Why Your Small Business Doesn’t Need an IT Guy

Let’s face it, your small or medium-sized business probably doesn’t need an “IT guy”. It’s 2010, not 1995, and most likely what you need is an agile web company with great support. When we speak about the IT field, things like inefficiency, legacy, and big reoccurring fees come to mind for most of us. Whether we call it a revelation, or a revolution, almost everything small businesses do, can [or will be] simple and web-based.

You’re Email.

Although Microsoft Outlook still holds the largest market share for email clients at around 37% (Email client trends for 2009), the trend continues to be that web-based email clients (Hotmail, Gmail) are on the rise by about six percent in 2009, and clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook are seeing drop in usage anywhere between three and nine percent. When you’re average Joe at the local flower shop wants to email someone, and is faced with options for TLS or SSL email encryption, he can go with an IT guy, or move to a simple solution like Gmail.

One better, Google Apps makes it really simple to setup Gmail with your webserver, which means you can have email addresses like “you@yourdomain.com”, all controlled through the simple Gmail control panel. Your email can be accessed from anywhere in the world, it is fully encrypted, and you don’t need an IT guy to explain it because Google does a great job with tutorials. The only techy work is from a web team who change a couple things called MX records on your server, we can do that.

Your Website.

If you’re a young or small business, you are relying on setting yourself apart from the crowd, because if you don’t, your business will fail. You want a cool website, something that engages users and is peppered with crisp graphics and photography; we know. Unfortunately when you put this in the hands of an IT guy, he might be great at setting up servers, and maybe he took a class on HTML in college, but when it comes your online presence, he will probably screw you over. A website used to be a “coding” thing, something only geeks in basements could do, but it’s now a full-fledged marketing tool that needs everything from built-in blogging, to the hippest social media integration. There is a huge leap between those who can build websites, to those who can build websites correctly.

You’re Finances.

Our affinity for desktop financial software is similar to our affinity for petting cobras. The first time you open QuickBooks, you immediately realize there isn’t going to be anything quick about it. As a small business you are worried about a couple things relating to your finances, keeping it quick, and being informed. You don’t have money for an IT guy to setup your financial database, with your invoice templates, hooked to your printer, exporting to some Excel archive. Add a computer, better buy another software license, and not to mention deal a plethora of operating system and hardware requirement hurdles. Use a WebApp for your invoices, and either have a web team take an hour to show you how to use it, or take a morning and learn it yourself. Look into Freshbooks, FreeAgent, or Blinksale.

The Difference between Agile Web Teams and IT Guys

The world of IT is by nature wrapped up in legacy software, and slow implementation. This might be okay for corporations, and large entities, but most small businesses need everything done five minutes ago. We [Prime Studios] can run full security audits, buy domains, and send any file from any project from our phones.

Scany, GoDaddy, and SugarSync iPhone Apps

The fact is that local storage is becoming second to “the cloud”, and there is no such thing as a “workstation” for people; we work from our laptops, our phones, on airplanes, and should expect an internet connection to be enough for 95% of our business tasks. The new-age is replacing IT guys with VOIP applications like Skype and Google Voice, eliminating the need for a database guru with simple web and phone apps, and taking advantage of smart web teams who stay on top of the very best ways to make a small business grow, and not worry about the tech.