Cloud computing has been buzzing for some time… co-working spaces are more popular than ever… everywhere you look, businesses are using creative divisions of common resources as a means to identify new ways to enhance their processes and reduce operational costs. In this blog series, we will examine the practical application of shared business resources and the impact that it will have on the future of the small business space.
Within the next 5 years you will start to see the sharing of resources between organizations in absolutely every aspect of business, from the board room to the operations team. With this, the small business space will no longer be a fragmented sea of scattered priorities and conflicting agendas, but rather, a composition of specialized, independent teams that work with multiple small businesses at a single time. This will effectively convert the small business space into a series of independent departments that serve a unique and highly-specialized purpose solely for the businesses that need that specialization most.
This will also place small businesses at a significant advantage over larger organizations simply because this structure will allow for a mobility and scalability that cannot be accomplished with an in-house team. Imagine if one month you could scale your development team down by 500% to ramp up your marketing and communications for a product release, only to go back to standard recurring volume without any operational or HR repercussions!
To a certain extent, we already see this in organizations that outsource marketing or development work; but, this luxury has always come at a premium. Well, it doesn’t have to!
Stick around for the next installment in this series. In the next post, we talk about the structure employed to effectively build a business entirely from specialized, and scalable, shared resources.