Business owners are the worst IT managers for their companies. In
this video, I'm going to share with you the deadly don'ts of
being a business owner and also trying to manage your IT and
what you can do about it.
My name is Pete Moriarty and we've helped 1000s of business
owners all over the world, get their tech, right so they can
grow and scale more successful businesses. Now, if you're right
now, someone who's doing it yourself, I'm hoping that no
matter what stage of business you're at, I can give you some
tips on how to make sure you are stepping back from the IT
control seat, and hopefully no longer holding your business
back.
Now, if you're new to the channel, check out our growth
roadmap. We've got playlists for every different stage of
business and helping you making sure that your technology is the
right strategy for helping you to grow your business. And we
really love helping small business owners succeed. No
matter what stage of business you're at, right now, we want to
make sure that you've got the right tech in place so you can
grow a productive team and have a business that works on your
terms.
So let's talk about tech in business. For most business
owners, they spend a lot of time doing it themselves,
particularly in the early stages of business. And what that
typically looks like is Googling around watching videos on
YouTube, and putting together band aid solutions for making
the technology inside a business work. And while that's all well
and good when maybe you're a startup or you don't have any
employees in the business and you're just a sole operator, and
you'll see that in our growth roadmap, as you progress through
the different stages of growth in business, and you start
bringing on other team members, many business owners never
change their habits, and still want to be the person who is the
go to for technology.
Now unfortunately, we've seen over time business owners who
have 5, 10, 15, 20+ employees still wearing the IT manager hat
inside the business. And let me tell you, that is not productive
use of your time, it's also probably not something I'd want
to trust you with. If you're someone who runs an ecommerce
store, or maybe you're someone who has a manufacturing store or
business or maybe a retail outlet, I don't know if I'd
trust you to go to a hardware and buy some wood bricks and
some concrete and build me a house. And that's because you're
probably not trained in those disciplines to be a carpenter or
to be a builder. And it's the same kind of thing with it, we
see business owners who are doing the technology themselves.
And not only are they taking time away from high value tasks
that they could be doing otherwise, which are probably
their talents, but also you may be leaving your business exposed
to risks as well. So I want to share some of the things that we
see business owners doing and what then to do about it.
Now most business owners have probably set up their emails
themselves. When they first got started, you register a domain
name. If you started with Wix or Squarespace for your website,
you probably signed up to that yourself. But for many business
owners who are in the Google Workspace ecosystem,
particularly businesses that have started in the last five
years, business owners tend to be pretty savvy these days and
have kind of like enough knowledge to be dangerous. And
so many business owners have actually set up their own DNS
records and DNS records being domain name records to configure
a Google Workspace account. What we also see business owners
doing is things like onboarding and offboarding staff. So when a
new person joins your company, you just go to your Workspace
and you click plus one, and you add an extra user in there. And
when someone leaves, you know, you know how to kind of like,
reset their password or switch them off. Now, there are some of
the basics that business owners typically take care of. But then
what happens is from time to time you have employees join and
they need a new hardware device. And so all of a sudden, you're
running up a new laptop for someone, or you're educating
your staff on how to use Google Workspace. So you're running
training for them as well, all of a sudden, your IT technology
trainer. Or maybe you're helping someone to clean up a virus on
their computer because they don't know how to fix it. You're
the only one in the business who the responsibility falls too.
Can you see how this role is starting to look more and more
like an IT manager instead of a business owner? Well, what ends
up happening and these are the effects of these things is that
let's say you've set up your own DNS, but maybe you only set up
half of it correctly enough so that the emails work. But maybe
you didn't configure all the records correctly. We see for
most businesses that we audit their Workspace accounts,
they've missed out one or two things like maybe DKIM or DMARC
records to make sure that your emails don't end up going in
spam. And we see a lot of customers who come to us who say
they are missing orders from customers, because customer
emails going to spam or when they do outreach in a business
development role that their emails are ending up in their
prospects spam. And what that means is they're actually
missing out on business, because they've misconfigured, the
technical side of the domain that.
Next up customers come to us and their Google Drive is an
absolute mess, files are missing, they can't find things.
Or they had a virtual assistant or a contractor to the business
who is using an external personal Gmail account to share
files, and that person has ceased working for them. And all
the files have disappeared from the Google Drive. Not only that,
but if your Google Drive is a mess, it can be really hard and
time consuming. For team members to actually find files and
information.
Next up, we tend to see when we look into an admin account that
there's lots of user accounts that are unaccounted for. And
what I mean by that is there's lots of people who have left the
business over time, but their accounts are still active and
alive inside of Google workspace. And what ends up
happening is you have to pay extra for all of those accounts.
But there may be information that your team members need, or
even that you need, hiding away in those accounts, and I know
it, I get the feeling that you don't want to delete those
accounts, or what do you do with that data? Well, it ends up kind
of getting stuck there. And inevitably, one of the biggest
issues that customers come to us with is they've had some kind of
data loss event. So whether that be an account that was
compromised, something got deleted, something wasn't backed
up properly, and now it's gone missing, or they're just in
complete overwhelm with their technology tasks, they are
finding that they're not able to get their productive work done,
because they're spending all of their time being an IT manager
for the rest of the business.
Now, you don't have to be an entrepreneur or a founder for
this to be your challenge, you may be an operations manager,
you may be an office manager, you may be the person who's just
been kind of lumped with this job. And so I'm going to now
transition to talking about what are some of the things that you
can do to de-role yourself from the IT manager role inside the
business, because we want to hand this over to someone else,
we want to make sure that this is no longer your
responsibility, or ideally, that responsibility is 8020. And
we've reduced it right down just to the absolute most most
important things.
Well, number one is to do a task audit, you want to do an audit
of all of the IT tasks that are happening in the business right
now, whether that's updating and maintaining the website,
changing DNS settings, onboarding and offboarding
staff, organizing your Google Drive, troubleshooting things,
when someone has a computer problem, helping someone to get
started on a new computer training your new team members,
when they come on board, all of these things need to be
accounted for including how much time you're actually spending
doing that.
Number two, you want to make sure that you document and
systemise all of those things, it helps to build an online
intranet with all of your systems, processes and policies.
And we've got guides and videos on how to do that using Google
Sites, you want to have all of your IT policies and information
documented. So you've got it all written down. And that's the
next step to delegate to someone else.
Number three is delegating. When you delegate, you want to take
your hat off and put that hat on to somebody else. Now, whether
that's internal staff, and I've got some warnings around that,
or an external IT party, which also comes with its own
challenges, you want to make sure that that goes off your hat
and onto somebody else's plate. Let's talk about those for a
second. The advantages of doing it internally, if you hand this
off to someone else, like maybe an operations or an office
manager is that that person is going to be close enough to you
being inside the business that you can rely on them to take
care of that. And you can always kind of like hit them up during
the day if you need anything. The downside is that if you
designate that to one person in the business, and they may be a
tech savvy person, if they ever leave the business and are
replaced by someone who's not as tech savvy as them, or if they
leave, and they haven't documented anything, and we see
this over and over and over again, that intellectual
property is lost. And that job role immediately goes back to
you after they've left the business. So that's not our
recommendation, my recommendation is instead to
hand off to an external IT party, someone like itGenius
would be a good fit. If you need basic tasks done remotely.
Things like onboarding and offboarding. Things like
managing DNS, things like making sure things are backed up,
organizing Google Drive, all of these is to say that they are
tasks that I probably wouldn't be giving to your internal team,
they're probably better farmed out to someone else.
Now, if you're interested, itGenius has a Concierge program
that does exactly this. We have an AI-based chatbot, which
actually has humans in the background as well, which allows
you to quickly interface with our support team for adding and
removing staff changing settings inside of G Suite. Basically,
anything you need to do in the Google world, our team had just
a couple of clicks away. And rather than working with the
direct Google support team who are really good at supporting
the product, but not really there to support businesses, and
not really there as a concierge service to help with your
business processes. Our team are all dedicated to helping you
make sure you reduce the amount of time that you're spending
doing tech tasks yourself.
Now, we have policies already created as a go to for
onboarding and off boarding staff when you're off boarding
someone outside the business and you want to merge their email
into a bucket account. And inside that bucket account means
that you can always search through past employees email.
Well, that's something that we do by default. Anytime we have
bought a company user, when we're onboarding someone, we
want to make sure they're in the right groups, we want to make
sure they get all the right calendar invites that they need.
We want to make sure they get permission to everything they
need inside your Google account. And so we'll work with you to
set up the correct permissions, the correct structures, the
correct user groups and permission groups to help you
make sure that everything's organized there. And then
finally, an audit and cleanup of your Google Drive is probably a
good idea. We do this for every single business that we work
with just to make sure that your permissions are set correctly.
You don't have random files that are owned by people outside the
business that can potentially be lost and that you've got a
Google Drive setup where everyone can see exactly what's
happening and get a good opportunity to find the
information that they need as they're looking for it.
So let me know if this has been helpful drop a comment down
below. I'd love to know how you go de-risking yourself in the
business taking off the hat of the IT person and actually
passing it over to someone else. If you're already a subscriber
to Google Workspace, where you can jump on to our transfer in
offer, switch your billing over to us and you get access to a
bunch of free training videos from our team, a little bit of
support from our support team and a free account check as
well. If you're interested in that, jump on the link below. If
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otherwise, I'll see you in the next video. Cheers.