Well, 2020 is almost over and it’s been an incredibly trying and long year for just about everyone. The COVID-19 coronavirus has transformed the landscape of business everywhere. If you run a small business, you may have been impacted especially hard.
If it’s time for COVID-19 reopening, you may be dealing with a variety of regulations and challenges that are making business that much more difficult. Now, with the holidays fast upon us, small and medium-sized businesses need to be prepared.
For some small businesses, the holidays are the busiest time of the year, whereas for others, the holidays may be one of the slow times. Either way, is your company prepared? Let’s take a look at some of the things your business might be dealing with and/or preparing for.
With COVID-19 reopening, you will need to revamp your store to make sure social distancing and other rules are followed. What are your COVID-19 signage needs? Do you have the equipment to handle it? Social distancing plaques, door signs, floor stickers, and other items will be needed, and may need to be replaced frequently.
One piece of equipment that can greatly help with this is a wide format printer. This is a printer that is designed to handle larger paper or document sizes than the typical 8 1/2 by 11 inch letter paper. By having a wide format printer onsite, you can avoid the extra costs of hiring out your COVID-19 signage jobs to a local print company.
Wide format printers come in a variety of sizes and styles, with some very affordable as an outright purchase and others that can be very reasonably obtained through printer leasing or managed print services.
Do you still have employees working from home? Video conferencing, managed IT services, and document management systems can help keep remote workers connected to the files they need without sacrificing security.
Document management solutions can be a huge boost for productivity of remote workers and teams. It simply makes it so much easier to collaborate. No more digging into old emails to find links to files. Everything is available in a cloud-based, centralized system that offers AI-powered search functionality, version tracking, and access control. And it’s far more secure and reliable than manually sharing documents back and forth via email.
You can even set up your remote employees with company printers via managed print solutions to monitor their printer usage and spend.
For some businesses, the end of the year is a slow time for business. And most businesses are feeling the impact of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Is your budget feeling the squeeze in the fourth quarter? Look at more cost-effective options to keep your business working and in the black. This includes equipment leasing with low costs and flexible terms – a great choice for printers as well as other IT equipment.
Managed IT services as well as print solutions can save your business money in multiple ways – from alleviating the need to hire more on-site IT staff to reducing the costs of aging printer fleets. How do aging printer fleets cost more money? They need frequent repairs, are cybersecurity risks, and reduce productivity due to more downtime.
Managed print services also helps cut down on waste by monitoring all printer usage to see where print resources are being used. This can reduce the amount of non-authorized printing by employees (who, for example, might be using business machines to print up a newsletter for their local crochet club).
By taking care of some of these issues, small businesses can set themselves up for more success in 2021, which will hopefully be a better year.
Blue Technologies is an expert provider of managed IT services, document management systems, and managed print services for small and medium-sized businesses. Our managed print services can be a huge help to businesses – whether your staff is on-site or remote. We offer a full managed service of your entire printer fleet, as well as printer purchasing and leasing. Additionally, we have a full selection of wide format printers to help with all your COVID-19 signage needs.
Blue Technologies helps small and medium-sized businesses with COVID-19 reopening in Ohio. Contact us today to discuss your needs!