Technology and Your Business

By Sean Campbell, Principal Technology Evangelist, Campbell Solutions

This series focuses on “firsts” that new business owners will experience as they grow their business. I’ll try to distill some of the lessons I’ve learned as I grew my company, 3 Leaf, the experiences I’ve had as part of other companies, as well as some of my more recent experiences as part of my new venture. I hope that each new article will set you on a higher and more straightforward path to success.

The first article in this series was Hiring your First Salesperson. Second article was Using Contractors to Grow your Business.

Technology-based companies whose founders are knee deep into technology sometimes face an interesting challenge. The challenge primarily presents itself when the founder or those nearest to him or her rush out and acquire the latest and greatest technology that they believe will save the company time, dollars or both.

This phenomenon is common in small technology-focused businesses where the owners gush about a new 802.11n wireless network, a new search appliance or new matching 30-inch LCDs purchased for themselves or others. Rarely, however, do such owners ask the hard questions about the real impact said technology is may provide -- especially when compared against its total cost of acquisition. I suspect that many business founders with a technology background seriously underestimate this, because for them, learning new technology is a relatively easy project, otherwise they wouldn’t be in a position of technical leadership.

I’m not saying that dual monitors for some people on the team, or a new search appliance for some companies won’t be worth the investment in time and money. But they must be evaluated as business decisions, not as new technology toys or devices that seem like they would make everyone more productive.

I am far from a Luddite. In fact, most people who know me would be surprised I would even write a column with this angle. However, I have learned that just because you can personally implement a technology does not mean that it makes sense to do so for a portion or all of your business.

The classic case of this is when I attempted to move all of our accounting online. You would think this would make logical sense. With the distributed and growing team we had at the time it seemed silly to be using QuickBooks the way we were. Some type of all up, “room to grow” solution (such as a NetSuite or similar) made sense. Or so it seemed. The reality was far from it.

After a small set of communications with my team I quickly realized that while I might have been more productive in an environment with more knobs and bells and whistles and actually gotten more out of the product personally, the people doing the accounting were quite happy with QuickBooks. So happy, in fact, that they were more productive using a two-year-old version of QuickBooks, and begged me not to upgrade. Now don’t get me wrong; one of the people doing accounting had a master’s degree and another was more than accomplished as well. So this wasn’t a matter of raw intellect or capability. This was simply a matter of my attempting to weld more technology onto a problem domain (accounting, in this case) that didn’t need it.

Owners who come from a technology background can be especially susceptible to wanting to move company, systems and processes to the latest and greatest hardware and software. We “know” that the technology is for real in a given case and will stand the test of time. Or at least we figure we’ll be more right than someone who doesn’t know technology. But at the end of the day, parts of your business will work better with more emphasis on technology, and others, with less. Here are just a few examples that I have personally experienced:

• An investment early on in an internally hosted portal solution. It seemed like the right idea at the time: organize the company, organize its communications, etc. However, what I found is that less is more. For example, Basecamp is a great product that makes it easy to set up basic portals, and we leveraged it very heavily once we settled on it. And there are hosted solutions for a variety of other products from Microsoft and others that make sense as well.
• A deep investment in hosting our own Exchange server for mail early on. We did this for a number of years, and, while the IT side of the house learned a lot by dogfooding the latest Microsoft releases, the company as a whole might have been better served by simply using a hosted exchange solution. Or, for that matter, something even simpler in the early stages of the company.
• Deciding to use Team Foundation Server for a while instead of an alternative such as Subversion. For our needs, it was much better to use an easy-to-install product out of the box and simply get to work. And we didn’t need all of the additional collaboration features.

On the other hand, I’ve made some decisions that have turned out very well from the start. Here are just a couple from different problem domains:

• EVDO connectivity. I could not live without it on the road or even around town. It turns otherwise dead time (waiting for a meeting to start, for example) into productive time and many other instances that are too numerous to mention. Spend more than five minutes with me and I’ll be telling you that you need an EVDO card if I don’t see one in your laptop.
  
• Mind Mapping Software. I stayed away from the initial purchase investment in a tool such as Mind Manager for some time until I realized that this was truly the way to get a lot of creative brainstorming accomplished. And in technology evangelism work, you do a great deal of that with individuals and teams.
  
• Groove. This is an awesome product and one that really changed the way we worked across the whole company. It made us more productive and more responsive to client requests, and eliminated many of the typical problems you have in transferring files around a company, with clients, and with contractors.

A good concluding example is your Web site. For some people who sell their product online, this is the key thing that they need to keep up and running. But for most service-based businesses it’s about what you provide to your customers not what your Web site says. The level of service in client interactions and the level of craftsmanship you bring to each deliverable are really key here. Not what your Web site says. Beyond having a straightforward, professional-looking Web site, most service firms seem to twist in the wind about colors and turns of phrase way too often. At the end of the day, customers of professional-services firms are buying you, not the Web site. For example, as the years went by with my company, I spent more time talking to clients and giving them the level of service they deserved rather than worrying about whether I needed a new face lift for my Web site on any given year.

In closing, your technology focus should be on its potential impact to the business, regardless of what you personally know about that technology. This will keep you focused on the right purchases and the right decisions.

About the Author
Sean Campbell has been a successful entrepreneur since 1999. Campbell was a founding member of 3 Leaf, a company he grew over a period of six years and eventually sold in 2006. He has a long history of working on a variety of consulting projects focused on technology evangelism efforts with Microsoft, Intel and other companies. He also has been lead author of three books: two for Microsoft Press published in 2003 and 2005, and one for Intel Press in 2006. You can reach him at sean@campbell-solutions.com or read his blogs at blog.technologyevangelism.com and blog.campbell-solutions.com.