Sachin G Kulkarni

I get chance to speak with many small business owners like you through mediums such as phone, skype, hangout and sometimes face to face. Every time when they speak about the internal business management software, the topic of workflow comes along the way.

Being small business owner, you may have mindset that business process management system (BPMS) is for big organizations and it’s too complex for small teams. You may be partially right. This blog will throw some light on business process management system for small team.

You are at the center of your small team

If you are running a business with small team having around 10-30 people, then no matter what, you would be at the center of your small team. Every information flows through you. If the team is spread across the geographical this becomes even more complex. Most of your time is spent communicating between your employees.

If this is you, then you are reading the right blog. I know you don’t need a full functional business process management system. But what you need is a component of BPM- that is workflow management system.

If you are reading this post, then you are well aware of what those terms SaaS and CRM mean. May be you are in the process to evaluate the best CRM system for your business. You are doing this because CRM from brands such as Salesforce, Sap or Microsoft is too complex for your medium sized business to fit in.

So which is the best SaaS based CRM for your business? Believe me, none of them are your best fit. Now you may think that this is baseless argument. Of course, it’s not. I am going to tell you the thoughts collected from various entrepreneurs during my freelancing from last 5 years. Read ahead, if you are interested.

Missing factor in SaaS based CRM system

Your company finds a sweet spot in the market by differentiating on how you serve the customers. This is directly dependent on how the company operates internally. In simple word, business process directly reflects the customer service. Better the business process at your company, best you serve your customers.

Now that said, most of the CRM available as SaaS focus on 3 key areas – Marketing, Sales Customer service. This is required by all the companies irrespective of their size. These CRM can be customized to a predefined extent to increase their relevancy to your business. But they real miss is the business process integration.

So you have done with building your online service or a product. The very last feature is to have online payment system for your customer to pay you. This is last feature, but very crucial one. You may use online payment service such as chragebee, chragify , recurly etc and integrate with your system. But wait, they charge you more and the fact is you end up paying more in long run.

Think of it; you can build your own, fully controlled online payment system by using payment gateway from the bank where you hold business account. Yes, it’s safe if you consider 5 things described in this blog. Read them and get your developer to follow them during development.

Save your order with the payment gateway response

Every order or subscription done at your website is being saved in database. Your developer includes business relevant information such as subscription end date or number of pieces ordered in the database. However, he may miss out with the key information – payment gateway response.

Payment gateway response is information given out by the payment gateway for every transaction – be it successful or failure. This is very important information at times. In fact, during a dispute between you and your bank this information is a key. Hence make sure that your developer saves it in the database.

You may be motivated to start your freelancing career after reading blogs and speaking to other freelancers. Everyone advice you to have a personal website to promote you service. In fact they tell you that websites as your identify on the internet. But what they don’t tell you is how to make your freelance website such that clients come to you. This blog guide you to build one such website.

First impression is the best impression

Home page is the first page to visit by any new clients. Since you are completely new in their world, they willing don’t want to stay more than 20 seconds there. This means you have got just 20 seconds to retain them.  You can do that by introducing yourself in just a line or two. Below is a quick example of mine.

Also note to have a good tagline for yourself that would convince your customer to stay back and browse rest of your website. If you achieve it, you have won a client – of course not an extent to get a order placed.

Here is the Info-graphics which show the magnitude of change in internet today

 

Original 

You as a small package tour operator have been facing competition from big travel companies. These companies use all form of advertising such as Facebook ads, AdWords , twitter ads to attract more customers. Spending just few bucks on online advertising will not make your online campaign effective. If you are in similar situation, then this blog is for you.

This blog will teach you to promote your package tour without spending any money online. We will concentrate on 5 effective ways which would be more leads.

Involve in travel meet up

There are many travel meetup which happens in the city every month. Most of these travel meetups are listed in meetup.com. This is a most popular site which lists all types of events in the city and good part is it is social.

You may not physically attend the meetup. However it’s good if you can. Alternatively you can engage people in the travel meetup group. Leave comment about the destination or theme you server to the people. This will give you some good traffic and enquiry on your website.

With the increase in use of internet by both new and old generation travelers, customers are find information online. This has made classical offline travel agency to disappear from the market.On the other side, this changing behavior has created lot of space in the online travel industry.

To enchase this market shift, Travel entrepreneurs are coming up with the fresh ideas to fill in the market with new possibilities. Of course the existing tour operator and travel agents needs to get online to catch up with the trend.

The changing market need raised the need for technology specifically designed and developed for travel industry. As a Freelance Travel Technology Developer, I fill in this need by developing and implement travel portals, travel CMS, travel CRM, travel marketplace etc.

If you are reading this post, then you may be looking out for one such developer. Click on the link below to discuss more about your requirements.

Being a freelancer web developer from past 5 years, I have worked with many clients and projects. While I have enjoyed working on all of them,I also found myself following different process for different project and clients. Most of the time would go away into following process and billing, I believe Toptal has a proven modle and make my business operation smooth.

Of course, before signing up with Toptal,I have managed to read many reviews about the service and found most of them to be positive. This is one of the thing which help me to strongly consider the Toptal.

I would post more about the Toptal after I gain experience with it. Keep an eye on this space to read my experience with Toptal. You will find at least 1 post every month after I start Toptaling…

After reading tones of API success stories,many business & enterprises have started building their own API. While this sounds good, it also create problems in future if the design of the API is not well thought of. This blog throws light on the API design specifically for a business process.However, if you are very new to API and willing to start from level zero, then understand core principle of REST API before reading any further.

Resource is a central part of the API. Resource identifier, Resource representations, API operations everything are built around the resource. Anything is a part of a business can be seen as a resource.Virtual entities such as customer or vendor, non-virtual entities such as subscriptions or orders, business process such a employee on-boarding can be seen a resource.

Getting started with example

For the explanation point of view, lets select a employee on-boarding as a business process. We consider 4 different activities what business perform while on-boarding a employee.

• Creating employee
• Assigning a pay manager
• Creating a user account
• Create a email Inbox

All the above activities are performed in a sequence and are interrelated. For instance email inbox cannot be created without creating a user account.

When it comes to development time, API first approach will take more time to build a product. With the intention to get the product faster to the market, every entrepreneur ask them-self  the question in the title of this blog.Even though answer is know to be YES in the corner of our mind, there is a natural curiosity to understand more about it before convincing our-self.

I have gone through this stage of flickering mind and have found convincing answers and explanations. This blog  discuss about being API from day one and making our own product a client of that API.

Let’s split the question in two and discuss them separately.

Should I build a API early ?

With the decrease in mobile device cost and internet, most business find their customer engaging more with mobile apps than desktop sites.With this shift, it is clear that business need API from day one. However not all products needs to be over mobile – at-least at the beginning . Even with this scenario , I would suggest to go API first. Private API have proved to have ROI and value addition for business.