Building Business Systems for Fun & Profit

Since it's very much a focus in the media and the business community at the moment, I wrote up a few ideas on how your I.T. strategy can help your small/medium business to survive and thrive during an economic slowdown.

Have a read and let me know what you think.

A friend called today, asking me to recommend a PC/Windows consultant who could do a simple network setup job in her office.

She figured that since I am immersed in the small business I.T. industry, surely I could help her avoid the unreliable or downright dodgy consultants and find someone who would show up on time, do the job right the first time and charge a reasonable price.

I couldn't do it!

Yes, we have come across a lot of PC consultants over the years, but there are absolutely none that I could recommend.

Every time I thought of someone, I realised I would have to qualify my comments about them: "Well, you could call so and so, but.....". All I wanted was a consultant that I could recommend without any 'buts', and I couldn't come up with a single one!

How embarrassing is that? And what a sad indictment of our industry - a truly dismal result!

Unfortunately that's the same thing I hear again and again from small business owners - virtually no one is happy with their PC consultants. I.T. on Tap has acquired a lot of new customers who were keen to see the back of their consultant and happy to get that whole raft of problems off their shoulders.

I can't think of too many industries that have survived and continued with such dreadful customer satisfaction levels. The reason is simply that it's been an essential service with no alternatives available - until now.

It's been a while since my last blog entry....one reason why is because we're in the middle of our official launch and I've been doing lots of interviews with the media. The first few articles have started to appear, so I've put a few of them up on our brand-new In the News page. Check it out.

We'll be exhibiting at Flying Solo Live in Sydney next week, so if you're attending then stop by and say "hello".

Let me ask you something: when you're dealing with someone in a business context and you notice they have an email address like joe.bloggs@yahoo.com or party-dude@hotmail.com, then what sort of assumptions do you make as a result?

Lately I've been noticing the number of people I communicate with who are still using a free email account or an email address from their ISP. I can't help but form some preconceived ideas about them as a result, and surely I'm not the only one?

I mean: come on! It's 2008 already, if you haven't even registered a domain for your business then I'd question just how serious you are? You can register a domain for only $7 to $40 per year, and a reasonable hosted email account can be had from only $10 a month.

Of course, without a domain you can't have a website either - even the most basic 1-page brochureware website...

So if you won't even make the modest investment of time & money to present your (Internet) self in a reasonable light by branding your communications with your own Internet domain, then how can you justify asking for my business?

No more excuses! You wouldn't have launched your business without at least a phone number for customers to call you and a postal address for them to send the cheques to. So you shouldn't be trying to do business in the 21st century without at least a basic Internet presence and that means a domain, an email account that uses it and a website. Hop to it!

About a year ago we switched banks, to Bendigo Bank. That would have to be the best (banking) move we ever made!

I won't name our previous bank in order to protect the guilty, suffice to say they are one of the "big 4" and we were driven away by years of dismal service. Our supposed account manager was permanently "missing in action", if we needed something we had to be prepared to wait at least 2 weeks for any sort of response - often we'd simply never hear back at all.

Moving banks wasn't easy, given the number of accounts and merchant facilities we have across our group of companies. However, we are very glad we did!

Now, whenever we contact our account manager at Bendigo something very strange happens: she responds! Usually within an hour! To emails as well as phone calls, no chasing required - that's amazing for an Australian bank.

Since then I've told everyone who'd listen how great Bendigo's service is, and I know at least a few companies who've switched on our recommendation.

I was prompted to write this entry after seeing a story in the Australian newspaper today: in the midst of all the credit crunch bad news, only 1 Australian bank seems to be doing well. Yes, Bendigo announced annual net profit up 40% on the previous year.

It's great to see them doing well, they deserve it. Well done guys!

I'm increasingly starting to notice stories like this one, about small/medium businesses taking environment issues more seriously and looking to reduce their carbon footprint.

This article talks about businesses buying more power-efficient servers, and indeed that's a step forward. But even better is getting rid of your servers completely!

You see, servers installed at small businesses are always going to be under-utilised - there just simply aren't enough people logged on and hammering them to keep them busy, that's why they tick along at something like 5% CPU usage all day.

That means 95% of their cost, 95% of the power they use and 95% of the carbon emitted as a result, is completely wasted. Needless wasted, too.

Your business lacks one essential ingredient for effective use of I.T. and that's scale. Even though you only need 5% of a server you can't buy only 5% of a server, so you have to buy a whole server which is 20 times more than you need...or do you?

I.T. on Tap works by bringing scale to the small business space. We aggregate the needs of all our small clients together, and then we're able to meet those needs much more efficiently than they could on their own.

For example, we estimate that every 1 of our servers replaces around 11 to 13 servers that our small/medium business clients would otherwise install and run at their offices.

That's reflected in the load on our servers: even with a more efficient infrastructure, our servers run at typical loads of around 50% - they're simply doing a lot more work, since there are fewer of them for the same number of people.

An 11 to 1 reduction, isn't that a HUGE cut in power consumption and carbon emissions? We think so, and that's why we're determined to get the word out:

Do your bit to fight climate change: turn off your server today!

I'm declaring war on the web design industry!

Now they may not even notice my jihad against them, but let me explain why anyway:

The SME website market is at the beginning of a major transition:

• away from static "brochure-style" websites, designed with editing tools such as Microsoft FrontPage (at the low end) and Adobe DreamWeaver (almost the industry standard).
• towards websites running on a software platform (called a Content Management System or CMS).

Now I'm all in favour of the change - in fact the only type of web hosting that I.T. on Tap offers is using a CMS; we believe very strongly it's the way to go.

CMS software makes it very easy for you to update your website using an ordinary web browser, and it also makes it cheap & easy to add advanced software features to your website. That last point is key: putting a basic brochure up as your website doesn't cut it in 2008. Your business will benefit much more if you actually leverage the power of the web to a much greater extent, and a CMS is the starting point for doing just that.

So back to the industry's web designers - if they're supporting, even driving, the shift to CMS software then where's the problem?

The issue I have with what they're doing is this: it seems like nearly every web design house is announcing the release of their own, proprietary, CMS software. There are literally thousands of these products on offer. Of course the quality varies enormously between software products, and many are simple derivatives of other products, for the most part they all have one aim:

To lock you, the customer, into using that same company for your design work - forever!

Since there is only company skilled up in using that CMS software, guess how many options you have to shop around your design work? That's right: none at all, unless you're willing to write off your previous investment and switch to another software product.

Is this huge diversity of software products actually contributing anything to the industry? I can't see it; to me it just looks like a cynical "land grab" to get as many clients locked into each company's proprietary software products as possible, before the dust settles and the market starts to realise what's happened. Very few of these software products actually contribute any advancement or innovation to the market. We simply don't need thousands of CMS software products, and in time I'm sure the bulk of them will wash away, taking your website investment with them.

What's the lesson to take away? Simply this: when you're talking CMS software with a prospective web designer, ask the tough questions:

• Who wrote it? (Best answer: an open source community. 2nd best answer: a credible 3rd party software vendor.)
• Who's supporting it? (Best answer: as above. )
• How many websites are currently running on this software? (Minimum answer: 10,000+)
• Who else (other than you, Mr Designer) is skilled up in designing for this software product? (Minimum answer: 1,000+ web designers around the world)

If you don't get good answers to the above questions, then either insist your designer use one of the top dozen or so software products (rated by number of websites and/or number of designers). Or find a designer who has your best interests more at heart.

A little bit of behind-the-scenes news this week: after extensive testing, we put a pair of new login/encryption boxes into use this week.

This is just the sort of behind-the-scenes techo stuff that goes on all the time, and that most of our clients are very pleased to never hear about it. I can understand that - techie stuff is exciting to us techies, but you'd probably rather we just got on with things and didn't bother you with the details.

The main reason I'm mentioning it because this upgrade had a visible impact: you probably noticed that the icons are bigger in your application window, and that logging in is now a little faster than before. Apart from that, it's business as usual.