Business owners are the worst IT managers for their companies. In this video, I'm going to share with you the deadly don'ts of being a business owner and also trying to manage your IT and what you can do about it. If right now, you're someone who's doing it yourself, I want to give you some tips on how to make sure you are stepping back from the IT control seat, and hopefully no longer holding your business back.
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Transcription:
Business owners are the worst IT managers for their companies. In this video, I'm going to share with you the deadly don'ts of being a business owner and also trying to manage your IT and what you can do about it. My name is Pete Moriarty and we've helped 1000s of business owners all over the world, get their tech, right so they can grow and scale more successful businesses. Now, if you're right now, someone who's doing it yourself, I'm hoping that no matter what stage of business you're at, I can give you some tips on how to make sure you are stepping back from the IT control seat, and hopefully no longer holding your business back. Now, if you're new to the channel, check out our growth roadmap. We've got playlists for every different stage of business and helping you making sure that your technology is the right strategy for helping you to grow your business. And we really love helping small business owners succeed. No matter what stage of business you're at, right now, we want to make sure that you've got the right tech in place so you can grow a productive team and have a business that works on your terms. So let's talk about tech in business. For most business owners, they spend a lot of time doing it themselves, particularly in the early stages of business. And what that typically looks like is Googling around watching videos on YouTube, and putting together band aid solutions for making the technology inside a business work. And while that's all well and good when maybe you're a startup or you don't have any employees in the business and you're just a sole operator, and you'll see that in our growth roadmap, as you progress through the different stages of growth in business, and you start bringing on other team members, many business owners never change their habits, and still want to be the person who is the go to for technology. Now unfortunately, we've seen over time business owners who have 5, 10, 15, 20+ employees still wearing the IT manager hat inside the business. And let me tell you, that is not productive use of your time, it's also probably not something I'd want to trust you with. If you're someone who runs an ecommerce store, or maybe you're someone who has a manufacturing store or business or maybe a retail outlet, I don't know if I'd trust you to go to a hardware and buy some wood bricks and some concrete and build me a house. And that's because you're probably not trained in those disciplines to be a carpenter or to be a builder. And it's the same kind of thing with it, we see business owners who are doing the technology themselves. And not only are they taking time away from high value tasks that they could be doing otherwise, which are probably their talents, but also you may be leaving your business exposed to risks as well. So I want to share some of the things that we see business owners doing and what then to do about it. Now most business owners have probably set up their emails themselves. When they first got started, you register a domain name. If you started with Wix or Squarespace for your website, you probably signed up to that yourself. But for many business owners who are in the Google Workspace ecosystem, particularly businesses that have started in the last five years, business owners tend to be pretty savvy these days and have kind of like enough knowledge to be dangerous. And so many business owners have actually set up their own DNS records and DNS records being domain name records to configure a Google Workspace account. What we also see business owners doing is things like onboarding and offboarding staff. So when a new person joins your company, you just go to your Workspace and you click plus one, and you add an extra user in there. And when someone leaves, you know, you know how to kind of like, reset their password or switch them off. Now, there are some of the basics that business owners typically take care of. But then what happens is from time to time you have employees join and they need a new hardware device. And so all of a sudden, you're running up a new laptop for someone, or you're educating your staff on how to use Google Workspace. So you're running training for them as well, all of a sudden, your IT technology trainer. Or maybe you're helping someone to clean up a virus on their computer because they don't know how to fix it. You're the only one in the business who the responsibility falls too. Can you see how this role is starting to look more and more like an IT manager instead of a business owner? Well, what ends up happening and these are the effects of these things is that let's say you've set up your own DNS, but maybe you only set up half of it correctly enough so that the emails work. But maybe you didn't configure all the records correctly. We see for most businesses that we audit their Workspace accounts, they've missed out one or two things like maybe DKIM or DMARC records to make sure that your emails don't end up going in spam. And we see a lot of customers who come to us who say they are missing orders from customers, because customer emails going to spam or when they do outreach in a business development role that their emails are ending up in their prospects spam. And what that means is they're actually missing out on business, because they've misconfigured, the technical side of the domain that. Next up customers come to us and their Google Drive is an absolute mess, files are missing, they can't find things. Or they had a virtual assistant or a contractor to the business who is using an external personal Gmail account to share files, and that person has ceased working for them. And all the files have disappeared from the Google Drive. Not only that, but if your Google Drive is a mess, it can be really hard and time consuming. For team members to actually find files and information. Next up, we tend to see when we look into an admin account that there's lots of user accounts that are unaccounted for. And what I mean by that is there's lots of people who have left the business over time, but their accounts are still active and alive inside of Google workspace. And what ends up happening is you have to pay extra for all of those accounts. But there may be information that your team members need, or even that you need, hiding away in those accounts, and I know it, I get the feeling that you don't want to delete those accounts, or what do you do with that data? Well, it ends up kind of getting stuck there. And inevitably, one of the biggest issues that customers come to us with is they've had some kind of data loss event. So whether that be an account that was compromised, something got deleted, something wasn't backed up properly, and now it's gone missing, or they're just in complete overwhelm with their technology tasks, they are finding that they're not able to get their productive work done, because they're spending all of their time being an IT manager for the rest of the business. Now, you don't have to be an entrepreneur or a founder for this to be your challenge, you may be an operations manager, you may be an office manager, you may be the person who's just been kind of lumped with this job. And so I'm going to now transition to talking about what are some of the things that you can do to de-role yourself from the IT manager role inside the business, because we want to hand this over to someone else, we want to make sure that this is no longer your responsibility, or ideally, that responsibility is 8020. And we've reduced it right down just to the absolute most most important things. Well, number one is to do a task audit, you want to do an audit of all of the IT tasks that are happening in the business right now, whether that's updating and maintaining the website, changing DNS settings, onboarding and offboarding staff, organizing your Google Drive, troubleshooting things, when someone has a computer problem, helping someone to get started on a new computer training your new team members, when they come on board, all of these things need to be accounted for including how much time you're actually spending doing that. Number two, you want to make sure that you document and systemise all of those things, it helps to build an online intranet with all of your systems, processes and policies. And we've got guides and videos on how to do that using Google Sites, you want to have all of your IT policies and information documented. So you've got it all written down. And that's the next step to delegate to someone else. Number three is delegating. When you delegate, you want to take your hat off and put that hat on to somebody else. Now, whether that's internal staff, and I've got some warnings around that, or an external IT party, which also comes with its own challenges, you want to make sure that that goes off your hat and onto somebody else's plate. Let's talk about those for a second. The advantages of doing it internally, if you hand this off to someone else, like maybe an operations or an office manager is that that person is going to be close enough to you being inside the business that you can rely on them to take care of that. And you can always kind of like hit them up during the day if you need anything. The downside is that if you designate that to one person in the business, and they may be a tech savvy person, if they ever leave the business and are replaced by someone who's not as tech savvy as them, or if they leave, and they haven't documented anything, and we see this over and over and over again, that intellectual property is lost. And that job role immediately goes back to you after they've left the business. So that's not our recommendation, my recommendation is instead to hand off to an external IT party, someone like itGenius would be a good fit. If you need basic tasks done remotely. Things like onboarding and offboarding. Things like managing DNS, things like making sure things are backed up, organizing Google Drive, all of these is to say that they are tasks that I probably wouldn't be giving to your internal team, they're probably better farmed out to someone else. Now, if you're interested, itGenius has a Concierge program that does exactly this. We have an AI-based chatbot, which actually has humans in the background as well, which allows you to quickly interface with our support team for adding and removing staff changing settings inside of G Suite. Basically, anything you need to do in the Google world, our team had just a couple of clicks away. And rather than working with the direct Google support team who are really good at supporting the product, but not really there to support businesses, and not really there as a concierge service to help with your business processes. Our team are all dedicated to helping you make sure you reduce the amount of time that you're spending doing tech tasks yourself. Now, we have policies already created as a go to for onboarding and off boarding staff when you're off boarding someone outside the business and you want to merge their email into a bucket account. And inside that bucket account means that you can always search through past employees email. Well, that's something that we do by default. Anytime we have bought a company user, when we're onboarding someone, we want to make sure they're in the right groups, we want to make sure they get all the right calendar invites that they need. We want to make sure they get permission to everything they need inside your Google account. And so we'll work with you to set up the correct permissions, the correct structures, the correct user groups and permission groups to help you make sure that everything's organized there. And then finally, an audit and cleanup of your Google Drive is probably a good idea. We do this for every single business that we work with just to make sure that your permissions are set correctly. You don't have random files that are owned by people outside the business that can potentially be lost and that you've got a Google Drive setup where everyone can see exactly what's happening and get a good opportunity to find the information that they need as they're looking for it. So let me know if this has been helpful drop a comment down below. I'd love to know how you go de-risking yourself in the business taking off the hat of the IT person and actually passing it over to someone else. If you're already a subscriber to Google Workspace, where you can jump on to our transfer in offer, switch your billing over to us and you get access to a bunch of free training videos from our team, a little bit of support from our support team and a free account check as well. If you're interested in that, jump on the link below. If you're not already subscribed to our channel, make sure you subscribe for this content and more. We've worked with literally 10s of 1000s of businesses all over the world and we look forward to helping you with your technology journey. Give us a thumbs up if you liked the content. And otherwise, I'll see you in the next video. Cheers.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
