Prepare yourself for years of success with this guide to future-proof business ideas and tools designed to support 21st-century companies.
Article overview:
Why You Need to Future Proof Your Business
Failure to adapt to modern innovations and movements can leave any business struggling. Without thinking about the future, you can get trapped in the past, and quickly become outdated. Eventually, you’ll find competitors overtake you as a result, and that’s when you get into real trouble.
Future-Proof Business Ideas to Be Aware Of
Future-proofing your business is simple. There are many tools available to keep your brand relevant and ready for change. These include introducing online faxing, cloud-based software, developing mobile applications, data compliance solutions, and task automation.
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The business landscape is always shifting. It’s constantly finding new ways to attract customers and improve the way things work. Failure to keep up with trends, and stay ahead of the curve, means you end up floundering. We’re all familiar with famous examples, such as Blockbuster Video, that couldn’t keep up with the modern world; crashing and burning as a result, with Netflix taking over their crown.
But how do you stop yourself from being the next Blockbuster Video? You look to ways to protect yourself with future-proof business ideas that support survival in our new age of business, and beyond.
Online Faxing
You’d be forgiven for thinking that fax is a product of a bygone era, given its prevalence in the mid-to-late 20th century. However, far from being a dead-and-buried communication platform, fax is still alive and thriving to this day, with billions of fax documents sent every year from millions of machines all around the world.
Fax continues to be an important part of many business infrastructures because of the numerous advantages it holds, which includes easy submission of visual files, fast transmissions of records and other essential files, as well as the ability to quickly share legally-binding documents. Despite the value of fax though, fax machines are not supportive of modern work. They are slow, cumbersome and vulnerable to data threats. When looking for future-proof business ideas, getting rid of fax machines is going to be on the list. But, how can you eliminate fax machines if fax is so important?
Switching from fax machines to digital fax helps future-proof your business. It allows you to maintain fax communication — a platform that remains an integral part of many industries and economies and will do for years to come — and update technology to enable work processes that are much more suitable for current business environments. This move also helps protect your business from the upcoming ISDN switch-off by removing reliance on soon-to-be-obsolete landlines.
Cloud-Based Collaboration Tools
Mobile Applications
Recent years have seen a big shift towards the adoption of mobile apps as a consumer experience. Mobile customers are twice as likely to buy using an app than a website. The volume of app downloads is also rising rapidly, and with people spending on average over three hours a day on their phone, being visible and easily accessible on a consumer’s smartphone is becoming a critical part of brand awareness.
To stay competitive in the modern business environment, you need a mobile application. When looking for future-proofed business ideas, jumping on the application movement should be a priority for any company. Apps might not be the newest of technology, having been made prominent by Apple over a decade ago, but as they become more wide-spread and cheaper to develop, being without one puts your business at a disadvantage.
Data Compliance Software
Task Automation Tools
The cost of business has steadily increased year-on-year, with Brexit instability not making things any easier. Yet while prices go up, revenue streams fall. Disposable income is down — people are struggling just as businesses are. The very survival of your business could depend on optimising expenses and making sure no money is wasted. Future-proofing might simply be about making the pennies count.
There are lots of things you can do to help make money go further. One such future-proof business idea referenced earlier in this blog is the introduction of digital fax. Cheaper and more reliable than fax machines, it can stamp out unnecessary costs while maintaining essential functionality. But besides digital fax solutions, what else can do this? That idea of being able to do something cheaper is ideal. But no business wants to compromise on quality or operational capability — and cutting costs almost always implies this will be the case.
Automation tools are key to achieving this goal. Examples of automation include virtual assistant technology, which allows you to experience the benefits of a personal assistant through automated software, without the high costs associated with staff completing these actions. Instead, your workforce can be utilised more effectively, with simple and time-consuming tasks absorbed by automation. This allows you to gain maximum ROI from your recruiting investments by enabling staff to focus their skills on more impactful tasks and projects. You may also be able to avoid costly hires althogher.