Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
The Wizard of Oz

Getting Started is the Hardest Part

This post is the first in a regular series I’ll be writing about practical tips for incorporating technology into your business. We’ve got a lot of small business owners and entrepreneurs reading our website, so we thought it would be helpful to reveal some of what goes on behind the curtain.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how impenetrable tech-related things are for many small businesses, so my intention here is to simplify the overwhelming list of things you could do into lists that you can start with today and see real results from tomorrow.

It also drives me completely crazy to experience first-hand the way that a lot of IT support firms and contractors treat small businesses. From ridiculous hourly rates to recommending unnecessary and expensive services, it often feels like there is an entire industry predicated on keeping entrepreneurs in the dark and feeling trapped by the complexity of technology.

The first thing to know is that technology can do two very important things for your business: save you money and make you money. Let’s start with the saving part, since it’s very often much easier to implement and will deliver more immediate results.

Five Simple Tech Tips to Save $5,000

1. Switch your email to Google Apps. Gmail was revolutionary for those used to Hotmail or other webmail services because of its simple, fast interface, and the “conversation” feature that groups replies and forwards into a thread you can access with one click. Then in 2006 Google launched Google Apps, which provided the same email functionality for businesses — the key difference being that you could now use your own domain instead of gmail.com. Our carrieanddanielle.com email uses Google Apps, which replaced our clunky and expensive hosted exchange service. And did I mention that it’s completely free? Not only do we no longer run out of storage space in our mailboxes, we’re saving about $1,500 a year. Better, faster AND cheaper always sounds too good to be true, but in this case it isn’t. It took us about an hour to set everything up, and Google provides extensive online guides for making the change. And my perennial life-saving blog, Lifehacker, has plenty of tips, from the basics of Google Apps, to migrating your old email and contacts from Outlook.
2. Use Basecamp instead of Microsoft Project. For the projects we’re managing today we’d need at least two Microsoft Project licenses, which run at about $600 each for the standard edition. Basecamp is part of the suite of products created by 37signals, and it fully embraces their “less is more” philosophy. You won’t find the seemingly infinite list of features you get with Project (and most likely never use…), but you will be able to create and assign tasks, monitor milestones and provide access to your projects for an unlimited number of users. You can also share files, send messages and create “writeboards” (just like they sound — virtual whiteboards) for brainstorming and collaboration. So two years of Basecamp = $566, or less than the cost of one MS Project license. Let’s round that to a saving of $600 over those two years.
3. Phase out paid IT support. Our IT support costs last year were several thousand dollars. Since March we’ve spent precisely zero. Admittedly we spent some money to get ourselves out of the black pit of despair of Windows desktop support by buying new macs for everyone in the office. But I’ve run the numbers and we will net out ahead in our first year of owning the macs because they just work. There’s no more paying to diagnose mysterious issues with anti-virus software or “tuning up” two-year-old windows machines that are unusably slow. Imagine if cars were this unreliable, we simply wouldn’t accept it. Yet because it’s technology we often tolerate the constant throwing of good money after bad. Let’s be generous and call this one $500 in year one and $1,500 next year.
4. Automate your phone system. You don’t need someone sitting at a reception desk “aggressively waiting” for the phone to ring. And to get a fully automated phone system complete with that warm and fuzzy “big, real company” feel you can spend about half of what your average old-school telco interconnect will tell you is required. We went with Microsoft’s new Response Point system (see, we’re not Microsoft bigots, we just make smart choices!), which cost us $900 less than the cheapest quote for older, clunkier systems from traditional vendors.
5. So we’re already at $5,000 in savings and I haven’t even listed five tips. So this one is a mea culpa, to say that newer / cheaper isn’t always better. I tried my best to inflict the free, open source NeoOffice on the team here, rather than spend money for Microsoft Office. Trouble is, it’s just not ready for primetime yet and I put Danielle in particular through mucho agony of Neo’s maddening idiosyncracies. So try it out if you like, but keep a few hundred bucks in your back pocket for when you discover you need Bill Gates after all.

For many of you all of the above will seem very obvious, but they’re intended as a gentle introduction to things you can do starting literally right now. And remember we’re just getting started. Look for much more in the coming weeks.