Small business startups know all-too-well the value of minutes and seconds in matters of money. Making a sale or sealing a contract often requires precise timing in getting the gears turning. The hard part is knowing when to start and at which r.p.m. each one should be set. Enterprises large and small spend considerable amounts of time looking over data and coordinating team member efforts before they act on the information learned therein.

Information. It’s what’s necessary for successful company actions. The faster you get it, the quicker you can make the decisions that make money. It’s no wonder small business have a reputation for being sleepless beings bent on sharing the experience with the team. But before cracking the whip or tacking another monthly meeting to the calendar, consider more employee-friendly and efficient alternatives in the pursuit of faster knowledge-gain.

Here are three to get you started:

1. Streamlined Communications

This ranks first and foremost among the techniques your small business ought to be taking advantage of in order to fasten its operations. Keeping employees connected through a multitude of communications mediums, ideally under the umbrella of a single service, is key to enabling quicker actions to be taken as an enterprise.

Exchanging project details and critical documents doesn’t require corralling the team together – an outdated technique that slows most companies down. Instead, maintaining dedicated and easy-to-monitor unified communication is really all you need to maintain the flow of knowledge necessary for optimal business timing.

2. Data Integration

Companies which depend on integration platforms to provide workers with information lists and pages are often faced with the challenge of uniting these multipurpose systems with external data sources. To not do so results in duplication, unsynced tracking, and ultimately hours wasted in the long-run as employees re-consult and double-check data. Investing in something like Sharepoint integration could help to maximize information efficiency with a simplified interface not dependent on user programming to function on a day-to-day basis.

Connecting your data sources together to maintain unity of facts and details, especially when one source has a superior method of organization and delivery compared to the others, is an effective and easy-to-achieve way to expedite company action.

3. Remote Workforce

There are increasing advantages to allowing your employees to work from anywhere, anytime. Benefits to your want of faster company action include around-the-clock market monitoring by night owls and international personnel, on-the-go decision-making from top-to-bottom, and a sense of never-ending momentum. Additionally, the aforementioned recommendations make mobile enterprises easier to execute than ever before. Access to integrated, trustworthy data and the ability to reach out to each team member in the appropriate medium enables remote workers to act fast as both a team and individual players.

It’s far too easy for small business startups to spend unnecessary amounts of extra seconds and minutes examining, collecting, and collaborating over the information which is vital to have for them to succeed as growing enterprises. For the overwhelming majority of small scale outfits these wasted hours can be lethal in the long-run. Practical means to make efficient your information access and communication exist through technology. Put them to good use to make best use of precious time.

Cover photo credit: Simon Blackley / Flickr