IT at the Small and Growing company

This post was originally published to Daniel Jefferies' Medium blog feed.

“A company this size can’t afford mistakes.”

For the last 13 years or so I’ve been working on IT with great folks in small, mid-sized and large organizations all over the country. In that time I’ve noticed that just as businesses change as they grow so do the IT departments that serve them. As the business changes, the IT challenges change. Sometimes the IT department keeps up with these challenges and sometimes they get stuck in the ways of the past. I want to start today by looking at the IT needs of Small and Growing businesses which many times have no IT department of their own. In future posts I also plan to cover lessons learned in working with IT in Mid-Sized and Scaling businesses as well as Large and Transforming organizations.

Impact Athletic builds quality work surfaces and storage equipment for Athletic Trainers.

Impact Athletic builds quality work surfaces and storage equipment for Athletic Trainers. I’m a entrepreneur at heart. I love to meet people that are starting something new. Kevin Mcleod and his company Impact Athletic are great examples of this type of small and growing company. Like most small organizations they have no IT department of their own.

“I love tech, I love shiny new things, but I was absolutely frightened by what we had to tackle in IT.” recalls Kevin.

Like many small companies, Impact started out using whatever consumer technologies were at hand. Personal email accounts, a copy of Quickbooks and whatever hardware seemed to be the best deal at the local big box electronics retailer or online. This approach works great at the very beginning but as the company grows this “just use what you have” approach begins to breakdown.
Kevin realized very quickly that he needed an IT partner to get him set up with the right tools so his team could “move fast.” Kevin selected Newmind to be that partner and in Kevin’s words Impact had “infrastructure overnight.”

When I asked Kevin why he had chosen to invest in an IT partner he said, “A company this size can’t afford mistakes.”

I really like working with companies like Kevin’s but not all small companies his size make the smart decisions he did. I’ve noticed that they usually have some common challenges and some make common mistakes. Here are the challenges and mistakes that I have observed other companies making in IT during their small and growing phase.

3 Challenges

1. Can’t afford the IT help that they really need.
2. Need good IT to stay productive and win against larger competitors.
3. Often the owners of the company aren’t strong on IT and feel frustrated having to make decisions without advice from a trusted and experienced advisor.

3 Common Mistakes

1. Most business owners wait too long to find an IT partner that can be a trusted advisor and take the IT workload off the owner’s shoulders.
2. Many small companies develop defacto IT people. Sarah in accounting knows a bit about IT so all the questions go to her. Before you know it she is spending half her time on the accounts payable and half on IT. Her accounts payable workload is suffering and the IT work isn’t getting done very well either. She’s probably frustrated as well and thinking of leaving because no one appreciates all the extra work she is doing.
3. In the early stages companies tend to work harder not smarter. They hire more people to do labor intensive manual tasks rather than getting IT help to make the people they have more productive. From a cost perspective they end up spending much more than they would have if they had made a larger investment in IT at an earlier point in time.

3 Recommendations

1. Find an affordable IT Partner early in the life of the business.
   Your people will be more productive and happy and you will have more time to grow the business and fewer IT headaches to distract you.
2. Invest in the right tools for your team.
   Many small business owners have tight budgets. When it is time for a better email system, a customer relationship management (CRM) system or other tools they tend to drag their feet because of the cost. If you have an IT partner as a trusted advisor early on this can help you make an informed decision. They will probably tell you that to attract the right people you need the right tools. Failing to invest in the right tools can create a frustrating environment and make it difficult to retain your best employees.
3. Stay flexible.
   Look for an IT partner like Kevin did and sign a flexible agreement with them. Choose IT tools that are flexible and have short term commitments, a la carte pricing options and trial periods. Your business is growing fast and you need to be able to make changes quickly if needed. If you are a small business owner or manager I hope some of the information in this post validates some of the great decisions that you’ve made regarding your IT. If you see some mistakes you’ve made I hope I’ve given enough information to help you make corrections. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me by leaving a comment or on twitter @heydjeff.

Daniel Jefferies is the founder of Newmind Group. Based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Newmind Group began as a small, regional IT company in 2003. Since then, we have opened offices in Charleston, Minneapolis, and Silicon Valley, and have grown in scope and size to become a national provider of cloud computing solutions for businesses of all sizes. Our specialty is moving legacy systems to more cost effective and reliable cloud based systems hosted by Google, Amazon, and Rackspace.

Is Backup Killing Your Free Time?

This is a guest post by Daniel Kuperman and the team at Axcient.

There are three moments in an IT person’s work life that they typically dread.

• Setting up backup
• Testing the backup
• Restoring from backup

In each of those moments there is more at stake than you think.

If backup jobs are not setup correctly, the whole backup chain can break and all your efforts would have been for nothing. Testing a backup is not particularly a joyful activity because it requires a lot of time and effort to make sure that a) you had indeed setup backup jobs correctly, and that b) you can actually restore files if needed. And, of course, when disaster strikes, you always hope that you can actually restore files as your testing results implied.

Where Does Your Time Go?

When considering how much effort backup takes, we typically underestimate the task. The problem is, most backup products that come from the legacy of tape backup, have kept complex interfaces and not very user-friendly options. The result is hours spent configuring backup jobs, schedules, and alerts for each device you want protected.

Learn More About Data Backup

Schedule a 1:1 consultation with Newmind Group and learn how we can help with:

• Reduced Downtime & Data Loss During a Disaster
• Data protection for multiple platforms and devices
• Application Aware backups

Schedule

In some cases, you even have to be careful not to schedule the start of a backup job too close to the next, or make sure that all options available for backing up your data are correctly set for each type of job.

When monitoring your backups, is it easy to spot which jobs completed successfully or do you have to dig through log files to decipher if there were any errors you should be worried about? Time spent looking for error messages is time that you could be using for something more productive.

When it comes time for testing your disaster recovery plan, being able to easily restore backups is essential and having to go through product documentation or spending time trying to understand how to actually do a restore without messing up other backup jobs that are running can be frustrating.

Finally, if you actually have to go through a full restore process after an event like fire, flood, or a natural disaster you can’t afford being lost on endless product menus, having to go to ‘help files’ or being on-hold with tech support.

How User Experience Influences Productivity

Now imagine that when you setup a backup job, instead of having to navigate through multiple screens containing dozens of check-boxes, you could have all the necessary info in a single screen. That instead of having to manually add different devices you want to protect, the system could auto-detect network devices and make the process of protecting them easier.

What if instead of navigating through logs, you could just login to one screen that would show you at the top all the critical messages so that you could take care of those issues more quickly? And how about the ability to test your DR plan by simply clicking a button?

These and more are part of what Axcient has themed Next-Generation Cloud Continuity and is part of our philosophy of using ‘exception-based management’ to make the job of creating, monitoring, testing, and actually recovering backups much easier.

The point is, when looking at how much time you or your staff spends on routine backup or DR tasks, it is worth considering how much of that time is because of the product and the actual product screens. Its like comparing MS Word with Google Docs, or even different TV remote controls. When something was created to make the user’s life easier, it is easy to spot.

Daniel Kuperman, Senior Manager of Product Marketing, Axcient

Daniel leads product marketing efforts at Axcient, working closely with product development, sales, marketing and the partner channel. He has over 10 years of experience in the technology industry and especially with B2B software companies. He holds an MBA and a PMP certification by the Project Management Institute.

A good day to be a Newminder

New Report Lists Newmind Group among North America’s Top 200 Managed Service Providers (MSPs)

Kalamazoo, MI --  Newmind Group, Inc. has landed on Nine Lives Media’s MSPmentor 200 North America Edition, a first-ever list identifying North America’s top 200 managed service providers (MSPs).

The MSPmentor 200 North America Edition is determined by the organization’s global online survey, conducted October-December 2011. The MSPmentor 200 North America Edition recognizes top managed service providers based on a range of metrics, including annual managed services revenue growth, revenue per employee, managed services offered and customer devices managed.

"It’s a very excited time to work at Newmind," said Daniel Jefferies, Newmind's founder. "Our clients are seeing dramatic cost savings of 30-40%, strong productivity improvements and I'm seeing many of them get genuine enjoyment out of working with the leading cloud computing solutions and platforms that we are helping them implement. It’s a lot of fun."

“Nine Lives Media and MSPmentor congratulate Newmind Group for its leadership position in North America,” said Amy Katz, president of Nine Lives Media, a division of Penton Media. “In the fiercely competitive IT services market, these MSPs represent the best of the best.”

As a managed service provider, Newmind takes a personal interest in finding custom solutions for their clients and strives to simplify clients’ cumbersome tasks in addition to saving them money. Newmind’s staff of Certified Trainers, Certified Deployment Specials, and custom development teams bring their enthusiasm for technology into every task and project they tackle, working with businesses large and small to make their work more productive, profitable, and fun.