Doing some IT support for a business earlier this year, I was concerned by how old many of their systems were. I initially went in to fix up a printer that would not cooperate with the system that it was supposed to be fixed to. I had it going via a back door route, but the fundamental problem was that the software they were operating was really old and was struggling to cope with something that was much more sophisticated.
I was summoned back a few days later when the firm owner’s computer collapsed quite spectacularly. It took hours to restore, eventually having to have a total rebuild but we got there finally and I was told that the position is not out of the ordinary. Aside from their accounting software, they had no IT support at all which left them exposed and meant that their IT systems had fallen increasingly out of date. And this isn’t unusual with small firms in the Black Country that are so focused on their prime purpose that the support work was taken for granted.
This in itself is not an issue, you don’t need to have the most modern systems, upgrading and renewing every 6-12 months or even every couple of years, but operating systems and essential software should be reviewed every three years at least. As some suppliers, partners and customers, certainly the bigger ones, will replace and as a matter of course they will share files and data and one day, these files will not be usable as the formats will be amended. For instance, someone using Microsoft Office from the mid to late nineteen ninties (and many are in my experience) will not cope with a file sent from Office 2010 and when that happens, everything regarding that partner and information will stop. What if it’s an invoice or a large order? That could be very expensive.
The same can be said of SEO for firms who put their business online with an expensive and well made website, which looks fabulous, works perfectly and is scarcely seen by buyers looking to visit that could be going to that company. Let’s suppose a Black Country steel firm is in need of a new lathe and would intend to get one from a firm in the vicinity, but can’t find a lathe manufacturer on the internet since all their online searches produce businesses who are better optimised. Our lathe maker may not even be registered with the search engines in which case the most exact search in the world is not going to display them and they may as well not have a website at all. Perhaps they have heard of SEO which, I will confess, has a poor PR image sometimes, and they view it as a doubtful cost. But good SEO does work, is worth the cost and how costly is not getting that lathe order?
Small firms have to focus on their main business, of course they do. But they need to be kept up to date with their support systems which means good IT support, SEO as well as the more obvious such as anti virus software. To let them slip behind too much will one day make the worried about expense a self-fulfilling prophecy instead of an aid to profitability.
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