakeman@businessexample.com would be a much more formatted and standardized option, provided you keep that completely consistent across your administrative suite for your domain.

This means if someone hasn’t the exact contact information for another member of the team, figuring it out can be quite easy provided they know who they wish to contact. It’s little allowances and conveniences like this that can make all the difference.

Stay Reachable

Keeping two separate points of contact for customers trying to reach support and businesses belaying enquiries for you can be important. Staying reachable can help them avoid the confusion of contacting your support team and then being transferred to a separate department. Keeping two divided numbers for your corporate headquarters and your other customer-facing enquiries is important, as well as a point of contact email address overlooked by your PR personnel and managers.

With these tips, we hope things can become just a little more comfortable when running a business. Unnecessary complexity is never a good thing.