Are You on Track for Your Company’s IT Goals?

Summary: IT infrastructure is an important component of every company’s business plan. Hear from Dave Hodgdon and Steve Ripper from PCG IT discuss how to incorporate IT into your business. Listen or read more to see if you are on track to meet your company’s IT goals.

Mike:  I am happy to be joined in the studio by my good friends Steve and Dave here. Good to see you both on another Tech Tuesday, my friend.

Dave Hodgdon: Good morning Mike.

Steve Ripper: Good morning, Mike. [crosstalk]

Mike:  It doesn’t get much better than Tech Tuesday.

Dave: To look at us on Tech Tuesday just makes your day, right here.

Mike:  You guys make my day when you come in every Tuesday morning.

Dave: [crosstalk] Someone has to do it, right?

Mike:  Well, it’s good to have you with us and the —

Steve: Not for much longer, Mike. I’m going to win that $450 million and you’re never going to see me again in this studio.

Mike:  I don’t think so.

Dave: $416 something million.

Mike:  What would you do with that, Dave?

Dave: I’d be down in St John. I’d be retiring.

Mike:  Full time? [crosstalk] Yeah, he’d be retiring. You’re not going to work right?

Dave: No, I’ll still work.

Mike:  You’ll still work a little bit, right?

Dave: I got to be here for Tech Tuesdays anyway.

Mike:  You can do, we can do a remote from the islands on Tech Tuesday. So, we bring to the table today. I always want to tell people that there’s convenient locations. And before we start, I know business has been very good. I know you’re in the past, you’ve been looking for some new workers. Have you found workers, you still looking for people?

Dave: Everything’s great. We’ve, fortunate enough, we’ve got some great new hires. We’ve added three people to the team —

Mike:  Wonderful.

Dave: . . . and we’re ready or rock and roll.

Steve: Shout out, Miranda!

Dave: Shout out, Miranda, our newest a technician, Miranda, just joined us. And we have another engineer, Roland that just joined us.

Mike:  Alright, Miranda and Roland. Alright, good to have you both with us. And they’ll have to be part of tech Tuesday someday. Let’s bring them in. Show them the . . .

Dave: Show them the real, huh?

Mike:  The real world.

Dave: Nice.

Mike:  Yeah. Well, they really do. Put them under the pressure. Put them under the pressure.

What are we going to focus on today guys? Let’s talk a little bit about it today. What’s our topic today?

Are Your Company’s IT Goals on Track?

Steve: So, are you on track for your company’s IT goals? Like do you have goals? Do companies out there, are they thinking? If you’re listening to this right now, are you thinking about the big picture? That’s kind of what we want to talk about today. So, we talked a little bit about what a line of business app a couple of weeks ago. You know the, the one single program that helps you manage your business, whether it’s a contact management software, whether it’s a scheduling software, whether it’s an accounting package. Do you know where you are with that? Are there upgrades that need to be done this year?

Dave: Yup.

Steve: Is there a roadmap for it? How many versions? Is there a new version that you need to do? Are you talking to someone? So, do you have goals and are you meeting them?

Mike:  So, visions and goals are really about everything from what type of hardware you need, what type of maintenance you need on your system, what type of software you need on your system, making sure that you are up to date and also creating a budget for this stuff, as well. Correct?

Dave: That’s the big one, Mike. Just like us, we expanded our offices. That you got to think about the planning. You need new Internet providers. You need a new phone provider, you need to put the infrastructure, the switches, the routers in place. How is that office going to communicate back to you? How are the guys on the road going to communicate back to you? How are you going to manage them?

So, those are all key things. And I was just working in my garden the other day and, similar to, we’re talking about IT, is that, in my garden I’m thinking about, I’m planning it, where stuff’s going to go. There’s various costs, but it’s the same thing. You got to think about what it’s going to look like in the long run.

Mike:  Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. I don’t like . . . I hate when I get called out as an IT guy and there’s a problem. We call it things are on fire, right? And I’ve got to fix it. No one really wins. No one’s happy with me that I had to fix it. They’re glad that I’m there for them. My favorite part of IT is when I get a decision maker, a company owner, who says, “Hey Steve, I’m hiring six new salespeople and we want to do more like teams. We want to chat more, we want to make them more, we want to empower them so that when they’re on the road, they’re not, Well, I’m tired with this VPN.” In other words, they have a vision, they have a plan.

That’s stuff’s way more fun to try and figure out what are we going to do to make them better, make them faster, make them agile, make them work better, make it easier on them. So, I like hearing about a plan or maybe an idea and then I have some ideas back. That’s my favorite part of IT.

Dave: And it’s the roadmap. It is fun to think the roadmap of the tiny steps you need to get from where I am now, what I want to do, and what’s it’s going to can take to get there. It is a lot of fun to help plan, design, and help them execute, and that’s where our companies see the value in . . .

Mike:  So, really maintaining your infrastructure within your business. We talk about the infrastructure on the highway of life, so to speak. And we talk about our roads and stuff. We’re talking about the infrastructure of a business.

Dave: Exactly. Think about the bridge coming to Dover. This has been painful, but now we saw, last few weeks, the cars are moving through. The vision is finally there, but you’ve got to really get there.

Mike:  Well, don’t, don’t get me started about highway projects. But you know what my theory on highway projects are. As soon as they’re done, they’re obsolete.

Steve: Or it’s time to restart them.

Include IT Infrastructure in Your Business Plan

Mike:  Yeah, it’s time to restart them. Alright, so, a question that people really need to talk about in businesses, do you have an updated business plan that includes your IT infrastructure? That’s important.

Dave: We talked about the infrastructure and getting to the cloud. And the infrastructure, think of it as your house, your foundation. If you don’t have a good foundation, things happen. You’ve got your plumbing, your electrical. It has to be solid. You need to empower your users to get the best performance. Empower them. Let them have what they want.

Mike:  Yeah, and you also say, listen to your employees as well. Listen to what they need. Listen to what they need regarding technology. Even put a suggestion box in, because they may know of a couple of things that you may not know or they may have seen something on the internet that says, “Hey, we could use this, we could do this. You know the folks, at Portsmouth Computer Group can do this for us.” You know?

Steve: Yes. So, Dave has to listen to us. We’re all technically focused and we’re out there doing it. So, we all have opinions. He almost has no choice but to listen to us. But, other companies . . .

Mike:  Is that true, Dave?

Dave: I do. I do listen, and they come a lot. I do [crosstalk].

Steve: He’s really good at it. He’s really good at going . . .

Dave: When they give me something, they give me a reason and they pretty much . . . The check is open right now.

Steve: So, I’ve seen company owners out there where they almost don’t feel like their employees really have an opinion on this. Maybe they have a low value of their IT abilities, their computability. But, that’s not always fair. And I always try to tell them that your employees know what they need to do. Even if they can’t speak in terms of hard drives, and firewalls, and stuff. They know what’s not working for them. They know what could be better. And so, listening to them can kind of point you towards where some of the problems are. Suggestion box are a great idea, comments.

I’ve been asked and done in the past where we set up a comment email. So that, so that someone can send and they’re assured that it’s anonymous, but where they can send and go, “My computer’s really slow. I mean, everybody says that, but I wished the software did this,” or, “I wish there was a different way of us talking about the workflow.” Because every company needs to think about workflow, not necessarily the software, but how do they interact with each other to get the day’s work done?

So, talking to your employees really helps that process.

Dave: And I let them know their feedback’s extremely important to me, Mike. It’s very relevant and important. We have actually created a group in our company, we call it the Tech Focus Group, and we meet every two weeks and we just talk about everything that’s there and we’re trying to work on a roadmap.

So, it’s just not my head because we have some very smart people in our organization and they’re coming with ideas and we are creating a roadmap one, two, three years out. And it does make a difference to empower your people and engage them.

Mike:  So, when you hear from suggestions from employees and that you’ve heard from other companies and their experiences, what are most of the suggestions? Exactly what you said, Steve. My computer is running slow, I wished the software did this type of thing. What else are they suggesting?

Steve: So there’s things like that. The big one you’ll see a lot for companies will be… Employees are the best at pointing out bottlenecks where it’s not working. Our dispatcher… I have a hard time telling them in real time what I need them to know or they need me.

A lot of times it’s communication. Those are the things. Computers make you more efficient for the thing you need to do, right? It’s easier to do accounting in QuickBooks than it is to do it on a ledger. [crosstalk] So, computers make things more efficient and they help with communication, whether it’s chatting in real time. Maybe you’re only doing email. So, sometimes employees will look at . . . I wish I could get that news to them faster, right? We have guys on the road in the trucks, how can we talk to them in a way, in real time, as opposed to waiting for them to call in. So, these are all IT issues. These are ways that technology can help. And so, you get a lot of that feedback.

Mike:  And so, obviously, the folks from PCG, obviously, you provide that so-called roadmap to companies?

Dave: Yes.

Mike:  Okay.

Dave: We call it the VCO services, and I feel that’s one of the key things that helps differentiate PCG is that we’ve got technical people, we have business people. We listen to what they want and we help them with the roadmap. We helped them with the budget and we’re the guide. They’re the hero, we’re the guide, and we’re going to help them get there. And if you give them a solid roadmap, you give him a budget, and you do it step by step, you can’t do everything right away. There’s got to be a roadmap step, step, step, and things happen.

We have one of our scenarios. Our product we use is okay for new sales on the road. So, DJ came to me with a great idea. So, he’s equipped the car with the notebook, the portable printer, but he actually has the CRM, the system that collects the data, takes the business card, ties it right into the system, and he’s actively engaging with them right away. Pretty cool stuff.

Communication Techniques

Mike:  That’s interesting. Wow. Is that something very brand new on the market?

Dave: It’s HubSpot. So, it’s out there, but it’s a better way for you, as a person, to communicate because it’s using LinkedIn, it’s using Facebook. It’s telling when they’re doing stuff, you have the ability live to do things more. Our system is average at best.

Mike:  Got you, yeah.

Dave: It’s great for our technical service board, and the guys, but it’s horrible at that. And so, it wasn’t allowing him to empower him, but he came says, “This isn’t good. I need to do this.” And we gave him the tools and it makes a difference.

Steve: See the amazing thing out there is that there’s pretty much, technology-wise, the internet and everything else. There’s pretty much a solution for almost everything. So, what we end up doing is when you’re really doing what you want to do, you’re consulting on what’s possible.

In other words, they’re going to come back . . . he’s talking about DJ, that really starts as a, I wish I could do this.

Dave: It did, yeah.

Steve: I wish I could do it faster. I get the business cards and I’ve got a stack of business cards and they’re falling all over the seats in the car. How can I turn this into instant data that I can act on? When I hear that, when Dave hears that . . .

So then, we translate that into what technology can do. You find the company that’s out there because they’re all out there, so ultimately ends up being HubSpot. But when you dig deep, every time I go to look, Mike, I’m like, “Somebody is doing this? That’s pretty cool.”

Mike:  Yeah, that’s very interesting, yeah.

Steve: I didn’t even know that they were doing it, right? And I’m in it.

Mike:  That’s fascinating stuff.

Dave: I still have a car to my desk, but I’m old school. But, once you have that live card, it doesn’t matter. It scans directly in there, has everything, you’re able to send the person thank you for the email right then. And any time they open, or do anything with you, or hit a website, or check our website out, you get a ping that they’ve come to you.

Mike:  Very nice.

Dave: So, it really allows you to engage, which is pretty cool.

Mike:  I like that. I like that. All right. The boys from a Portsmouth Computer Group, pcgit.com is where you want to check them out. Dover and Portsmouth, their new brand new locations in Manchester and Portland, Maine. Any final words, Dave, today?

Dave: As I think just part of IT planning, as we talked about, PCG, if you’re interested in getting a roadmap and want some solid advice, give the team here at PCG a call. We’d love to help you and remember next week is the Sippin’ For Seals.

Mike:  We’ve been talking about it all week, actually. What a great fundraiser.

Dave: Good. [crosstalk] Great fundraiser.

Mike:  Seacoast Science Center there. All right Steve, good to see you again. Thank you for coming in.

Steve: Thank you, Mike.

Dave: My pleasure.

Mike:  Dave, always good to see you, my friend.

Dave: Let’s hope, best two out of three. Let’s hope to bring home the Cup, right?

Mike:  Hey, it doesn’t get much better than that, right?

Dave: It is fun, hockey, right now.

Steve: You got to have a better third period than that one though.

Mike:  Well, I know you’re not going to win all the games, right?

Steve: Yeah, you can’t.

Dave: Hopefully, Chara will play.

Mike:  You got to win four though.

Dave: Got to win four.

Mike:  You got to win at least one.

Dave: Bring the Cup.

Mike:  It’s be amazing if they bring the Cup home, huh?

Dave: It’d be a lot of fun.

Mike:  I’d say we’re very spoiled in Boston.

Dave: I think that’d be three championships within one year.

Mike:  That’s amazing.

Dave: That is amazing. Yes, we’re very spoiled.

Mike:  It is amazing , and no other cities can compare to that, really. Thank you guys.

Dave: My pleasure.

Mike:  Have a great week. We’ll see you next Tuesday.