May 26, 2015 at 11:11 Brief study of services for business
Today, on May 26, in honor of the Day of Russian Entrepreneurship , as a businessman, he decided in a small note to analyze the situation in the field of information services to help and support domestic entrepreneurs. There is no need to talk about the fact that this topic is extremely popular: all hunting and recruiting sites simply burst from the number of job offers for personal assistants and business assistants.
I also want to warn you right away that this article has not been paid by anyone and contains only a subjective study of the author. Just try to figure out what information systems or live services are capable of providing real assistance to Russian business today and in what way it can be expressed.
So, for the personal services of an assistant, even in the provinces, they offer quite a lot of money, which tells us about the potential demand for ready-made systems and developments in this area. But in fact, there are not so many large systems worthy of attention in this review, and they are mainly related to supporting financial statements, legal advice and sending documentation between partners. Well, it would seem, but what else can you think of in support of an ordinary entrepreneur?
But it turns out that some specialists are looking for ever newer more interesting services, expanding the number of opportunities and approaching the issue of business support unbanally. And it's great:
Let's try to analyze the vector of the direction of thoughts of developers of such non-trivial services, it seems to me that they should reason like this:
“What is business in itself? What hundreds of processes and tasks does it consist of, does it include magic tricks or is it designed only on hard work? What components could it be divided into? To do this, try to answer the key question: what does 99% of a businessman’s work consist of? As you know, just a good hard work is not yet a business, because Stakhanov himself was not a businessman. To render one-time services in the same way, to do hack work is also not a business, the hack does not have enough flow, automation of a successful transaction, which has brought some benefits, and scaling of one-time success, is in some way ”.
Indeed, I myself have come to similar conclusions that the essence of any business lies in the constant search for the best opportunities and the successful implementation of bold ideas. This definition also includes constant attempts to optimize, one might even say “redesign” the existing state of things; attempts to redistribute existing resources by their own efforts so that outsiders would be massively ready for these efforts to voluntarily give their hard-earned money. It is also very important not to forget that the business is inseparable from risk, as it exists in an open system with incompletely calculated opportunities.
Perhaps passionate about the success of Magic, business service industry leaders today are ready to offer any exotic services to support the entrepreneur, right up to attaching a whole team of “personal consultants and assistants”, capable of literally everything:
Indeed, a whole team of young, proactive assistants who know ready-made answers to all questions - it sounds very tempting.
However, I, as a pessimist with experience, immediately begins to be puzzled by one detail: “ And if the business is so successful that it was able to profit by a monthly turnover of more than ten million rubles - will he need the advice of yesterday's students sitting on small salaries?"Call it excessive suspicion, but I consider myself entitled to ask how all these people sitting with a cup of coffee in a cozy office can know more about the subtleties and life hacks of my business than myself, plowing 14 hours a day, seven days a week?
But in general, I want to note an interesting trend - already today some online services are striving to create an entire ecosystem around the support of entrepreneurs. Need a website or promotion? - here are the contacts of the company “from our circle”. Need a new supplier, repair service, office cleaning or wholesaler? - here is a list of guys "from our circle." Thus, from the usual program for filling out accounts and making payments, we can observe how entrepreneurial services are gradually mutating into closed business clubs before our very eyes. It can be assumed that in a few years the main thing that any young startup should do is to join one of these services of “business assistants”, and then, depending on the selected tariff, already receive in the mail the phones of the right people and entire teams for further full promotion in all directions. At least for novice businessmen, it is such a service that seems critically necessary, and all reports on income-expenses, document management and control of employees will recede into the background until the end of the first calendar year.
Perhaps this is too naive a forecast, but I see the prospect of a merger of accelerators, simple document management services and online services that are now appearing with personal assistants - into single complexes of management companies that keep thousands of large and small entrepreneurs under their wing within a single “ecosystem”. It seems to me that this will only benefit small businesses, when instead of today's extremely aggressive environment with low chances of survival, it will be possible to receive moral and economic support from “their clan” depending on the chosen tariff.
Well, the next step is the complete transfer of all business functions to artificial intelligence. My forecast is that in just three to five years, every inhabitant of the Earth will be able to receive daily alerts about how exactly today, based on current global needs, it will be possible to most profitably and successfully invest each person’s resources: time, talent, knowledge, professional skills and materials available. It seems to me on such a service of the future that it makes sense to start work now. Well and with a holiday, dear businessmen!
I also want to warn you right away that this article has not been paid by anyone and contains only a subjective study of the author. Just try to figure out what information systems or live services are capable of providing real assistance to Russian business today and in what way it can be expressed.
So, for the personal services of an assistant, even in the provinces, they offer quite a lot of money, which tells us about the potential demand for ready-made systems and developments in this area. But in fact, there are not so many large systems worthy of attention in this review, and they are mainly related to supporting financial statements, legal advice and sending documentation between partners. Well, it would seem, but what else can you think of in support of an ordinary entrepreneur?
But it turns out that some specialists are looking for ever newer more interesting services, expanding the number of opportunities and approaching the issue of business support unbanally. And it's great:
Let's try to analyze the vector of the direction of thoughts of developers of such non-trivial services, it seems to me that they should reason like this:
“What is business in itself? What hundreds of processes and tasks does it consist of, does it include magic tricks or is it designed only on hard work? What components could it be divided into? To do this, try to answer the key question: what does 99% of a businessman’s work consist of? As you know, just a good hard work is not yet a business, because Stakhanov himself was not a businessman. To render one-time services in the same way, to do hack work is also not a business, the hack does not have enough flow, automation of a successful transaction, which has brought some benefits, and scaling of one-time success, is in some way ”.
Indeed, I myself have come to similar conclusions that the essence of any business lies in the constant search for the best opportunities and the successful implementation of bold ideas. This definition also includes constant attempts to optimize, one might even say “redesign” the existing state of things; attempts to redistribute existing resources by their own efforts so that outsiders would be massively ready for these efforts to voluntarily give their hard-earned money. It is also very important not to forget that the business is inseparable from risk, as it exists in an open system with incompletely calculated opportunities.
Perhaps passionate about the success of Magic, business service industry leaders today are ready to offer any exotic services to support the entrepreneur, right up to attaching a whole team of “personal consultants and assistants”, capable of literally everything:
Indeed, a whole team of young, proactive assistants who know ready-made answers to all questions - it sounds very tempting.
However, I, as a pessimist with experience, immediately begins to be puzzled by one detail: “ And if the business is so successful that it was able to profit by a monthly turnover of more than ten million rubles - will he need the advice of yesterday's students sitting on small salaries?"Call it excessive suspicion, but I consider myself entitled to ask how all these people sitting with a cup of coffee in a cozy office can know more about the subtleties and life hacks of my business than myself, plowing 14 hours a day, seven days a week?
But in general, I want to note an interesting trend - already today some online services are striving to create an entire ecosystem around the support of entrepreneurs. Need a website or promotion? - here are the contacts of the company “from our circle”. Need a new supplier, repair service, office cleaning or wholesaler? - here is a list of guys "from our circle." Thus, from the usual program for filling out accounts and making payments, we can observe how entrepreneurial services are gradually mutating into closed business clubs before our very eyes. It can be assumed that in a few years the main thing that any young startup should do is to join one of these services of “business assistants”, and then, depending on the selected tariff, already receive in the mail the phones of the right people and entire teams for further full promotion in all directions. At least for novice businessmen, it is such a service that seems critically necessary, and all reports on income-expenses, document management and control of employees will recede into the background until the end of the first calendar year.
Perhaps this is too naive a forecast, but I see the prospect of a merger of accelerators, simple document management services and online services that are now appearing with personal assistants - into single complexes of management companies that keep thousands of large and small entrepreneurs under their wing within a single “ecosystem”. It seems to me that this will only benefit small businesses, when instead of today's extremely aggressive environment with low chances of survival, it will be possible to receive moral and economic support from “their clan” depending on the chosen tariff.
Well, the next step is the complete transfer of all business functions to artificial intelligence. My forecast is that in just three to five years, every inhabitant of the Earth will be able to receive daily alerts about how exactly today, based on current global needs, it will be possible to most profitably and successfully invest each person’s resources: time, talent, knowledge, professional skills and materials available. It seems to me on such a service of the future that it makes sense to start work now. Well and with a holiday, dear businessmen!