Doing some IT support for a company earlier this year, I was struck by how old some of their systems were. I first went in to load up a printer that refused to cooperate with the computer that it was meant to be attached to. I got it going by finding a back door process, but the fundamental problem was that the software they were operating was very old and was having trouble trying cope with something that was far more sophisticated.

I was back a few days later when the company owner’s machine failed quite stunningly. It took an age to repair, eventually having to have a complete rebuild but we got there finally and I was told that the situation is not unusual. Apart from their accounting software, they had no IT support at all which left them exposed and meant that their computer equipment had slipped further and further out of date. And this isn’t odd with small businesses in the Black Country that are so focused on their primary purpose that the back office work was taken for granted.

This in itself is not an issue, you don’t need to have the most up to date systems, upgrading and replacing every six to twelve or even every couple of years, but operating systems and vital software should be checked for upgraded every three years at least. As some suppliers, partners and customers, especially the larger ones, will refit and as a matter of course they will trasmit files and data and one day, these files will not be opened as the formats will change. For instance, someone working with Microsoft Office from the mid to late nineteen ninties (and plenty are to my knowledge) will not cope with a file transmitted from Office 2010 and when the day comes, everything to do with that partner and data will come to a halt. What if it is an invoice or a substantial order? That could be very expensive.

The same can be said of SEO for firms who put their trade online with a costly and well designed website, which looks superb, behaves efficiently and is scarcely used by people looking to do business that could be going to that company. Let us say a Black Country steel company is in need of a new lathe and would intend to buy from a firm in the area, but are unable to find a lathe manufacturer on the internet because all their online searches list firms who are better optimised. Our lathe manufacturer might not even be registered with the search engines in which case the closest search in the world isn’t going to find them and they may as well not bother with a website at all. Perhaps they know about SEO which, I will confess, has a poor PR image sometimes, and they view it as an untrusted cost. But proper SEO does work, is worth the outlay and how hard is not securing that lathe order?

Small firms have to concentrate on their main business, of course they do. But they should be kept up to date with their admin systems which means quality IT support, SEO as well as the more obvious such as anti virus software. To let them get behind too far will sooner or later make the feared outlay a self-fulfilling prophecy instead of a boon to profitability.

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