For every small business out there, it is a huge thing to just be and thrive. They have to constantly figure out ways to reach out, thrive and then hope for growth. More-often-than-desired, it puts them in the survival mode.

The operations have to be set up, leads brought in, sales teams to be trained and finally have a growth culture to drive everything. It is a lot and needs everyone to be on the same page, especially for a small business. Incorporating collaboration tools is an easy win here as any misses (that can be tracked) are great for learning but not all need to happen. In fact, just being on the same page fixes most of them and saves a lot of time and effort.

However, most businesses feel “Let me first stabilise and then I will think of putting “growth systems” in place.

Here are some of the myths that small business owners need to stay away from!

#Myth 1 – I have a small team. Collaboration is not for me.

It is understandable. Big businesses have the time, resources, infrastructure and the intent to create a collaboration system. They also have large teams that compensate for tight timelines, slow information flow, dynamic workflows, etc.

The smaller teams do not have the economy of scale. They have to be on top of everything that concerns their offerings. “Not missing anything” achieves a more than “critical” status.

#Myth 2 – I have too many things on my mind. Collaboration is “a wastage” of time now.

While setting up a business process, every 1 hour spent on brainstorming & establishing it properly saves 100 costly hours in the growth stage. Would you rather slack yourself out on the action while it is happening because you did not plan your process properly?

Collaborative tools are designed to save time & effort. As soon as they are set up properly, they start boosting productivity.

Ex – Your sales team needs a proposal with marketing inputs. In absence of a tool, there are ways to still do it. They will require a meeting, a brief, back and forth emails, calls to get to the final proposal. And this collaboration between sales & marketing cannot be used effectively for the next lead without duplicating the same cycle.

While a collaborative tool makes this whole exercise a clearly demonstrated case of “how to close a lead together”, it also sets a precedent for all the forthcoming collaborations. And it reduces the time sought by both the teams to repeat the same task next time.

#Myth 3 – I don’t have the budget for this NOW.

Collaborative tools are evolving fast. They are cloud based, do not need special hardware/software, are easy to install and integrable with existing applications like your email & cloud services.

Setting up a good “flexible” process with the help of a collaborative tool is easier when the team is small. It gets rather difficult to make the team unlearn all the time-consuming ways of task management, lead management & problem solving when the processes have hardened.

A small business generally has a good team who are great at what they do. They are motivated and raring to go, probably even while they are mobile in the field. Doesn’t it make sense to prevent this team from becoming an overworked pool of talent with the help of collaborative frameworks?

Check out how a company changed its model of collaboration to help its team deliver their best.