When it comes to business tools like Salesforce or Marketo, small businesses are often forced to choose between a high price point or low functionality versions of the platform. Want just your marketing person to have access to the Salesforce marketing tools? You’ll have to upgrade all of your users (and pay significantly more a month) just for one person to have access to the tools they need to successfully do their job.
Miami-based entrepreneur and Founder of Business Plus, Jonathan Cooper, ran into this exact scenario when running several of his family’s businesses. Not only was it a struggle to be able to afford the latest and greatest tools, they also had trouble getting those tools to communicate since integrations are costly due to having to build out an API. Most SaaS companies charge a flat rate for an integration, which might be affordable for a large company, but when you’re a small organization, thousands of dollars on integrations are simply out of the question. Business Plus provides a platform where all the business tools are consolidated into one single platform, removing the cost and hassle of integrations.
“SMBs are forced to compete with larger businesses that have greater resources and deeper pockets everyday,” Jonathan Cooper says. “Our new platform levels the playing field for small business owners so they can allocate their resources towards growing their business and effectively compete with larger businesses.”
So what exactly is Business Plus? Jonathan describes it as being the Costco or Sam’s Club approach to business tools. You pay a flat monthly membership then only pay for whatever tools you need, based on user. The entire organization may be using the business phone piece but perhaps only your marketing person is using the automated mailing and social publisher. Your HR manager might be the only person using the talent manager and your customer support team is using the support ticket system. Instead of paying for everyone to be able to use everything, you pay ‘a la carte’ based on which users have access to a product. Even better is how intuitive and easy-to-use the Business Plus platform is to search and find the services your small business needs.
Business Plus’ platform is different for a reason — they are one of the first startups to combine the buying power of SMBs to offer a member-based operating platform without any minimum commitments or cancellation fees. According to Jonathan, if a business isn’t happy with their service, they don’t want to force them to stay. In a world of high minimum commitments without any chance to ‘try before you buy’, this type of mentality is highly refreshing.
The platform also supports nearly every core aspect of operations for a small business including phone service, payment processing, point of sale, accounting, CRM, HR, marketing, sales, website development and more. By pooling the collective resources of members to reduce costs and providing a simple operating platform that shares data across all solutions, SMBs can conserve valuable resources that effectively help them compete with larger companies.
Here’s the full list of Hardware and Software Solutions that Business Plus provides:
- Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Offers reliable voice communication services with a host of core features needed everyday by SMBs, including hosted Private Branch Exchange (PBX), multi-level Interactive Voice Response (IVR) with payment integration, custom music and messaging, and multiple call profiles.
- Payment Processing. Benefits the bottom line with pass-through pricing and payment processing that has no monthly minimums, contracts or cancellation fees, or monthly or statement fees. Processing available on mobile devices, terminals, online, point-of-sale systems and many other commonly used platforms.
- Point of Sale (POS). Available both online and off, the easy-to-install solution presents contacts, accounting and order information from the cloud.
- Sales & Accounting. An easy to use online bookkeeping system allows businesses to budget and manage all aspects of accounting, easily convert records from other bookkeeping software platforms, and get help from professional accountants in the network. The integrated sales tool provides customer invoices and quotes, automatically calculates sales tax, and manages shipping and logistics to customers.
- Service/Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Manages contacts and view team engagement activities. The platform includes Google Apps for Work (email, calendar, documents, drive,) task, lead, project, contract and device management, as well as team collaboration, live meetings, e-signature and password vault.
- Website Builder. Creates an e-commerce or traditional website using one of the modern responsive templates that monitors results using Google analytics. The tool provides an easy-to-use drag and drop builder, and it allows users to purchase, transfer and connect domains.
- Marketing. Builds a program that allows businesses to survey customers, conduct A/B tests, manage integrated campaigns across multiple channels, track referrals and publish reports, among other activities.
- Customer & Internal Support. Manages customer interactions through social, email, voice, text and live chat. The solution helps build a process internally using a simple ticketing system and workflow automation.
- Human Resources. Manages compensation disbursement with digital pay stubs for employees and contractors, employee benefits, charitable contributions, on- and off-boarding, performance management, and other human resource activities.
- Bookings. The built-in bookings engine keeps business owners on schedule by generating custom appointments and reservations with reminders via email, phone and text.
Business Plus is currently accepting Beta Users. To try the platform or for more information, visit http://www.businessplus.com.
