Southwest Florida Small Business Technology

So, we’ve recruited a fantastic company to provide business technology related articles pertaining to our local Southwest Florida (Bonita Springs, Fort Myers, Naples, Estero) audience, but until the articles start coming in I thought I would throw my 2 cents in regarding technology.

First of all as a business owner, or someone thinking about running a business, keep an open mind when it comes to technology. Like an article I recently read on business week, technologies, particularly the Internet, are lowering the barriers to business, reducing costs, increasing efficiency (and subsequently customer satisfaction). Technology is not electronics, technology is not wires, technology is not something for only geeks who play dungeons and dragons (which, by the way is the single biggest group on MeetUp.com for the Southwest Florida area).

No, technology need not be complicated, and if you keep an open mind or perspective, you can really use it to your benefit.

Let me rephrase that, although the implementation, customization, or actual grunt portion of technology may be involved, complicated, specialized, the end results, and uses should be what you are primarily concerned with. What immediately comes to mind when I think of technology is the uproar of jobs being outsourced to India. This has been a hot debate for quite sometime. For a period many jobs were being shipped or outsourced overseas, and for good reason. Inexpensive labor, and quality work made it attractive. Unfortunately, as has been evidenced by some call centers switching back to the US, communication is also an important part, perhaps the most important part, of an operation, and was just too costly a sacrifice to make. Our own endeavors overseas failed because of some language and communication disconnects.

Anyway, why I am talking about all of this? Technology is the ultimate outsourced labor. With computers, great software, and a team of trained professionals offices can accomplish with 5 people what it used to take dozens. To me, this is nearly equal, perhaps even a step above outsourcing to other countries, but it rarely gets addressed. Ethics aside, the technology in your office works to literally replace, and speed up your existing staff as well as, in some cases, eliminate the need for extra space. A law office, for example, with a centralized server, and special software can now eliminate the need for a “file room” and all but eliminate the process of “filing” by implementing a process through their computer system that automatically “files” documents to perspective client areas.

• Hundreds of square feet saved = $10’s of thousands of dollars saved
• Single job completely eliminated = $10’s of thousands of dollars saved
• Being able to instantly bring up any client file while your on the phone with them, making them think they’re the only client you have… priceless

The technology in your business should, at every level work to achieve these goals, faster, easier, more automated. And, other than an occasional downed hard drive or power failure technology is always-on, always accessible, and accessible from anywhere.

Technology Revolution

With this in mind, Southwest Florida businesses should take note that there is a revolution going on in the technology industry. Businesses are moving away from the central server approach, where an office has one or more physical computers in the office that route traffic, and store files and being replaced by what are called “managed services.” In the not-too-distant future all computing, especially centralized computing - whereby your business and employees access valuable resources (customer data, accounting information, etc) will be hosted offsite, on a number of servers, providing greater flexibility (access from anywhere), speed, uptime, and reduced costs.

There are already a number of services out there like this, one of the big ones right now is “managed exchange.” Various companies basically take the need to purchase, install, and maintain a single server in house for your companies email and you simply pay a monthly fee per mailbox instead. Everything else is built in. And since these companies can specialize, and throw hundreds or thousands of emails on one or a few machines, the cost is reduced tremendously. What used to cost $1000/machine, $1000 for software, $1000/year for maintance, now only costs a few dollars per month to achieve. And, since it is a recurring monthly cost, it greatly minimizes start-up costs and can expand with your business.

But, this is not the only service available. For example our office uses Skype to manage calls. We have no centralized call area, physically set up in the office. Instead an always-on application routes calls, forwards calls, and collects voicemail, everywhere and anywhere.

Go do a search on Google for whatever part of your business or process you think could benefit from technology or these kinds of managed services and you’ll be surprised at what you might find.