Anything I.T. and the Geek Collective provide an I.T. Support service and Website design to business clients in Plymouth, South West of the UK.
Atomic Habits is a book I’m currently reading and it just makes perfect sense! James Clear talks about how these small decisions or habits can be amazing catalysts in the long run to boost your business.
So how can you make small atomic decisions? Read on!
Small habitual actions
Small habitual actions producing long-term, sustainable results. Success in I.T. is often about making small decisions and changes, rather than high-impact decisions.
As you read this article consider what actions you take automatically that perhaps haven’t been beneficial to you and your business.
Atomic habits in I.T – Just make stopping and thinking a habit before making a decision.
Future thinking
Keeping the future of your business in mind when making technology decisions will not only help reduce embarrassing future high expenses but provide a fantastic tech platform for growth.
I wrote on my personal blog about the concept of Future Thinking. It needs a little more work but I believe the ideas are extremely pertinent to business too.
Small (yet important) choices
Small choices can make all the difference. Did you decide to put off upgrading your file storage systems, web and email hosting last year? Maybe, you now pay the price by:
- Website reliability and speed issues
- An inordinate amount of spam in your inbox(es)
- Too much time taken up with getting colleagues information which they could have had access to with an upgraded system. This could also include failure to provide important contacts with the right information quickly enough, losing sales or important deals in the process
- Loss of documents or other data due to failure to implement a good backup strategy (by the way, syncing services like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive are not good enough, I’ll explain later)
Concerns of present costs should not outweigh future-benefits
Are you in this for the long-term or not? Do you intend to be in business for more than a year? I should hope so! Then you need to spend some serious mental energies on your IT/web/telecoms systems. Making the right decision doesn’t even need to be expensive!
Before the nitty-gritty details, here are a couple of questions that must be considered:
How do I know I’m making the right decisions?
How do I know that everything is connecting and ‘hanging together’ correctly?
Seek trusted advice and making atomic decisions. That’s the answer
Consider all your business tech requirements under the following headings:
- I.T. Systems
- Web Systems
- Telecom Systems
- Bespoke (to your business) Systems
"Just make small (atomic) decisions to head your business in the right direction"
I.T. systems
I.T. systems are the things that you use every day such as turning on the computer and loading a program to carry out our duties. It could be sending and receiving emails, writing letters and printing them, entering data into a finance package, and so on. I.T. systems would include the wireless and cabled Internet connections, printers, webcams and microphones for meetings, the list goes on.
Everything about your I.T. systems must work well. The beauty of a good I.T. system is that you hardly know it’s there because it rarely goes wrong. Poor quality systems often throw up little annoying errors which compound over time and disrupt the flow.
In business, flow is so important (I see another blog post in my future) and choosing the right system to enable better flow is one of those crucial atomic choices you can make.
Network cabling from your router to your PC’s and the correct choice of equipment is essential. From wireless access points to routers, PC’s to Macs, door entry systems to CCTV’s. It’s all got to hang together somehow.
"Just make small (atomic) decisions to head your business in the right direction"
Web systems
These might include the hosting service for your website, the email platform, and how they all interlink with each other.
There are several very good server platforms to host websites and email applications. Amazon Web Services (AWS) being one such. AWS takes the level of server capabilities to another level. AWS might not be the right one for you though. Word of warning, you will need to have a really good understanding of AWS and server technologies to make this work.
You might be better off choosing a hoster who can offer at the very least unlimited bandwidth, unlimited space, and great support when/if things do go wrong.
Many providers of website design and hosting services offer monthly payment options. Anything I.T. and our partner Hello Simon (award-winning freelancer) offer this as a way for our clients to spread the costs of what would normally be a large outlay.
"Just make small (atomic) decisions to head your business in the right direction"
Ask your current provider if your website is hosted on the latest (and speedy) hard disk technology, known as SSD. These hard drives on web servers are super fast, much faster than ‘older’ drives.
Should you choose a website made with WordPress or one that is custom-coded (hand-written programming)? Around a third of websites made today are made with WordPress.
WordPress is now extremely popular because it not only provides the business owner with a way of creating and editing pages on their site but it has a wide range of ‘plugins’ providing versatility.
Sometimes that is not enough and you need someone to program a website for you. That’s okay. Handwriting a website provides an opportunity to make it do exactly what you want, BUT can be a lot more expensive than a WordPress created site.
Websites by Anything I.T. and Hello Simon
Please also consider how you market your site. Likely, you will need an SEO service like that provider by Hello Simon (SEO). Again, this can be paid for on a monthly basis. In fact, this is highly recommended since SEO is best planned for the long-term.
Telecom Systems
Gone are the days when a fully-featured telephone system costs the earth. I remember not so long ago it would cost a minimum of £1,000 to get started. That was just for the hardware!
Perhaps thousands of pounds plus huge ongoing support costs just so you could put calls on hold, play them a message so they could choose the right department, or transfer calls to another team member. Then you had the BT line and call expenses on top! You’d need ISDN which was expensive as well.
Nowadays, you can pay as little as £20 per team member with unlimited calls with all the features, and more, of a state-of-the-art telephone system! All this in ‘the cloud’ so no expensive BT lines required.
The system we provide is by a very accomplished provider called Wildix.
Anything I.T. and Hello Comtec offer a service called Number Club. Get in touch if this interests you.
"Just make small (atomic) decisions to head your business in the right direction"
Bespoke Systems
From a distance, this looks daunting and you’d be forgiven if you don’t see how this fits in with the topic of atomic habits.
Sometimes businesses need to run software that is pertinent to their business. There are countless numbers of them!
From accounting systems to property management portals (by the way, Anything I.T. make one called Posidacious), care home software, car sales.
There are sales systems that help you gain leads and sales sometimes called funnels. Once again, monthly payments are the norm here so if you budget well based on your income then you should do well.
You name it, if you have a business, there’s probably some bespoke software that’s been made for you.
Just be aware of the costs such software as they can be crippling. Maybe you could commission a company to make your own! If you do, you might want to consider something that is cloud-based rather than a piece of software that is installed on your PC.
As for the support of such software, in most cases, you will need to pay for support from the provider, rather than outsource support to a company like Comtec ICT or Anything I.T.
"Just make small (atomic) decisions to head your business in the right direction"
Ask us how bespoke software impacts on your I.T. systems though.
Cloud-based business-class web and I.T. systems
Here are some examples of business-class software and systems that you really should consider, but with relative low-cost impact on your business.
- Office 365 for Business – Email, cloud storage (OneDrive) and much more, monthly payments from less than £6 per month (Price List)
- Shopify – An online store anyone can set up for a monthly fee (you can get us to set it up for you)
- Xero – cloud accounting package, paid monthly, invoices, quotes, reminders, pay directly from the invoice and much more
- Canva – Make marketing images for social media, business cards and more. There’s a free version and a paid-for version
- Hootsuite – Manage multiple social media accounts from one program
- WordPress – A content management system for your website – A WordPress support and management service can be purchased through Anything I.T. – See Price List
"Just make small (atomic) decisions to head your business in the right direction"
Summarisation
I know I’ve repeated myself about making small decisions throughout this post. It bears repeating though! You don’t need to make big, expensive decisions when considering technology. Just a small one here and there to nudge your business in the right direction.
The benefits will astound you. Once more:
"Just make small (atomic) decisions to head your business in the right direction"