Doing some IT support for a company earlier this year, I was concerned by how old a few of their systems were. I initially went in to fix up a printer that wouldn’t play ball with the pc that it was supposed to be connected to. I got it going via a back door route, but the main issue was that the software they were operating was really ancient and was having trouble trying cope with something that was much more modern.
I was asked back a few days later when the business owner’s computer crashed quite dramatically. It took ages to repair, eventually having to have a complete rebuild but we got there finally and I found out that the circumstance isn’t unusual. Apart from their accounting software, they had no IT support at all which left them exposed and meant that their IT equipment had fallen more and more out of date. And this isn’t unusual with small businesses in the Black Country that are so focused on their prime operation that the admin work was taken for granted.
This in itself is perfectly ok, you don’t need to have the most recent systems, upgrading and replacing every year or even every couple of years, but operating systems and essential software should be upgraded every three years at the most. As some suppliers, partners and customers, particularly the larger ones, will refit and as a matter of course they will send and receive files and data and sooner or later, these files won’t be usable as the formats will change. For instance, somebody using MS Office from the mid to late 90′s (and plenty are in my experience) will not deal with a file transmitted from Office 2010 and when that happens, everything concerning that partner and work will stop. What if it is an invoice or a big order? That could be very expensive.
The same pertains of SEO for businesses who put their business online with a dear and well written website, which looks great, works well and is rarely seen by people looking to visit that could be going to that firm. Let’s suppose a Black Country steel company requires a new lathe and would like to purchase from a business close by the vicinity, but cannot find a lathe maker on the internet because all their online searches list businesses who are better optimised. Our lathe manufacturer may not even be registered with the search engines in which case the closest search in the world is not going to locate them and they might as well not bother with a website at all. Perhaps they know about SEO which, I will confess, has a poor public image sometimes, and they see it as an untrusted outgoing. But proper SEO does work, is worth the cost and how hard is not securing that lathe order?
Small firms have to concentrate on their core business, of course they do. But they should be kept up to date with their admin systems which means proper IT support, SEO as well as the more obvious such as anti virus software. To let them get behind too much will sooner or later make the feared expense a self-fulfilling prophecy instead of a boon to profitability.
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