5 reasons your small business needs custom tech solutions

With each passing year, the technology gap between savvy companies and rigid traditionalists grows vaster and more oppressive. Falling behind in the rapid technology arms race means your competitors will possess huge advantages in all aspects of business. Of course, off-the-shelf solutions can keep you on competitive ground in most cases, but if you want to surpass the competition and seize the advantage for yourself, you need custom solutions, tailored to the unique challenges of your business. If you’re not convinced, just consider these five simple reasons to invest in custom business technology solutions:

1) Maximized efficiency

The simplest advantage of custom business technology comes in the increased efficiency offered; whether by building a solution from scratch or by adjusting a pre-existing base to be devoid of distractions and unneeded features, a company can put software in the hands of its employees that lends itself to maximum productivity. It can also ease the learning process for new employees and give your best employees the time they need to get even more work done. By eliminating waste with custom solutions, you guarantee an improvement to your bottom line.

2) More useful data

The data a business needs to assess employees, analyze markets, quantify goals, and otherwise thrive varies between industries, markets, business models, and advertising mediums. Instead of relying upon off-the-shelf solutions providing the same canned data everyone else gets, a custom solution can put the information your business needs at its fingertips, collected, parsed, and sorted to maximize ease-of-access and usefulness. Modern businesses demand more and better data to succeed, and custom solutions can fulfill that demand in a way other solutions cannot. 

3) Original solutions to unique problems

Not every problem a business faces has a pre-existing solution in the wilderness. The proper response to such a lack is not to give up on a solution and slog on with old methods, but to put together a workable solution from scratch. The absence of off-the-shelf solutions should be seen not as a problem, but as an opportunity; if you can’t get a canned fix for the challenge, neither can your competition, which means that in finding a solution you seize a unique opportunity to get ahead. 

4) Adjust to changes quickly

When you’re using off-the-shelf solutions for your business, any upheaval to the way you do business, the market, your product, or anything else can make your pricy software and infrastructure wholly useless and outdated. While the same can happen just as quickly with a custom solution, you can nonetheless adapt to the issue and put forth revised solutions much more easily, without sacrificing the familiarity you’ve built up with your current solution as you otherwise might have to.

5) Improved security

While a custom solution may not inherently have fewer gaps in its security than an off-the-shelf product, it will have far fewer people trying to break through those gaps — which means your business will inherently be more secure. You won’t have to worry about some hacker releasing an exploit that works on your business and every other business in your industry while taking a swing at some company completely unrelated to you.