The True Cost of Tech: In this week’s episode of The Entrepreneur Expedition, we will be discussing your company’s hardware and software choices from a philosophical and financial perspective.
Transcription: Entrepreneur Expedition Episode 102: The True Cost of Tech
Hello everyone and welcome back to The Entrepreneur Expedition. This is your host, Alex Iglesias, and this week, we’ll be talking about technology and small businesses — and how the choices you make can, at times, cost or save thousands of dollars not listed on the price tag.
The True Cost of Tech: Questions to ask
Technology plays a huge part in any company. I think this is a concept that doesn’t need to be detailed. I’m not here to talk about how great technology is, but hopefully, I can bring some new thoughts to you.
If you’re a current or future business owner, before you select any technology, you need to come up with not only your business plan but your business goals. Where do you see your company in ten years? Do you want it to be a global enterprise, or do you want it to stay a local mom-and-pop type thing? Do you imagine having 300 employees or maxing out at 10? These questions will help you determine the type of scalability you need in your software and hardware choices.
The True Cost of Tech: Try to Foresee Your Needs
Switching costs from one software suite to another can be huge as they can range anywhere from having to spend money on training employees on the new system to having to pay expensive IT consultants to transfer data across the platforms all the way to having to decide to lose information because of untransferable data. All of these are huge costs that will exceed the literal cost of the new software. The same thing goes with hardware. Mac OS and Windows are about ninety ninety eight percent of the way to true interchangeability at this point, but you might find in the future there are softwares you might need that will run on one, but not the other. For example, I know that ArcGIS — it’s a cartography software — ArcGIS does not run on Mac OS. It’s Windows only. So if you’re getting into, you know, geographical intelligence analysis into that industry, you’re not going to want to use Mac.
This step of your expedition requires critical thinking adaptability and a lot of foresight into your future once these things are taken into mind. You’ll need to actually make your choices. These choices will include everything from accounting and finance software, supply chain, possible customer relationship management, project management, inter-team communication, customer communication — you name it. When you’re starting out or if you’re upgrading your systems you need to think about every possible type of software you might need.
The True Cost of Tech: Consider Convenience
The great thing about the current state of software and hardware, though, is at this point there have been huge leaps made by a variety of companies to create solid inter-compatible ecosystems of products. For example, Intuit has their own suite of first and third party software’s that can allow you to link a wide variety of your process-related software together. Like, I know they offer a few POS systems that can link directly to QuickBooks. It’s super convenient. It’s a great thing to do to look into these types of ecosystems in the same way of hardware companies and their respective operating systems work seamlessly together, perhaps much better, than using multiple platforms.
I know it’s been I know it’s proven very convenient and inexpensive for my company being able to FaceTime each other from the pre-configured FaceTime app on Mac and iOS rather than having everyone, you know, download Skype or something else. Now, obviously, isn’t a big deal, but the concept applies across the board and convenience truly matters. And really that’s the moral of the story when it comes to tech and communication. Whether you’re starting up a company right now or evaluating the systems of your existing company, convenience is what keeps people happy and productive.
The True Cost of Tech: Wrapping Up
Utilizing effective cloud storage for example will give anyone access to the same documents on any device automatically rather than having to email things to yourself or put them on flash drives and transfer the data manually. It saves time and money for your company and for your employees enabling team members with high quality and regular upgraded or updated hardware that they enjoy using will boost employee satisfaction and save you lots of money on first off on troubleshooting faulty equipment if you’re upgrading and updating regularly you could even potentially lose sales or hit snags because your systems are failing and that costs that cost money to fix. And it could also cost money in revenues because of unhappy customers your employee turnover rate will also be lower.
Saving it doesn’t save you thousands of dollars on hiring and training. Efficient systems will allow quality work to be done in faster time leading to higher customer satisfaction and ultimately higher referral rates increasing sales opportunities volume and revenues. The list goes on. All I’m saying is, the next time you’re browsing the internet or the store shelves for your hardware or software configurations, consider these thoughts, and maybe say no to picking up that $200 laptop to save money because you’ll likely pay much more for that choice in the future.
Well, that’s about a wrap. Once again, this is Alex Iglesias of ALTO Solutions Group and this is The Entrepreneur Expedition. Talk to you next week. Check-in with us every Friday. There should be a new podcast every Friday. Talk to you then. Bye!