I started my business in 1997 with the same basic mantra we use today; provide technology solutions to support business goals.  While the technology has changed, the attitude hasn’t.  Do what we need to do to satisfy the customer and bill them for an honest amount of time to do it.  Well as we have grown that has become more difficult.  More staff, more clients and more personalities has caused us to have to put more procedures in place to make sure that everyone is treated fairly and we still have the possibility of making a (small) profit in the end.

Now in comes the Massachusetts data security law and we have another entire set of issues for not only us but all of our clients.  We have checklists for them to follow so they are not liable for potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.  Plus we need to have an acceptable use policy (AUP) , a written information security policy (WISP) and now they are talking about PCI compliance because we come in the vicinity of credit cards numbers!  What ever happened to “my word is my bond”?  I would so rather spend time helping people figure out what makes an effective website, how to handle their technology planning and budgeting, or how to determine the ROI of installing a network server.

No question that running a business in today’s high tech/high risk environment is different than pre-Y2K but I never thought I’d spend more time reviewing internal policies than getting out and helping clients with their businesses.  At least we get the opportunity to help our clients create some of these policies too!

Most of you tech savvy business people out there have had a LinkedIn account for years, but have you been truly using it to increase your business opportunities?

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional online network with more than 45 million users representing 150 industries, and in case you’re wondering, the company itself is valued around $1 billion. Since September 2008, when the economic crisis hit, it has seen a 25% increase in the rate of sign-ups as concerned professionals look to keep their contacts up to date. That equates to approximately 1 million new users every two weeks. In terms of activity by those users, in the last two months there has been a 15% increase in the issuing of invitations to get people to join business networking circles and there has also been a 14% increase in the amount of recommendations made by users endorsing another member of LinkedIn.

The explosion of LinkedIn usage brings to mind the age old question of Quantity versus Quality.   Would you prefer to have 500 good contacts, or would you rather have 50 great contacts? The former may inflate your network statistics, but the latter may inflate your sales statistics. We can’t all be like Ron Bates, but do we want to be?

Who is Ron Bates you ask? With 44,000 direct contacts on LinkedIn, Ron has been referred to as “the most connected man on Earth.” In fact, I just tried to connect with Ron last night. I haven’t been accepted yet, but I did it for fun and I don’t expect any business to come from it. To effectively use LinkedIn to promote and grow your business you don’t need a ton of contacts, you just need a handful of great contacts that are in need of the services that your company offers and are interested in working with you or know others who would be.

If you’re hoping to reap the benefits of a LinkedIn account, you need to commit to actively using it on a consistent basis. At the very least you should look at your profile every day to see to see who your contacts are networking with, and if there are more “People You May Know” listed in your profile. Remember, your contacts’ new contacts are now in your network, and the groups they have joined may be of interest to you.

The bottom-line with LinkedIn is that people would much rather work with people who their friends and colleagues know and trust. To truly realize a return on the investment of time required by LinkedIn you need to increase your number of viable connections and thus increase your chances of getting more business. In order to make your profile more appealing you need to nurture it by being committed to completing at least one or two LinkedIn tasks every single day. Make a connection, join a group, or just enhance your profile. Be sure to track the traffic to your website and what percentage of it comes from LinkedIn.

There are many ways to establish sustainable relationships through LinkedIn.  Find out how to put the power of LinkedIn to work for your business by downloading part one and two of our three part series.

Without a doubt, the answer to the above question is THE BUSINESS!  But it’s amazing how often we forget this when looking at new technology to implement in a business.  Far too often, a cool new technology noticed by a business owner or the desire of their IT company to play with a new technology drives the decision for an implementation.  While there may be merits of the technology, the decision to affect a business’s production environment should be driven by a business need.  For example, we have clients come to us all the time saying something like, “Shouldn’t we be upgrading to Windows 7?”.  Our reply is usually, “Why?  Do you feel that one of the new features can help with a business problem you are having?”  While the answer is sometimes yes, most often it is because they have a friend who got it or saw a good ad on TV.

As a technology partner for our clients, we use the mantra that business needs should always drive technology implementations, not vice versa.  To help our clients make the best use of their technology investments we will work to understand their business so we can help them make informed decisions.  Some of the things we want to determine are:

• Is there a business problem you are having that is driving this?
• Have you considered all of the costs of this implementation?
• How will this affect your interactions with your clients?

By working in this fashion, we believe it build good long term relationships as we are not simply looking to book every billable project we can get our hands on.  In the long run it is a win/win.

We have compiled a more thorough list of the things we evaluate when helping a client determine if a new technology is right for them.  Download our “10 Reality Check Items to Consider in any Technology Implementation“.

5 signs that it’s time for a web site redesign:

1.  Your site isn’t effective in helping you achieve your goals (more sales, brand recognition, community awareness, etc)

2.  Your site is no longer an accurate representative of who you are and what you offer.

3.  The site looks very dated.  Not sure about this?  Check out your competitor’s sites to see what you are up against.

4.  You don’t have a scalable web site that you can update with new content, add a blog or integrate easily with social media.

5.  Users have asked for features or made other suggestions for changes that cannot be accomplished with your current site.

Looking for specific recommendations for your web site?  Let our team of experts evaluate it!

Have you ever Googled yourself or the company you work for?  Come on, you know you have!  It’s human nature to wonder what others are writing about you and the company you work for.  Before accepting your new position, didn’t you Google your new company to see if you could find any negative information?  Googling is an easy way to lose hours sorting through irrelevant web entries hoping to find the information you’re repeatedly looking for.  Valuable time and energy can be saved by using one of Google’s many convenient and useful tools, in this case, Google Alerts.

Google Alerts are emails or RSS feeds automatically sent to you when there are new Google search results for your specified terms.  After signing up using your GMail account on the Google Alerts homepage, you enter the search term, type of alert (search Google News, Google Groups, or the web), frequency of emails (daily, as it happens, or weekly), and your email address. Google Alerts sends you an email each time a new page for your chosen term makes it in the top twenty results on Google’s web search. You can set up alerts for as many as 1,000 search terms.  Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts - News, Web, Blogs, Comprehensive, Video and Groups.

• A News alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.

• A Web alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.

• A Blogs alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.

• A Comprehensive alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.

• A Video alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.

• A Groups alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

Google Alerts’ many uses make them convenient and helpful in our daily personal lives including monitoring a developing news story, tracking medical advances, being aware of what is being written about family members, and even getting the latest on a celebrity or sports team.  But there are many professional reasons to harness the power of Google Alerts, find out how to put the power of Google Alerts to work for your business by downloading Ten Important Business Uses of Google Alert.

As many people in the business community are trying very hard to make the most out of a year when all the cards seemed to be stacked against us, it is easy to put off the task of figuring out what we will spend next year to move our businesses forward again.  While budgeting for technology can seem daunting at times, it is the best way to make sure that you take into account all of the things that will help your business run most efficiently with minimal downtime.

We must first consider the standard operational items such as preventative maintenance and support - which every business should have in place.  There are also a myriad of other items that often get overlooked during the budgeting process that can pop up during the year causing undue stress on the budget and the management.  Some things to consider include  software renewals,  such as anti-virus or backup software.  You should also review your current hardware to determine what is out of warranty.  Based upon the function of the device, a warranty renewal or hardware replacement may be in order.

For those of you who have already considered the items above, congratulations!  You are ahead of most businesses at this point.  There are a few more strategic items you might consider,  a new business resumption plan or updates and testing to the one you have to ensure its viability.  Also, in today’s world of hackers and viruses, many businesses are being proactive about auditing their network and web site security to protect their valuable business data.

While this all may seem overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be.  You can use a budgeting template much like the one we use for our clients or simply hire a technology company to review and plan all of this for you.  We have seen many cases where our involvement early in the process has helped our clients plan better and avoid unexpected expenses during the year.

Download the Technology Budget Planning Worksheet

Good news!  In response to concerns voiced by many small business owners in Massachusetts, the Office of Consumer Affairs has announced revisions to the identity theft regulations that were set to take effect on January 1st 2010.

New language in the regulations includes risk-based in implementation -  requiring safeguards that are more appropriate to the size of the business, the amount of personal data stored (client or customer data and employee files), and the type of business.

The revised regulations are more consistent with Federal law, and therefore an appropriate guideline for businesses and other types of organizations in Connecticut to measure their risks and identify what steps they can take to minimize their exposure to security breaches and the potential remediation and litigation that follows a breach.

A public hearing will be held on the changes on 9/22/09 at the Transportation Building, 10 Park Plaza in Boston at 10 a.m.

Click the link below for a copy of the compliance checklist: 

http://www.foresitetech.com/forms/download_compliance

I’m about halfway through the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.   The gist of the book is that if you can find a new way to provide goods or services or a whole new market, then you can make the competition irrelevant and be a unique provider in a calm blue ocean of marketplace.  No longer will you be stuck in the churning bloodbath or “red ocean” of competition with others who all provide the same products or services and are forced to compete by price-cutting or other sales tactics with no hope of taking over meaningful market share.

To make your competition irrelevant, you have to take an in-depth look at what you and your competitors all do:

• Determine what truly has value to the customer (to do more of this)
• Uncover what the customer doesn’t care about (to reduce or eliminate)
• Look outside of your existing marketplace to see if there is untapped potential for creating a new service or product to address needs of people who do not do business with you today (untapped potential customers)

The hardest part is to put aside your preconceived ideas of your industry and open your mind to think of new ways to solve your customer’s needs.  I’ve been in the technology field for over 20 years, so this has been easier said than done, but it’s a great mental exercise.

Think about your own business.  Do you do things because “that’s the way it’s done”?  What could you eliminate or reduce without hurting the customer experience?  What could you increase or create to enhance the customer experience and set yourself apart from the competition - possibly even creating something never offered before?  What if you could recapture past clients that you had lost, new clients who chose a competitor, and potential clients with demands that are not being met in your marketplace?

If you have ideas for us to consider for what you’d like to see if anything was possible for technology support or web sites, or if you would like to brainstorm about your business to get an outside perspective, I’d love to hear from you.  Please leave a comment on the blog or email me at tlf@foresitetech.com.

When I first started my business, I was always looking for ideas from other people about how they…well…ran their business.  In 1997 when I started ForeSite, the Internet wasn’t quite what it is today and finding templates on things like business plans, cash flow models, legal documents, proposal templates etc. were few and far between.  In comes 2009  and there is so much stuff out there, you don’t know where to start.  Go ahead, type “business plan template” into Google and see what you get (444,000 results in case you don’t want to bother).  Now Google does a pretty good job of trying to get you quality results, but some are articles, others are blogs, others are people trying to get you to click through thinking you are getting a template but you really have to buy something.  It can get pretty tiresome.

Luckily, there are new services that help filter out the good from the better.  For example,  Docjax.com is a site that will only return links to actual documents.  If you decide you only want Word documents, you can filter for only those.  Now when you start clicking through, you know that you will get back a document that you could begin to modify to suit your needs.  If you are fairly specific, you might even find exactly what you want on the first page (try: “small business farm template” for example).  You still get 1059 results, but right at the top are some pretty relevant documents.  Have some fun and download to your heart’s content.  Most of the results you’ll get will be free!

Being in a service business providing computer support and web development, our product is our people’s time.  As our technical staff work on many projects and clients within a week, time planning for their weekly schedule is critical to ensure the best possible use of their time as well as the proper availability for emergencies that crop up.  To manage that in our world, we have implemented a categorization process for the types of work we perform and track what percentage of our time goes into each type.

To begin, we examined the work we did over a 12 month period and determined that the work was either recurring scheduled, planned projects, or “pop-up” work that occurs during the week that we didn’t know about ahead of time but had to handle.   I’ll refer to those types as Scheduled, Project, and Pop-up for the rest of this article.

As expected, the scheduled work we had a pretty good handle on and could calculate how much of our week would be dedicated to that.  The piece we had the least control of was the Pop-up work as these types of requests would come from our clients as they had issues or needs that couldn’t wait until their next scheduled visit.  While that was unexpected work, we found that on a week to week basis, the percentage of our time that this took was fairly regular.  So now we had two of the three variables somewhat accurately calculated.  But what about the project work?

In a client oriented network support and web development business, it is unrealistic to expect that your technical people will be 100% billable unless that are working on long term projects or placed full time at a client.  We use 80% as a target for our people which helps to account for vacations, personal time, internal meetings and training.  With that target, we need to figure out how much Project work we need to fill the gaps between the predictable Scheduled work and the peaks and valleys of the Pop-up work to hit our billable goals.

In planning the workload properly throughout the week, we have increased productivity of the individual engineer’s and developer’s as well as managed the workload to avoid missing SLAs or burning out our staff.
Additionally, proper management of the different work types has led to higher billable ratios and happier workers.  All around, it has been a win-win.