You may not have heard of us – we have been keeping our profile low getting our product set ironed out and getting the systems and processes ironed out for what will be the beginning of the next revolution is computer systems for small business. I have working in and on small businesses for most of my working life and I know its tough to make a dollar and do the things we do in business. Computers and the Internet play a bigger and bigger role in small business and with the advent of the FBT a couple of years ago computing became essential (no matter how frustrating they are or how much you hate them). Computer hardware has reduced dramatically in price but the total cost of ownership includes more than just hardware. Training, software and above all system maintenance and just keeping the jolly things working all add to the total cost of ownership and the total cost has been increasing dramatically if you have less than 30 screens in your business and that includes 700,000 Australian businesses. If you have 200 plus screens, the big service companies will be courting you every day for your business. And if u have 50 – 200 screens, there are some excellent large computer service companies who will look after you and provide good quality low cost support via standardization. But if you have three or ten or twenty five computers, who do you turn to. Before CompatibleIT.com, the choice was one of the thousands of independent computer consultants listed in the yellow pages. I do not want to criticize these providers unduly as many of them are excellent technicians with great personal computer skills. BUT….. there is a high degree of variability in their pricing and ability and its very hard to tell the difference without being an expert yourself. And the good ones get overloaded and too busy very quickly and either won’t take on new clients or are too busy to service new clients. As far as I know, all of them work on a fee per hour basis and provide personalized solutions for each client. This leads to unexpected and sometimes very large bills to fix things like viruses or software security upgrades or hardware failures when you least expect the bill and when you can’t predict the expense.
CompatibleIT.com is all about fixing these problems by doing what the big boys do – but in a miniaturized way for small business. The idea came out of seeing how universities manage networks of thousands of PC’s used by staff and students.
The key is to standardize the systems and manage them remotely.
The best model for what we do is the Pizza business – I know that sounds silly but if u think about Pizza before the advent of the big franchises, every Pizza was a personal work of culinary art, a specialist product, by the owner of the corner pizza shop. Some were great and some were pretty dodgy but they were all individual creations and there was no way to know how good it was going to be until you tried it. Then along came the multinational franchises and all of a sudden pizza came in standard sizes and standards flavors and was predictable and reliable. Better yet it was cheap, because the staff didn’t need to be pizza experts to follow the processes and reproduce the same pizza from any location over and over again.
CompatibleIT standardizes your existing or new computer system and then charges a low fixed monthly fee to maintain that system every day. It is highly automated and doesn’t require technicians traveling all over town to provide a specialist product. We keep our specialists in a network operations centre and work remotely using the internet the same way the university used its networks.
We drive costs down and we can charge one low fixed monthly fee to ensure the system is maintained and works every day. If the hardware fails, we can lend you a replacement computer – configured for your network – until the repairs are done under warranty.
Give me a call if you would like to know more about how this can work for you and a quote to standardize your system and maintain it every day. Most times it costs just one dollar a day to maintain a PC and you never lose out to staff downtime because they don’t have a computer to work on.
To support your staff, we also provide our clients with a free telephone helpdesk to solve their day to day problems and using remote network management software, the help desk staff can see the problem over the internet and they can even take remote control of the problem computer and fix it on the spot.
This help desk service is also available as a stand alone service for $33.00 per month - some conditions apply – as without the proactive maintenance and standardization, not all problems can be solved over the phone.
Help with free software
I love free software – well really I love free anything . Some of the public domain free software packages available today are amazing and offer REAL value – BUT – and isn’t there always a “but” sometimes knowing what free software is worth while and getting ti set up and installed is not easy. CompatibleIT provides a service to advise you about free software and to install and configure it for you. Its not a free service, but because we do it over and over again, just like the pizza, we have standardized the installation and configuration of free software so its great value for money.
Telephone Conference
I know that most small business owners and managers do not like their computers much and feel that they can be easily bamboozled by a technician. I run FREE telephone conferences nearly every week to explain how CompatibleIT works and to answer any questions you may have about anything computer related. If you would like receive an invitation to the next telephone conference, give me a call or drop mean email and I will make sure you get an invitation. The only thing you have t pay for is a phone call from your office or home to a dial in point in your nearest capital city. You pay only for the call – local call if you are in the city or STD if you are outside a metro area. Conference calls are run both in and out of business hours to deal with your busy schedule.