The general saying these days is that the economy is in a bad shape, things are tight and it is becoming increasingly difficult to make payroll. For small business owners, this is evident in the rate at which employees are being laid off, or having their hours reduced. The danger in all this is that cost cutting may be taken to such an extreme level that it is bound to affect productivity in the long run. I remember working very hard to convince a friend of mine to be careful about laying off too many good employees. “Why?” he asked, and my response was, what are you going to do if the work starts coming in and you do not have experienced people to get it out the door efficiently and profitably?
Business Environments
Automation and Small Business Owners
Small business owners are usually forced by budget constraints to do every thing they can to save cost. In order to save on software licensing costs,for example, a small business owner may install the free version of a critical application like a firewall or anti-virus on the business computers. The task of updating these applications then falls on each user to run periodic system scans and updates.
One thing that is not common in small business environments is process automation. Most processes are manually carried out. What we have to realize is that as hard as we try, at some point, somebody forgets to run a system scan or the backup program. Occasionally, someone could accidentally turn off or stop a backup application before the process is completed.