Peter Moriarty: Are you a business owner concerned about
the rising costs in your business, or maybe you've got a
whole bunch of different tech tools, and they're just starting
to spin out of control. In this video, I'm going to cover why
you should be consolidating your IT costs and some ideas on how
you can do that.
If you don't know about us, my name is Peter Moriarty. I'm an
IT consultant. And we help small and medium sized business owners
with their technology strategy. And we take businesses through a
growth roadmap, which is the different stages of Business and
Technology strategies for each different stage. Now, on our
channel, you'll find other videos in our playlist about how
you can learn about the different stages of business,
and some key tips for each one of those. But in this video,
we're talking about once your tech tools start to get a bit
out of control, how can you start to like rein in some of
those costs. And as you scale as a business, what I've found for
myself having grown a multimillion dollar recurring
revenue business, and we now have over 50 employees across
the business, and like literally 10s of 1000s of people that we
support, I found that one of the most important disciplines to
learn as a business owner is the discipline of finances. And what
that means is actually learning the commercial ins and outs of
your business and understanding how things work with everything
to do with the numbers. Now, this is something that often
business owners will abdicate or just kind of be afraid of
managing, it's the kind of thing that because it's not a core
competency, people will push that to the side and kind of
leave it to the accountant. But it's something that's really
important to develop as an entrepreneur, for you to grow a
successful business. Now, one of my favorite books on this is a
book called profit first, and I will drop a link to that down
below as well if you're interested in that. And that
really sets a bit of a foundation for how you should be
thinking about the different way that profits and monies kind of
flows through the business. Another one is called big
profits. And I'll link to that one down there as well. So let's
talk about ways that you can actually reduce some of the
expenses in your business or keep a lid on your IT costs. My
first tip is to actually do a credit card cut up. Now, that
doesn't mean stop using credit cards altogether, because using
a credit card can be great for points, especially if you've got
large business expenses, it's a great way to rack up points and
you can use them for flights or hotels or other things. But what
I mean is to actually cancel and have your credit card re issued
you just call up and let them know you lost it and you want to
ask for a new number. And what happens is all of your it
subscriptions will stop working right? And you'll get emails and
you know, you start getting a letter from zoom saying, Hey,
can you please put a new credit card into your account. And what
that does is it forces you to actually investigate every one
of your tools that you're paying for right now. And so if you
haven't used something in the last six months, and you're
unlikely to use it in the next 30 days, probably good time to
review and switch that one off. And you're going to
progressively do that for each one of the tools that you have.
Now cutting up the credit card is a nice reminder, because it's
going to prompt you to check in on each one of those. Now, my
number two tip is to reduce the number of users that you have in
your accounts, what we found is quite often we'll have people
start in a business. And when they leave a business, no one
kind of goes around and cleans up the users that are left in
different accounts. And so if you've got a Google workspace
account, you might be keeping the data of an old user who's
left the business rather than actually shutting down and
stopping paying for that license. So one of the things
that we do if you're a Google workspace user, and you're a
concierge member of our support service, we will actually help
you to consolidate all users and to archive their data. What that
means is you actually get a safe and secure inside an account
where you can access at any time the historical emails and
historical files of someone and Google doesn't give you a
solution for that out of the box. So that's a nice little
tip. If you're using Google workspace that kind of flows on
to my next tip, which is asking, Is it possible for you to share
users, if you've got multiple staff in the business and maybe
multiple people are working on a customer service type role?
Could you potentially share users or if you're using
something like Canva, if only one person at a time needs to
use the account? Well, why not use a tool like LastPass to
securely share the password with different team members. And then
from there, you can have multiple people use the one
license. Now, I'm not necessarily advocating that you
try and go outside of the terms of use of different online
products, like deliberately. But if you can save a few bucks
there, by having a couple of people share an account, there
might be a smarter way to work rather than paying to license
every single user. Now one of the things that we see many
business owners who are using Google workspace do is to
continue to use I call them double up apps or redundant
applications once they've made the switch to Google.
And so if you're still using slack as a chat application,
when Google has an amazing chat application called Google Chat,
or if you're still using Dropbox instead of using Google Drive,
or maybe you're using zoom when you could be potentially using
Google meet instead. These are all costs that add up not just
for you as a business owner, but also for all of your employees
as well. And so I like to do a little bit of an audit of like,
Okay, what tools are we using? And could we do these the Google
way? Are we still paying for Microsoft Office 365 every year
and could we instead use Google format documents inside of
Google Drive, which, by the way, now let you edit Microsoft
documents for free. So if you're interested in more videos on
switching from Microsoft documents over to Google
documents, or maybe switching from Dropbox to Google Drive,
we've got some more videos on that. And of course, link them
down below for you to check those out. Now, number five tip
is to get rid of your server. For many businesses, I don't
know why. But they still have local infrastructure hanging
around in their business, either they have like a network
harddrive, or they're using someone's PC to share files. Or
maybe there's a dedicated server solutions still sitting there.
And they haven't transitioned to cloud apps, or haven't
transitioned to using something like Google Drive for all of
their files. Now, we know that Google Drive works for terabytes
and terabytes of storage. And as long as you configure it
correctly, with the right sharing permissions, using the
shared drives feature, you can have all of your data protected
and secured and available to all of your team members no matter
what computer using without having to spend 20, or $30,000
on a service system every three to five years. And so that's my
final tip. If you're still a business that's in that era,
then have a chat to our team. And we'll be more than happy to
help out with a transition plan to move away from that local
infrastructure. Now, all these tips have been about trying to
stop doing things that haphazard way, and consolidate your
technology systems so that you can scale. What we know from
successful businesses is that they have a simple repeatable
process. And they have simple repeatable technology systems
that can then allow the business to scale and your technology
should really be there to be supporting your team members and
empowering your team members to get their jobs done more
productively and be able to get their best work done at work.
And so one of the other tools that we use is called cobert
CRM. And what that helps us do is to consolidate our
communications, and all of our relationships with different
team members. Now, we've produced a number of videos
lately on choosing a great CRM system and how important a CRM
system is to businesses why it should really be the heart of
your business. I'll link those ones down below if you haven't
already seen them. But if you haven't had a chat to our team
about renewing or reviewing how you're managing your
relationships with your customers, with your partners
with anyone you're doing a deal with, or just internally
tracking your communication with customers in one central
location, then maybe it's time to have a chat with our team.
Jump on the offer below and have a chat to our team about copper
CRM. Plenty of great stuff to learn there and I look forward
to catching you in the next video.