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Business Setup Automation: Tech Solutions and Tools for Building and Growing a Startup from Scratch – ReadWrite
Many founders admit that starting a startup is one of the toughest projects they have undertaken. Being an entrepreneur and starting your own business requires a lot of effort to get your startup off the ground.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20%, 45%, and 65% of new businesses fail within their first two, five, and ten years, respectively. This sorry statistic does indicate that all failed businesses lacked useful ideas. Sometimes, founders go on to build successful businesses on a model that had previously failed.
Business Setup Automation: Tech Solutions and Tools for Building and Growing a Startup from Scratch
To build a successful startup, innovation is important, but execution matters just as much, if not more. However, there is so much to be done that it can be overwhelming.
A founder is basically responsible for registering the business, filing taxes, building awareness, managing sales, coordinating team communications, and many other business processes. All these on top of building the actual product that the business sells. It does get overwhelming.
Today, founders don’t have to manually go through these ordeals when there are digital tools to automate many business processes. From the scratch, a startup needs to establish a firm foundation by paying attention to five areas of doing business:
- Legal compliance and accounting
- Brand awareness (because people need to know a company to do business with it)
- Marketing and customer relationship (the earlier a business gains loyal customers, the faster it grows)
- Communication and collaboration among team members
- Routine business processes
Each tool recommended here covers one aspect and contributes to building a stable foundation for business growth.
ZenBusiness
The messiest part of starting a business is wading through the seemingly endless lists of government requirements and legal obligations.
What if there was a platform that helps with all the filing processes needed to set up the business while you focus on the business’ essence? That’s ZenBusiness.
ZenBusiness assists founders to register their business and fulfill legal compliance requirements, whether the business is an LLC or a corporation. It also provides DBA services for sole proprietorships and companies looking to extend their offerings beyond their regular scope.
While you worry about building your business, ZenBusiness covers the legal aspects, creating operating agreements, providing easy accounting and tax assessment, preparing and filing articles of organization, setting up a banking resolution, etc.
Hootsuite
Brand awareness is critical for every company but particularly for small startups.
More so, your brand awareness allows you to engage your customers directly, organically, and dynamically.
Achieving this requires a high level of social intelligence, which is only possible when you have a tool that does all of the messy jobs for you, helps you to scale engagement and presents a clean report.
Hootsuite is that kind of social media management tool. It allows you to monitor and analyze trends in real-time in order to enhance your strategy. With Hootsuite, you can use a single collaborative content calendar to publish on your social media platforms instead of manually operating multiple schedules.
It also integrates with other useful tools such as Salesforce and Adobe to enable a seamlessly coordinated marketing strategy.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign started out as a marketing automation provider, focused on email marketing. So far, it has evolved into a smart tool for automating marketing tasks as well as customer relationship management.
That’s like a complete package for vitalizing a business’ entire customer experience strategy. With ActiveCampaign, you can set up personalized email messages to regularly engage customers. But it’s also useful for automating all the background work too: contact management, segmentation, engagement tracking, etc.
On the CRM automation side, you can use ActiveCampaign to manage pipelines, score deals, and sell more overall. In addition, the software automatically generates well-detailed reports for extracting useful insights.
Slack
Slack enables you to enhance work communications by building automated workflows. Want to share an important update or collect feedback? Use Slack to streamline these processes. You can integrate other apps into a workflow for non-Slack processes.
One notable use case is how DocuSign and Noom collaborated to automate onboard new hires efficiently by using Slack Workflow Builder.
According to the testimony of a senior IT manager of one of the companies, “By using Workflow Builder, you can enable everybody in a team channel to meet and greet their new teammate on day one. I think it fosters an instant team connection for the new employee.”
Automating common tasks helps your team run more efficiently.
Zapier
Zapier does not automate a specific range of tasks. Rather, it is a comprehensive tool for integrating all the apps used by your business by creating workflows (zaps). One workflow automatically collects Typeform responses and presents them as a Google Sheets document. Another allows you to share the same content across all social media channels.
With over 3,000 apps and counting, you’ll hardly run out of opportunities to automate critical but repetitive business processes. Zapier is easy to use and does not require coding abilities or any advanced skill set. All that’s required is to select a trigger and define the action to be completed once triggered.
Conclusion
Adopting automation early in business process management sets a solid underlying basis for scale later on. Streamlining mundane tasks leaves you and the rest of the team channeling your time and effort to critical tasks with high returns.
Automation could even be the difference between the success and failure of a startup. That’s why investing in quality tools from the outset is critical.
Top Image Credit: rfstudio; pexels
