Traditional office jobs continue to lose favor as more people realize the value of working from home or starting home-based businesses. Recent surveys seem to support that at least 50 percent of millennials operate home businesses. The benefits of working from home are obvious when costs are examined but even when working from home, a budding business can accumulate an extraordinary amount of expenses when starting out. Taking on costs such as business insurance, permits, licenses, and paying taxes can all begin to add up – leaving very little left over to scale and grow.
Finding the money to scale can be difficult and then there is the actual decision of what to invest in – what is going to have the most value to your organization? If you are working from home and want to keep it that way, adding more space or hiring more personnel might not be the best answer. Fortunately, technology may have some options for home-based entrepreneurs.
An option that may be more cost effective than you think is working with a software developer to create an app. About 60 percent of people around the world who own smartphones, access the internet from their phones. Mobile commerce conducted through smartphones will account for more than $117 billion in the U.S. alone. Clearly all this activity has the potential to create a steady stream of revenue for a small business looking to increase profits and remove geographical boundaries to accessing new markets.
Mobile applications have the potential of reaching individuals on a national and even international scale. The customers you work with at the start of your business usually come from your personal contacts and professional connections. To move beyond word-of-mouth referrals from these initial touch points, home-bases businesses need to get creative. If you invest in advertising or marketing, you will still eventually hit a plateau where your home will not allow you to continue to grow your business. Mobile apps give a single person, working from home the ability to connect with potential clients 24/7 and from anywhere, without the need for additional physical space.
So where do you start? How much should you invest? There are thousands of apps in the market so how do you stand out?
Contrary to popular opinion, developing an app can be fairly inexpensive to a business, depending on the complexity of the app the resulting cost can fluctuate. While app development can range in price, about 48% of small businesses report spending under $25K for a completed product. The functionality will ultimately determine the end price of your app. Working with a software developer or firm that offers some sort of initial analysis can be the difference between success and failure with the end product. An honest assessment of your idea, a review of competitors on the market and a reality check for what can be accomplished and accomplished well is an invaluable starting point when it comes to app development. A well-designed app will pay for its self fairly quickly.
Mobile applications are able to collect and utilize the knowledge you have built up over years of experience and offer customers a similar experience through a smartphone. Apps are being used in creative ways everyday by entrepreneurs. Recently a personal trainer came to our dev shop with an idea to take his customized workouts to clients through a mobile app. He had hit the wall for how many people he could train in a day and his only option to continue growing his business was to find a bigger space, hire more trainers and hope they were as good as him with clients.
We did an analysis and found the best way to help him achieve his desired outcome. By developing a mobile application, he could essentially create individualized and unique programs for clients around the world. The app tracks clients as they work out and provide the detailed information needed for them to get to the next level with their fitness goals. His bandwidth was expanded with mobile application and it created an additional revenue stream.
Beyond the financial benefits to a business, small business owners can increase customer engagement, attract new customers, build and strengthen your brand, improve customer loyalty, and stand out against competitors. The long-term effects gained from investing into a mobile app for your business outweigh the unfounded fears of investing in something new.
When assessing your own business whether you are large or small, a mobile application can change the way potential customers find and interact with you. People now use their mobile devices for everything, including browsing the internet, looking for services and learning about new companies. With the average person spending about three to four hours a day on their phone, it would be a missed opportunity not to develop a business plan that included the development of a mobile application. Entrepreneurs that embrace technology are more likely to stay competitive in the market.
Transforming a person-to-person business into a massive, self-sustaining platform with the capacity of attracting more people to your brand is an unapparelled opportunity for small businesses. When thinking about how to take your business to the next level, a mobile application may be the answer for how to scale while maintaining all the perks you enjoy as a home-based business.
