Digitalization – Preparation & Administration
While there are millions of factors to define the best strategy to digitize your current business and how to start your online business. I will try to generalize as much as possible to give an idea or guide of what steps should be taken to achieve these goals regardless of the country you live in or the industry your business is in. Later I will try to create more specific steps for each particular Niche, most likely also available on the page in the menu, but for now, let’s go to the general aspects.
Organization
The most obvious thing, that we all know we should do and maintain but at the same time the hardest thing to do for many and I including myself. If you already have your system and you are satisfied with it you can skip this step.
As we are going to digitize it is kind of obvious that we should keep everything in the computer or a storage place like the cloud, or external hard disk, among other places.
I use encrypted external hard drives for a long time, it is one of the safest methods I know to keep all sensitive information protected, but now I use a “cloud” of my own since I am not a fan of dropbox and google cloud and give them access to all the information I am storing on their servers. Don’t forget that nothing is free and they get something in return for helping you keep that data in the cloud.
Try to organize everything in folders as much as possible, images for the website, logos, incoming invoices, outgoing invoices, important documents, contracts, etc. While accounting and contracts there are platforms that solve this for you and make it easy [see Tools available], let’s take into account the fastest, cheapest and easiest option that is at your disposal, which is your computer.
This will help you to have quick access to the files you need and a place to store everything that is sent to you by email, chats, and files available on platforms, among others.
And if you are wondering how to create my own Cloud at home, there are many Routers that offer this function, but I use Synology NAS, if you have doubts about how to install it do not hesitate to ask me.
Management of the equipment and business itself
We already talked about how to store information, files, and data on a personal and simple level. But if you want to organize, your time, to-do list, clients, and even your computer and all its tasks, it gets a bit more difficult to manage everything in just your computer and a couple of folders with files, right?
Luckily there are many online tools where you can manage all this, obviously, without forgetting that some things you should still keep private on your computer, cloud, or hard drive. and you can see several of the tools I recommend in my tools section. But I can tell you that the one I use for almost everything at the moment is Notion, simple but powerful and you can modify it to your needs and you have access to it from everywhere, it has like everything its pros and cons and that’s why I invite you to see the others I recommend or even investigate on your own and get a new one that catches your attention.
I am not going to go deep into each one because each business has its own particular needs and budget, but if you are interested in a consultancy you can request one below.
Passwords
It is not a step in itself but it is something important to consider nowadays because we live in a world where you have to remember hundreds of passwords and it is VERY bad practice to always use the same one, not to say that it should be complex to be “secure”, that’s why I recommend you to use a password management service, you can check among the ones I recommend, but I personally use 1Password. I am quite satisfied with it because I use Macbook and its compatibility is brutal, but I invite you to browse and choose the one you like the most. This should be a MUST, because security should always come first in your business, even if it is a boring topic.
Backend or Frontend?
While these are terms widely used in programming to define what the user sees in a platform and how it interacts with it (Frontend). In comparison to all the technology, logic and algorithms that occur and are programmed in the background so that users can in one click publish a video that all their friends can see in just two steps and 1 minute of waiting.
More or less it can be reflected in your business and both steps should be digitized and automated to some extent, not just your website and social networks. But we will cover each of them in different sections so as not to extend too much here.
