There are 1.14 million small businesses in Canada. Compare that to our 21,415 medium sized businesses and 2,933 large enterprises, it’s easy to see why small businesses are so important.
Of course, you don’t want your business to stay small forever. You’ll want to grow and possibly expand with more locations. That’s why we’re talking about scalability. When we say that a business is ‘scalable’, we’re talking about it’s ability to handle a growing amount of business or that the business itself can easily get bigger in response to growth. An important quality, obviously, and a Hosted Phone System can help a business be more scalable. How?
Hosted Phone Systems Makes Onboarding Employees Easy
With a pre-digital phone system, it’s necessary to add new lines and new hardware every time your headcount grows. Managing all that hardware can become a full-time job for the IT department, costing you both time and money. A Hosted Phone System by contrast, is much easier. It simply requires that you contact your service provider to add another person to your hosted phone service. That’s it. They take care of the rest, and it’s easy because it’s all in the cloud.
A Hosted Phone System Can Let You Add or Remove Capacity When Your Demand is Seasonal
Of course, the scalability problems a lot of businesses face is that they have massive growth, but only during specific seasons. Hosted Phone Systems make handling an influx of seasonal employees easy too. Unlike more conventional problems related to the sudden influx (do we have enough desk space? Where are they all going to park?), adding a lot of new employees to a Hosted Phone service is as easy as making a call. Remember, no new lines—the service provider just needs to add more users and if necessary, upgrade your bandwidth, and you can downgrade when the season’s over.
Hosted Phone Systems Makes It Easy to Merge
There’s no doubt that mergers are hard—knitting together different corporate cultures, hierarchies, and office spaces takes a lot of time and energy. Merging technology is a little easier, though, when you have a Hosted Phone System. Getting two legacy (on-premise) phone systems to work together is a little challenging. By switching to a Hosted Phone System, merging companies not only get the obvious benefits of a single verses disparate phone systems (a single technology platform, only one provider to deal with, fewer variables for IT to deal with, etc.), they get a system that makes it easy to add users when they expand their business. As an added benefit, companies can move complex system maintenance activities to the service provider as part of the hosted phone service.
Hosted Phone Systems Makes It Easy to Manage Multiple Locations
In the past, a new location for a business meant new infrastructure and potentially a different phone system. With a Hosted Phone System, this isn’t necessary. Scaling your business might mean building a new location, but it shouldn’t mean building a new phone system. To a Hosted Phone System provider, adding five users at your business’s new location doesn’t look very different from adding five at your initial location. They make it easy to scale, whether you’re growing where you started or growing somewhere new.
Be Scalable by Not Thinking About It
As a small business owner, you should be allowed to worry more about growing your business than accommodating that growth in the future. That’s the great advantage of a Hosted Phone System. When subscribing to a cloud-based hosted phone system, your provider takes care of scalability requirements, allowing you to focus on your growing business.
