An IT Consultation Can Find Your Biggest Gaps

Do you feel like your business could be doing better? Does it feel like things move slowly, as if there were bottlenecks somewhere in your bottom line, or that something is just holding you back?

Even if it’s not all bad, do you ever get the sense that things could be going a little better for your company?

Let me tell you about a conversation I had the other day.

Steering the Big Ship

I was talking with an old colleague the other day—we were catching up on how things were going, talking about the camping trip he took with his family, talking shop about some business-related stuff. It wasn’t really about technology at that point, just two colleagues shooting the breeze.

His company had grown quite a bit over the years, going from a small handful of employees to around two dozen over the last several years. I love seeing that kind of growth and I always like having “what are your next steps” conversations with other business owners.

I asked him if he had any plans for growth over the next several years, and where he saw things going. He said to me, “I have lots of ideas, but when I was small, my business felt like it was just me in a small rowboat. If I wanted to go against the current, I could just get out, get my feet wet, and push. Now that my business is a little bigger, it’s like I’m steering a great big cargo ship, and no matter how many people I get to wade in the water to push, it barely changes direction.”

I really like this analogy, because I think a lot of small business owners who have experienced growth feel this from time to time, especially if you started out really small and scrappy. It’s true, over time, it becomes harder to make big changes to a growing business. You gain more customers, you get more work, you have more employees to pay… All of that makes things much more complex.

There’s Usually a Reason for a Loss of Momentum

I empathized with him, but I really wanted to dig in to see where things were getting caught up within his business. I asked him a handful of questions—what kind of stuff do your employees get stuck on? What kinds of excuses are they giving you when initiatives aren’t completed? Are there communication problems, are there bottlenecks, etc?

Together, we established that there is a big issue with just how much time most of their day-to-day processes take, all the way from the beginning. There weren’t communication gaps, but every single step of the way seemed to take longer than it should have, which meant by the time a task reached the production team, it was already behind.

I encouraged him to let us visit onsite for a few hours to run a real audit. We have a set of tools that allows a technician to quickly run a handful of in-depth reports to find any major technology issues, like out-of-date drivers, security updates, and that sort of thing.

While the tools were running, we chatted with a few members of the production staff. That’s when we identified a much larger issue…

Nearly every single task that the production team had to do throughout the day included grabbing a file off the server, moving it to the local machine, opening it in one application, resaving it as a different format, then opening the new file in another application to work on it, and then repeating the process in reverse to get the original file back onto the server.

That’s a lot of tasks, and while it only takes about 10 minutes, each employee on the team was doing that multiple times each day. Sometimes, a step would get missed and the wrong file would get pushed to the server, or someone might forget to push the file to the server. It was a mess.

They had tried everything to streamline the process, but since the connection to the server was pretty slow, and the software they were using was kind of finicky, they were forced to do it the hard way.

We had the network fixed and upgraded by the end of the week, and they’ll be upgrading to a new version of their software that won’t require them to change the file format each time. This will result in a 30% increase in productivity for that department, with a lot fewer frustrating issues (not to mention fewer frustrated workers).

Sometimes, the Answer is Right Under Your Nose

Business owners and managers tend to rack their brains solving issues and streamlining processes. Sometimes it just takes a second set of eyes, and sometimes it just takes a more technical approach. In this case, however, a simple audit and a handful of good questions got us to the solution. I’m not saying it’s easy—I’ve personally stared at problems that seemed like a dead end, until my son took a preliminary glance and had the perfect answer served up with my own slice of humble pie.

The point is, that a technical audit can often uncover a lot of things that can make steering the big ship easier. 

If you’d like us to sit down with you and talk shop, and audit your IT to find ways you can improve processes and get more done in the day, you can book a call with us here.