Digital tools every small business should actually consider

Most small businesses do not have a technology problem. They have a “we set this up five years ago and never revisited it” problem.

The tools worth having are not exotic. They are the ones that remove a recurring piece of friction — the thing someone does manually every week that a system could do once. Here is where that tends to be, and how to think about the connectivity underneath it, which is the part that usually gets decided last and matters most.

Business phones, and why the account matters

The mobile is the most-used business tool in almost every small business, and the one most likely to be on a personal plan. That works right up until it does not: someone leaves and the number goes with them, the bill is impossible to reconcile, and nobody can tell you what the fleet actually costs.

Putting phones on a business account fixes the ownership question and the visibility question at the same time. It also unlocks pooled data, which is where the money is — eligible services on one billing account share their allowances, so a heavy month for one person is absorbed rather than billed as an overage.

One thing to know: unlimited data inclusions sit outside the pool. If a plan carries unlimited data it does not share, so the fleet mix matters.

Tablets and mobile devices for teams on the move

Tablets earn their place where work happens standing up — forms, checklists, presentations, signatures, anything that used to be a clipboard and a follow-up email.

The thing that decides whether they get used is whether they carry their own connection. A tablet that has to be tethered off someone’s phone gets left in the office. Give it a service on the same account and it draws on the same pooled data as everything else. See tablet plans for how that is usually structured.

A backup connection you hope not to need

Fixed internet fails, and when it does a small business tends to have no second path. A pocket Wi-Fi or mobile broadband service is the cheapest insurance available against a lost day — and it is not idle spend, because the data comes out of the shared pool rather than being bought separately.

It has everyday uses too: a pop-up location, a client site with locked-down guest Wi-Fi, a new office before the fixed line is connected.

Wearables and the things at the edges

A connected watch is genuinely useful for people who cannot have a phone in their hand — someone driving, on a ladder, with gloves on, or serving a customer. Calls and messages reach them without the phone coming out.

These are not core infrastructure and should not be bought as though they are. They solve specific problems for specific roles, and are worth adding where that role exists rather than issuing across the board.

Choosing the stack, and who helps you do it

The pattern we see in businesses that get this right is not that they buy more. It is that they buy things that connect to each other and sit on one account, so there is one bill, one data pool and one person to call.

VBC Hub has been trading since 2012 and is Vodafone’s largest business channel partner in Australia; our directors have worked in telecommunications since 2005. We sell voice services on 24 and 36 month terms, and pricing follows the number of connections you run rather than a published list price.

If your setup has grown one decision at a time, it is worth an hour to look at it whole. Tell us how many connections you have and how your team works, and we will come back with a figure.