When money’s tight, how do you keep things going and save money at the same time? I think you need a process to decide what to do with equipment that dies. When are you better off repairing/replacing, when to upgrade, and when to just let it die and do without?
My first rule is to upgrade whenever security is an issue. Many small businesses, especially those with 20 or fewer employees, still connect to the Internet through a consumer router they bought at Best Buy for $50 five years ago. When that finally dies, do not replace it with the same model, because your security needs have grown, whether you admit it or not.
Modern routers include much more robust firewalls and virus and spyware filtering tools. As your company grows, new employees won’t have the same work ethic and dedication to the company as the old hands. You may not need to track if Employee #2 in seniority is wasting time on a Fantasy Football league Web site, but it is nice to know if Employee #27 has a Facebook addiction.
It will cost a few hundred dollars to get a business class router, but it’s worth it. Just the ability to see who’s going to which Web sites provides endless hours of fascination, unless you’re happy paying people to stalk stuffed penguins and the like on eBay. This upgrade is particularly needed if your single company router provides wireless access. The older routers have wireless security, kind of, but new wireless security router modules actually stop hackers, not just annoy them.
Mobile workers really need security upgrades on their equipment. Never buy another laptop for field use that doesn’t support full disk encryption. Buying a model with a biometric fingerprint reader is OK, but a single good password to bypass the full disk encryption security will really protect your data. Just don’t let your employees choose a braindead password from this list of Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time.
Should you run out and upgrade your security equipment right away? If you have the money, then yes. If not, just make sure you upgrade anything to do with security, including backup for your files, whenever your existing system breaks.
Speaking of laptops, I now recommend that most companies forget desktops and buy laptops or workstations. With the lower price of laptops, and their increasing power and screen size, buy those in place of off the shelf desktops. Plus, since laptops use only about a third of the juice, you can call yourself green with a semi-straight face.
Another technology area that has really improved in services and features while dropping in price is hosted e-mail services. If you have your own e-mail server today, especially if it’s Microsoft Exchange, you know the time and trouble required to keep it up and running. I’ve talked to several companies this past year that have around 50 employees and run their own Exchange server. Each one of them has one tech that spends more than half the workday keeping that system running correctly, dealing with spam, viruses, and traffic load problems constantly.
Escape from your Exchange prison when you need to upgrade or repair the server or the software. You can get everything you have today from dozens of e-mail hosting services, including all your add-on Microsoft services like shared calendars and SharePoint and so on, for a few dollars per user per month.
Let specialists fight Exchange and the flood of spam while you relax. Another great bonus will be the Internet bandwidth you get back if you let someone far upstream at a hosting service block your spam and do your virus checking. Many small businesses are sold more bandwidth when all they really need is an upstream spam blocking service; don’t be one of them.
When should you not replace or upgrade something that dies? When no one asks you about it more than twice. If people really need it, they’ll tell you. If they can work around the loss, put that replacement on the back burner.
While I don’t want to put employees in the same parts bin as laptops, desktops, routers, and e-mail servers, they often need replacing or upgrading as well. Bean counters will tell you spending money on training during a recession is wasteful, since you can more easily replace employees when unemployment is high. Don’t let bean counters ruin your business.
Upgrading employees is always a good idea when you choose employees that have proven their worth over time. Sure, you can get another bookkeeper easily enough today, and they’ll know bookkeeping, but will they be reliable and easy to work with? Will they know how to cajole customers into paying up a little more quickly? Will they be able to handle suppliers trying to change terms and discounts?
You can teach employees skills, such as a new accounting program, but you can almost never teach people to be reliable, trustworthy, and personable. Every great employee success I’ve seen started with a young person who works hard, does the right thing, and can be trusted. Managers and owners realize the employee is worth training, they do so, and everyone benefits.
Hard working employees with good tools to help them get their jobs done make more money for the business. Lazy employees sent to training stay lazy, and they try to get another job for more money as soon as they get their certificate. Maximize the value of your good employees with training and better technology support.
