“FACEBOOK ACQUIRES INSTAGRAM”
“TWITTER ACQUIRES VINE”
“GOOGLE ACQUIRES WAZE”
The biggest acquisitions of the hottest startups are hugely public. But because the most newsworthy acquisitions are the biggest, we’re led to believe those are the only kinds of acquisitions that happen. That’s simply not the case.
The franchise model of doing business is a decidedly American affair.
The concept marries the power and scale efficiencies of large corporate bodies with the entrepreneurialism and hard work of mom-and-pop small business.
According to the United States International Trade Association:
there are over 780,000 franchise businesses that directly employ over 8.8 million people and account for over $890 billion in direct economic output.
The franchise model is one of the powerhouses of the US economy and features countless household names – McDonald’s being one of its truly global successes.
In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:
What do you do if you don’t have the time or know-how to document and improve your processes?
You hire a business process consultant of course!
While we’ve talked endlessly in the past about why processes are important and how to manage your own, hiring a business process consultant lets you reap all the benefits without having to spend an age assessing your organization and talking to every last employee involved.
So, if you want to organize your processes and bring efficiency to your business but don’t have time to do it yourself, read on!
Fake news is a hot button issue right now and one we’ve covered a couple of times at Process Street.
Normally, the discussion of fake news is a roundly negative affair.
How do we come back from consistently lowering journalistic standards? What does this mean for society?
In this article, I’m going to put a more positive face on and explain why there’s good reason to believe quality journalism is going to make a comeback – it may have already begun!
Accounting is a time-consuming, complex, frustrating, and criminally boring part of running a business.
It’s precisely this kind of tedium which inspired Monty Python to riff on the profession several times, with accountants getting so frustrated that they do everything from becoming pirates (sailing the wide accountancy in a moving building) to try to switch to lion taming.
However, accounting and bookkeeping is also a vital part of running a business if you want to abide by the law and track your finances. No matter how tedious it might seem it’s vital to know what money is coming in, where it’s being spent, and whether you’re earning a net profit come the end of the financial year.
Continue Reading
In the first quarter of 2017, the AppStore and Playstore saw record revenues yet again with a whopping total of $15 billion worldwide, representing a year over year growth of 45%.
Add in other online sales and the amount of money being spent is astronomical.
But how do we process all these sales? And what means of processing is best for your company?
We’ve pondered the question at Process Street and decided to write up our findings. In this article, we’ll compare Stripe, Paypal, Square, and Braintree to see what each do and how they do it. We’ll analyze those findings and suggest which might be better for different kinds of businesses.
The key areas we’ll compare are:
But first, let’s look at some of the different use cases for these payment platforms to contextualize our investigation.
With today’s fast pace of living, it’s vital to have on-the-go access to everything that’s important to your work.
Rather than staring blankly out of a window on your train or bus to work, you could then instead be planning your day and organizing meetings, or commenting on tasks and sorting through your inbox to avoid getting distracted at the office.
However, with the sheer variety of technology on offer it’s also difficult to know what mobile apps you should be using.
That’s why I asked the Process Street team to share the best mobile apps for business they have installed and how they use them.
From the most valuable apps across our entire company to one-off niche cases that could do with a little more exposure, in this article I’ll highlight the apps that let our team stay productive and make every moment count.
A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of GDPR.
It seems to be the one thing everyone in the data security industry is talking about, Equifax aside…
Articles are being written, consultancy firms are popping up, and businesses are quietly panicking.
Yet, like so many grand legislative changes, many people are unsure what GDPR is, how it could affect their business, or whether they should even be worried about it at all.
In this article, we’ll be looking to clear up some of those misconceptions while presenting actionable steps for how companies can go about adjusting to the coming changes. We’ve scoured the available resources to find the answers to our concerns about GDPR and now we’re sharing it with you.
(Still employ a consultant though. As you’ll see, there’s too much at stake not to!)
We’ll explore not just the impact on European companies but also companies outside the European market who process or control data which could come under the scrutiny of these EU measures. SaaS companies like Process Street will find themselves needing to adapt their services for their large European clients, and if you work within the SaaS field you might have to do so too.
Before we go further, let me give you a Too Long; Didn’t Read:
The best short summary of the ethos of GDPR I’ve read comes from Wired:
For companies that have more than 250 employees, there’s a need to have documentation of why people’s information is being collected and processed, descriptions of the information that’s held, how long it’s being kept for and descriptions of technical security measures in place
The GDPR broadly sets out:
At the end of this article, you’ll find a free Process Street checklist which uses ICO recommendations and Article 29 Working Party advice to guide you through assessing your company’s GDPR readiness!
The Art of SaaS shows that even industry veterans are sick of unnecessary jargon and bloated descriptions.
Rather than spending thousands of words (or multiple books) trying to explain every variation of the SaaS model, it draws from the experiences of Dr. Ahmed Bouzid and Dave Rennyson in order to cover all of the basics of a quality SaaS business in less than 60 pages.
Being so short, an Art of SaaS review might seem redundant at first. Why not just read the book in about an hour and learn what the authors believe to be:
Well, in this post I’m going to cover both the core takeaways of The Art of SaaS and the context surrounding the book itself by drawing from other figures in the field.
I’ll show you why this odd little volume is worth reading and what pitfalls to avoid when taking it at face value.
Let’s get started.
The Guardian is a 195 year old British newspaper which expects to burn through £90m in 2017 after incurring damage of £200m the year before.
The Economist once described The Guardian as:
“[T]he most stylish paper in the hyper-competitive British quality pack, the wittiest and best-designed, the strongest for features, the one most likely to reflect modern life.”
At it’s peak it sold half a million papers per day. In June 2016, at peak Brexit-vote tension, The Guardian online claimed to have over 165m unique monthly browsers.
Yet, despite this history, reputation, and traffic, there are serious warnings that the money will run dry in as little as six or seven years.
If they can’t make it work, how can anyone? What future is there for journalism and traditional media?
In this article, we’ll explore a number of business models in use today on both a large and small scale, and begin to analyze their strengths and weaknesses.
We’ll break that down into 10 key recommendations for anyone looking to hop onboard the media startup bandwagon.
Then, for a bit of fun, we’ll delve into what could lie ahead for the future of print media.
Extra, extra! Read all about it!
