I recently caught up with tech expert Tom Jeffs, founder or IT support business Lucidica to ask him to share some top tips for small businesses. We caught up at the British Library’s Business & IP Centre where we both run sessions to help small business owners. His excellent advice is in the video below and a guest blog with 10 Top IT Tips follow courtesy of Tom and James from Lucidica.
10 Essential IT Tips – Guest blog
1. Back Up
It’s one of the oldest rules in the book and yet it’s still one that people ignore day in day out. Unless you’re incredibly lucky, one morning sometime in the future your PC (or Mac, no favourites here) will greet you with a blank screen. There’s always a chance a team of experts might be able to salvage something from the husk, but in many cases the data is gone forever.
That’s why you need a backup; and if it’s crucial data, you should follow the 3-2-1 rule:
- 3 backup copies of your data, on…
- 2 different types of storage media (e.g. external hard drives and a cloud services)
- 1 of these should be offsite (inc. cloud services)
2. Buy cheap, buy twice
Buying anything, whether it’s a mobile phone or a server, where the only selling point is its price tag is not a smart way to buy technology. Not only are you likely to come up against issues using it, but it also won’t last very long. You’ll lose time using it, fixing it when it goes wrong, and will probably have to buy something better anyway. Buying replacements for cheap hardware will quickly cost more than a single reliable product.
3. Don’t buy ‘the best’
On the flipside, don’t go out and spend vast sums of cash on a laptop because of you’ve been promised it’s the best. Everyone in a business will need their devices for different purposes, and there’s no one-size-fits-all ‘best’ anything.
If your team are out on the road all they’ll need are mobiles with batteries that last until sundown. If your business does a lot of video work, a low-powered ‘business PC’ isn’t going to have the ‘oomph’ you need. Fragile glassy tablets aren’t going to want to find themselves at home in a construction site! Work out what you need your technology for and find something that fits the purpose.
4. Understand your customers
The first thing you should do with your website is to install an analytics tool. There are hundreds of free options like Google Analytics, to paid services like Clicky or Mint; but they all do the same basic thing: provide information about people using your site.
Where they came from, what they searched for, how they move around, where they exit, what device they’re using – everything you could possibly want to build a picture of who your customers are, and how they act. You can then use this information to optimise your site; making sure it’s exactly what your customers want.
5. Keep track of your client relationships
If things are going well, you’re likely to have quite a few customers to keep track of at any one time. Use a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) like KarmaCRM or Capsule to keep tabs on the conversations you’ve been having, keep all their contact details together and up to date, and to help ensure that good prospects don’t drop out of the pipeline over a missed phone call!
6. Embrace the cloud
If something’s cloud-based it means it’s not stored on your machines. The benefit of cloud services, whether it’s file storage (DropBox, OneDrive), email (Gmail, Outlook), or software (Adobe CC, SalesForce) include the flexibility that you can use it from any PC, automatic updates, increased security, it’s more scalable (just buy more licenses rather than more software) and it’s generally easier to use.
Cloud isn’t perfect, and there are downsides – but increasingly this option is favoured by businesses wanting to keep their costs down, and productivity up.
7. Passwords
They’re a real pain and they cause hours of frustration, but passwords really are your first line of defence. Whether you’ve had your laptop stolen or someone’s trying to break into your email, it’s your password that’s going to keep you from losing everything.
Simple rules include not using ‘password’ or ‘1234’, making it a minimum of 8 characters long and mixing numbers, letters and special characters. Try using a sentence – the longer the better as long as you can remember it. Or if you’re still struggling, try something like LastPass, which remembers all your passwords for you.
8. Anti-Virus
Another key to keeping your computer secure is making sure you’ve got up-to-date antivirus. There are millions of bits of nasty software floating around the web, all of which are waiting to open a back door to your PC in the hunt for sensitive information.
Anti-virus doesn’t have to be prohibitively costly either – AVG, Avast! and a whole host of other companies offer free versions of their software which are more than capable of fighting off malware.
9. Public Wifi
Every coffee shop worth its beans offers free wifi these days; but that doesn’t always mean it’s a good idea to start your online business banking with a latte in hand. Public networks are susceptible to thieves who can use software to listen in on everything you’re doing online. It’s estimated that over 1000GB of data is stolen this way every day. Take precautions and even look into using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) when browsing publically.
10. Get proper support
No one’s questioning the prowess of your mate Chris who’s good with computers. But when your server blows up at 3am and takes that big project for tomorrow afternoon with it, how willing is Chris going to be to help save your business?
A proper IT team will have the experience to handle this exact kind of thing, and they’ll help out at any hour of the day. They won’t complain about being dragged out of bed (that’s what you pay them for), and they’ll know exactly where the backups are kept. And in the long run, clearing up after Chris might cost you more than a support contract.
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Guest blog courtesy of Tom and James of Lucidica. Lucidica provide IT support, Cloud Services, Consulting, Websites and Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs).
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