If you're a business owner, but you're currently working in the job of IT manager for your business, when is the right time for you to take off some of those hats? How can you get started getting more of your time back in your business? Find out more in this video.
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Transcription:
If you're a business owner, but you're currently working in the job of IT manager for your business, well, this video might be helpful for you to work out, when is the right time for you to take off some of those hats? And how can you get started getting more of your time back in your business? If you're new to the channel, my name is Pete Moriarty and I help businesses with their small business technology, we've helped literally 1000s of business owners grow and scale multiple businesses, more productive teams help them along the journey of entrepreneurship. And we've got what we call the growth roadmap, which outlines the different stages that business owners go through as they grow and scale a business and the different pieces of technology that are useful and important to implement at the different stages of business.
Now, if you haven't already head along to our channel, and you can check out some of our playlists for the different areas of business. But what I'm covering in this video is how do you know when it's time to bring in external support, we've worked with so many entrepreneurs who are managing the internal tech of their business, because that's usually where they started. They started with a website on Squarespace or WordPress, and kind of like built things themselves, and they registered domain names, and they probably sent up, you know, something like Google workspace for emails. And if that is you, you're probably used to things being fairly simple for DIY. Now, that's not your fault, or it's not anything wrong with that business technology tools nowadays are designed to be so easy that you don't really need an IT person to take care of them. And that's all well and good when you're starting the business and want to get a few runs on the board. But there comes a point where there is a shadow side to that. And you actually end up potentially spending some of your valuable time doing things that maybe are not the best use of your valuable time on the business. Now, you may have got to a certain point, when you're six hours into redesigning your website for the third time and thought to yourself, why the hell am I doing this? Shouldn't I be looking after customers or building widgets or selling more courses or doing whatever it is you do inside your business. And so if that's you, if you've maybe hired your first or second employee or contractor to help you out in a business, and you're starting to realize just how much time managing technology takes, well, then maybe it's time for you to consider bringing in some outside help. Now I've got some key warning signs that I want to give you as a bit of a diagnostic. And I'm thinking about one of my customers in particular here, because this person for a number of years, I watched trying to do things themselves. They were an early stage entrepreneur, but they had a successful business, they were earning more than $100,000 a year in sales in the business. And so it was very much established. But they were still spending a lot of time trying to do it themselves. And they were resistant to working with us. And I take consultancy, to help them with their technology tools. Now, whether you work with us or someone completely different, that's horses of courses, but what I want to share with you is some of the mistakes that business owners make and some of the warning signs that maybe it's not the best use of your time, where you're putting your energy right now. Now, if you are finding yourself asking questions in forums, or trying to find the answers to technology solutions yourself and you know, creating big spreadsheets with a bunch of different tools and applications for you to work on in your business, or maybe you just got bright shiny object syndrome and you sign up to every service or app that you see recommended for the business. Well, that might not be a great use of your time, then, are you finding that you're maybe being the IT person for your staff? Like are you the help desk resource where when something goes wrong in the business, your staff are always coming to you, they're coming to you to fix it, they're coming to you to onboard them, they're coming to you to refresh their computers, they're coming to you and they've got a virus problem. If you're the IT guy for your business? Well, that's probably another alarm bell that you should take notice of now. Thirdly, and this one is a very obvious one that plenty of people spend way too much time doing. Are you the one waiting on hold with support? Are you calling help desks? Are you calling your finance or your bank's technology help desk to help with things? Are you trying to get viruses removed from your computer from online help desks, from technology vendors, all of these things, the kinds of things that you as a business owner should be delegating to somebody else to take care of, especially if it's your team. Can you imagine you taking care of all of your team's technology and actually being the IT person or cleaning up their computers when they're running slowly. We've seen business owners do this all the time. So there's some of the warning signs. And if you really value your time, or you want to value your time, if you want more productivity in the business, if you want to be able to get more done and get closer to the success that you want in your business. Well, it's time to start valuing what your actual time is. And I've got some other videos on the channel here about valuing your time as an entrepreneur. It's very important, but not only valuing your time and making sure that you're focusing on high priority tasks and high value tasks is the most important, but there's also a risk of not taking action. If you're not willing to change or not willing to remove yourself from the IT person sees. Well, then perhaps you can run into problems where you may have blind spots. And what we see with business owners is they know enough to kind of be dangerous and they know enough on how to set up their email addresses to be correct in DNS. So Your emails will flow into Google workspace. And you know, they know enough of the basics to set a good password on their phone and set passwords on everyone's computers. But what about protecting your business from a cryptolocker virus? What about implementing two step or two factor authentication to protect accounts from being hacked, or someone else gaining access to what about setting up your SPF and DKM records in your DNS settings so that your emails don't end up in your customers spam mailboxes. Now, I would say about four out of five of the customers that come to us and get help with their Google workspace account, have something wrong with their DNS settings inside their domain name without even noticing it. And what happens is if you're a marketer, if you're sending newsletters to your customers, or if you're doing direct mail outs in any way, that means that your emails may end up in someone's spam mailbox. In the worst cases, we've had customers come to us where they've had a cryptolocker virus, malware infects all of their computers. And because there were no backup system setup, even though they were using Google workspace, even if they were using Dropbox, they still had files that they were unable to recover from. And it took them 10s, if not hundreds of hours to recover the business from that. And so that's the kind of thing that you want to avoid. And they're the little one percenters that we can fill in to make sure that your business is protected. Now, of course, if you'd like a review, and just to check out where things are out with your security, or your implementation of any of the tools that we've talked about, or any of the technology tools in your business, well, you can jump onto the link below. And we actually have a complimentary consultation available for certain businesses. And so jumping into that you can apply if we're a good fit, then we'll reach out and give you a consultation. So if you answer to yes to any of these questions, let's just do a little bit of a checklist here, it may be time to bring in some outside help. Number one, do you have a team? Or are you looking to hire a team? If you've got just one or two contractors, that's kind of okay. But when you get to the point of starting to have people functioning in your business as full time employees? Well, you want to make sure that you have technology support, so that you're not doing absolutely everything. criteria number two, if you have a business that is earning over $100,000, and that's Australian dollars, so maybe like 5060 70,000 US dollars around that mark isn't earning that much in total sales for the year, well, then it probably makes sense to bring someone on to help as a consultant with your technology. Or number three, if you answer yes to this, are you just not that competent with technology, you're not that comfortable with it. For some business owners, they say you know what, tech is not my thing. And if you're the kind of person who spends hours googling for things and trying to find a solution yourself, I understand that entrepreneurs are great at problem solving. And we're great at going out and finding the solution. But it's not always the best use of your time, some of our services for less than $100 a month, you can get access to a professional support team. Some of our services are even complimentary for it, which can help you to get a lot further with your tech. So if you're considering getting some help, you may want to consider our business it genius. We've helped 1000s of business owners all over the world, putting in place great technology tools to help you scale. But for you and your business, it's important for you to look at what is the best use of your time, you don't do all of the numbers and submit everything to the tax department yourself. You bring in an accountant for that if you've got something like a legal issue, or you need to build out terms and conditions for your business, you call your lawyer and you have them do that for you. Well, this is the same thing when it comes to working with technology help us be that little 10% that helps you move forward faster, and you get to focus more on running and managing your business.
If you're interested in a diagnostic or if you're already a customer of Google workspace, we have an amazing offer for you. It's called our transfer in offer. And that link is right below what that allows you to get access to his a training library with Google classroom videos for you and your team to get up to speed and get the most out of your investment in Google workspace. You also get access to free exclusive tools and upgrades to your Google account and your ecosystem of add ons to Google. So make sure you have a chat to the team about that. And with our concierge service. You get premium support for everything Google workspace that is a paid product. But if you're interested in that, our team will talk you through all the benefits until the next video, catch you later. And make sure you jump into our website, subscribe to our channel and if you like this content, drop us a thumbs up. Thanks!
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
