I get regular questions about what we really mean by WinWeb’s Small Business Infrastructure?

On-demand Small Business Infrastructure™ centers around the idea that business start-ups and growing small businesses need help with numerous administrative tasks that are not core to the business success - such as bookkeeping, it services, internet services, call handling and other such services.

These services - if performed by the business owner - cause a great deal of time wasting - while the fixed cost of a business is still accumulating. This is in our minds a fatally floored business model and can easily be remedied with our infrastructure approach.

We should not expect business start-ups and small business in general to be accountants, bookkeepers, lawyers, marketing & PR gurus and so on. We should provide small business with an infrastructure in which it can concentrate on core business tasks, while at the same time enabling the business owner to stay informed of all relevant business facts like cash flow, sales, HR issues, tax position and more. This will enable him / her to make informed decisions, maybe with the help of an external advisor.

Based on these facts, we have devised a six point on-demand Small Business Infrastructure™ concept, which consist of:

1. WinWeb On-Demand Software Solutions - Anywhere At Anytime.

AccountsOffice and OnlineOffice are our two software offerings, which are based on the SaaS - Software as a Services model, to allow for the following key business benefits:

• tight inclusion of business advisors from the start,
• cultivating outsourcing techniques at the outset, i.e. virtual assistants,
• no IT knowledge needed and hassle free operation,
• real-time multi-user access from anywhere, increasing mobility.

2. WinWeb 24/7 Live Support - We Are Here For You Always.

Providing customer care and support only during business hours is not acceptable to our clients. Experience has shown us that most admin work gets done by small business before nine in the morning or after five in the evening. This practice is essential if the business is to survive it’s early years.

This is why we have provided our much acclaimed customer support for 24 hours a day, seven days a week from the outset. Saving our clients wasted time and money - while setting new standards in customer support. No manuals need to be read - all problems can be solved in real-time online.

3. WinWeb Live - Networking Community for Small Business Only.

To foster collaboration and outsourcing we have expanded our WinWeb Live™ offering to allow for small business community networking - thus enabling the business owner to make decisions about his / her current needs, with the following benefits:

• timeshare virtual assistants for professional results,
• offer contracts of work to contractors on a case-by-case basis,
• promote the business to a large audience or even locally,
• find new work and contracts online

4. Business Advice

Our On-Demand Small Business Infrastructure™ enables business advisors, accountants, bookkeepers and other advisors to have a “Up Close and Personal” relationship with the small business owner, providing key elements for the success of a small business:

• timely and up-to-date advice from anywhere at anytime,
• more efficient advisor function due to SaaS technology, less travel,
• easily expandable advisor network.

5. Solution Partners

Third parties provide external services to complement our services, such as parcel service, office supply services, printing services. These and other services are provided on a bulk buy arrangements by leading businesses in their respective sectors - to provide the most reliable and up-to date service possible - with the effect of enhancing the professional appearance of our clients.

6. ClimateByte™ Technology - For A Cleaner Future.

Our clients are among the biggest demographics concerned with climate change and carbon footprint neutrality. It is a fact that employing remote working and collaboration techniques drastically reduces the damaging business side affects on our environment. We enable our clients to be more eco-friendly and aware, by providing them with our green technology - an ongoing development commitment of WinWeb.

WinWeb welcomes any suggestion that will further enhance our On-Demand Small Business Infrastructure™ concept - especially the development of even more eco-friendly business processes - to serve our small business and business start-up client-base.

I have been writing about virtual assistants and virtual workers for quite some time, explaining the benefits of outsourcing to virtual assistants and workers for small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses.

But I never really wrote something about what it means to have a virtual small business team, which is part of WinWeb’s Small Business Infrastructure approach - so here it goes, a virtual small business team is:

1. a collection of people working together in different locations, countries and time-zones
2. a “network” of people working together using advanced online technology
3. some teams my be project specific and/or limited in duration(time)

Not always do people only work virtually together, some times the meet - even if it is only socially. Under 1. many combinations are possible:

• different time in different locations
• same time in different locations
• same time in same location
• different time in the same location

This all really means one thing - anywhere at anytime! How virtual is your team or in other words how mobile and flexible is your small business. You should think about these issues in the planning phase of your business start-up.

Have you thought through all the possibilities for your small business outsourcing and bootstrapping or how much more green and eco-friendly your small business or start-up would be?

Dennis has a great new story this morning ( at 03:10 am ?) about “Sandhill Talks SaaS 2.0″. He also comments on my feelings toward SaaS. And he is quite right to say:

I’m pretty sure Stefan Topfer, CEO at Winweb would agree. His company’s offering sees accounting as a utility that underpins the business but which of itself is of little intrinsic value other than a necessary means of achieving compliance. Instead, he’s creating an infrastructure to support early stage business.

I am looking at this from a different perspective. All I care about is “client mortality”, the advantages of the SaaS model are enormous, but can be improved upon.

How do most small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses start? You have an idea, then what? As if it is not enough to deal with your idea you need to worry about all kinds of admin functions to run any kind of business. That is were WinWeb comes in, we are trying to provide:

• A on-demand, online IT infrastructure (SaaS), that will enable to set you up to run your small business with in minutes, at a very low cost, so you can “try” your business idea for a month, a year, whatever. You do not need a bank loan or quit your job (in some cases, you will have to) to find out if your idea is worth it. If it is not, then you go back to the drawing board and try again later. No problem since you have no contract with us that logs you in with us.
• But most importantly of all, we use our SaaS model to have you not only work with colleagues anywhere @ anytime in real time, but also with your accountant. Now here is the thing, most of us when we started our small business did not know the first thing about accounting, financial planning, and when and when NOT (that’ll be me then) to buy that BMW 530i. Your accountant, if it’s a good one, will not only tell you but explain it to you, so you grow from someone with an idea to a “business” someone with an idea.
• The same is true for other “Virtual Assistants“: Call answering, bookkeeping, typing, credit control, etc. There are so many dedicated professional people out there, mainly working from home. There is no way you could hope, as a small business, to employ even one of these skill sets full-time, unless they are important to the core business. With our SaaS model you can time-share these specialists at a very low hourly rate.

The combination of the SaaS model with our Live! services provides a low cost, well looked after (accountant), and very versatile business infrastructure that does lower new business mortality rates and lowers barrier for business start-up.

BTW, I read a great post the “Entrepreneurship Gap” yesterday. Here you can find some ideas about starting up in business that I like.

Accounting, Bookkeeping, Business Development, Business Infrastructure, Business Start Up, CPAs, Finance, On-demand, Outsourcing, SaaS, sme-blog, Software as a Service, Virtual Assitants, Web Technology, WinWeb