Consolidating tools and platforms help more than just cost savings
Transitions are great learning opportunities, and a driving factor for these changes is the need to consolidate business services. Consolidation of business services lets us find ways to cut costs and often times it allows business owners and admins to be more streamlined when running their businesses. While the financial factors are more tangible in justifying, the consolidation of services frees up a mental space that can be used by admins to become more efficient in solving other business problems. So in other words it makes a great deal of sense to review business operations and consolidate those whenever we can.
Some years ago I helped a client of mine who wanted to move their online jewelry store from a Drupal shopping cart to Squarespace. The main goal of the move was for my client to manage their website content and inventory easier than what Drupal shopping cart was providing at that time. We looked at several platforms and finally ended up deciding on Squarespace.
A few years later the same client decided to move permanently to Europe. One of the main questions in mind was if Squarespace was still a good choice for running their business in that region. Several months into their move it became clear that Squarespace wasn’t providing the flexibility to run their business in Europe, especially with Brexit adding to the already complicated EU sales tax requirements which the platform didn’t have a solution for.
After discussing with several other European business owners and with some research, the Shopify platform came up as a viable solution that can handle EU and UK requirements. So once again we rolled up our sleeves, migrated their Squarespace store, and launched it on Shopify. We spent about 2-3 weeks building, customizing, and moving their inventory over and finally launching. They continued to use both Squarespace and Shopify websites for a year or two during their transition to the EU and eventually closed the US side for good.
Just recently they contacted me again to help them with another transition. IT started off as something minor, an email account transfer from their US-based hosting company, MediaTemple to their new EU-based OVH. As I started looking at their current set up I realized that they registered their domain with Hostway and had their emails and DNS hosted with MediaTemple.
It became clear to me that they needed more than just pointing emails from one place to another. So my customer has agreed to consolidate their registrar, DNS, and email hosting services altogether and move it all to their new service provider in the EU, OVH which offers a variety of services such as email hosting, domain registration, and web hosting, all via a very user-friendly dashboard.
Consolidation is sometimes an outcome and sometimes the goal of a transition. In this case, the goal was to move only one aspect of the services which turned into moving everything into one place. It makes a lot of business and organizational sense to consolidate all these services under one roof. My client can now manage all of their renewal from the same place and enjoy great quality customer service for all of their services.
Email, web, domain registration, and DNS hosting are not the only things that move from one company to another. I help many businesses move databases and CRMs from one to another. In some ways, I feel like a “digital sherpa” with all this moving around. And seeing the speed at which technology progresses, the business’ digital migrations don’t seem to ever slow down anytime soon.
Business service consolidation is not limited to only email or website hosting. You may have opted to use a company that managed your data operations like data hygiene, enrichment, insights, and AI, or moved all of your e-commerce platforms from one to another. I help companies and individuals consolidate technologies to run their businesses more efficiently and cost-effectively. I can help by reviewing your existing setup, providing recommendations, and helping you with the transition all the way through.
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Please let me know if I can help you with your business operations.
