As a business owner, you may not be technologically savvy, but deep down you feel something’s just not right with your business. You may suspect some employee’s ulterior or even self-serving motives, where they conveniently seem to be the only one who knows how to solve certain issues that keep arising. You may suspect perhaps groups or whole departments aren’t focused on keeping your company growing as much as they are keeping their jobs and themselves relevant.
Who can you trust regarding technology you don’t have a deep understanding of?
But how will you know if you just keep taking their word for it? Of course, that’s when you need to get and independent second opinion and that’s where we can help you. How do you know we won’t recommend solutions that will just keep you relying on us? Well, you don’t, but that’s not how we operate. Many consultants you may hire will do exactly that — I’ve seen unscrupulous vendors recommend ridiculously costly solutions that in no way were in the best intentions of their clients but would only benefit themselves. Recommending solutions, systems, and platforms they’re well verse in or even already have similar templates and system designs to only charge full price for minor customization yet claim the system were created from scratch.
This is okay as long as there is an understanding of the value of buying a proven system as opposed to being charged for it to be proprietary and originally created to find out later it was cloned and slightly modified any way. Many companies couldn’t care less and shouldn’t — as long as the system delivered was what was expected for the price they paid for it. However, if you are in a niche business and believe you are paying for original software that you own and can resell perhaps to other industry partners or even your competitors, this is where the real trouble can begin, because it is not original software and you cannot resell it commercially.
Here are some tell-tale signs that perhaps your infrastructure is not designed to your company’s needs and not performing optimally
- You are dependent on an outside contractor or consultant to fix minor issues and do not have a basic understanding of the cause or the solution.
- Past reports of given time periods of you
- Small changes and updates you think would be minor takes weeks or months to make.
- r business, customer, sales, accounting, or other relevant data change when reports are ran again later that cover the same time periods. This is very bad, if your business records of historical transactions can be modified, your data that reflects reality is corrupt. For instance, if a customer paid $799 for your latest widget, the fact that’s what they paid at the time never changes. If your database is designed properly, historical data will never be altered, meaning it maintains integrity tied to reality and facts. Otherwise, how is the data preserved? Databases with a data destructive design are always going to corrupt your data. Good luck if you are ever going to be audited, either by the IRS, your franchisor, or other company you are beholden to.
- Strange “ghosts in the machine” appear — records change, go missing, and other weird and inexplicable things relating to your data seem commonplace.
- It seems normal that something breaks at least once per month that disrupts business.
These are symptoms of poor infrastructure design and performance. Some things, like weather conditions or internet connection outages are unavoidable, but there are many parts of your infrastructure you can improve and make much more reliable. More reliable infrastructure means less time and resources devoted to addressing these ad hoc issues and more for your company to focus on being productive and actually doing what you’re supposed to, and are designed to do. This results in reaching your goals and deadlines much faster, closing more sales, posting more quality content on your site, improving the quality of your marketing campaigns and related content, having more time to plan and execute more profitable ideas.
By fixing your infrastructure, you reach your goals and deadlines faster, having more thought equity to invest in your future efforts.
We go in with one question from an outsider’s perspective and ask:
“What would we do in your company’s situation?”
We know how to get legacy systems to work with new systems and also how to migrate you to a modern system and all it takes to get there. The longer you delay in hanging on to your old system, the more painful and expensive it will be later to modernize. We have the experience to guide you through the tangled web woven!