Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

If your business is tired of dealing with distorted audio, dropped calls, and general telephone bill chaos, you’re not alone. Countless small businesses are in the same boat, struggling against their telephone provider as they try to run their business in a more efficient manner. Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, offers a comprehensive solution to this dilemma, provided you take the time to implement a system that works for you.

That’s what we’re going over today—how to find the right VoIP solution for your SMB and avoid the five most common mistakes they encounter when doing so.

If your company's main computer system completely crashes—we’re talking total shutdown from a dead hard drive, a nasty virus like ransomware, or someone majorly messing up—what actually happens?

For a lot of businesses, the plan is that one dusty external hard drive they plug in at the end of the day. That's not a plan; it's a wish… and when everything goes dark, wishing won't save your job or the business.

While remote work presents many benefits, it has also created challenges, particularly due to the lack of visibility you have over your employees—at least physically. While you hope that trust is enough to carry your business, hope is not a plan for employee productivity. You’ll also need tools and methods to monitor your team so you can hold them accountable. We’re here to deliver the fix to your employee productivity needs.

Do you remember Tay? In 2016, Microsoft launched an AI chatbot on Twitter, named Tay, designed to learn from casual and playful conversation. The result was a spectacular public failure. Within 16 hours, the Internet had taught Tay to be wildly offensive, racist, and conspiratorial. Microsoft had to pull the plug in a panic.

Remote and hybrid work aren’t going away, so you can’t expect that today’s workforce won’t demand them in at least some capacity. That means your business needs to be ready to deliver these expectations in at least some capacity, especially if you want to remain competitive. If you aren’t willing to commit to full-on remote work, a hybrid approach combines the flexibility of remote work with the need for in-house operations, and is a perfectly suitable way to offer what employees want and need without sacrificing productivity and security.

You’ve invested serious money into your manufacturing equipment. We’re talking about your half-million-dollar workhorses that are supposed to be driving profit. If you’re being honest, though, you’re often just waiting for the next thing to break.

You run your machines hard, and if you only act when the alarm sounds, the grinding noise gets too loud, or the machine throws that dreaded red maintenance light, you’re cooked.

Generative AI is everywhere now, and businesses are racing to embrace the opportunities it is creating. That said, this needs to be done with caution. Let’s go over some common errors to watch out for and avoid.

It can be challenging for small to medium-sized businesses to see the true value of artificial intelligence. After all, up until not that long ago, most people associated AI with things like the Terminator, so it has a bit of a reputation to make up for. Regardless, AI is now accessible enough that even these SMBs can embrace its features.

Let’s review some of the ways you could incorporate AI into your business, relatively easily.

You’ve probably heard various terms like network hubs, network switches, and network routers, but do you know what these devices are, and more importantly, what differentiates them from one another? Each of these devices serves a different purpose, and depending on your business’ needs, one might be better than the other. Let’s look at the differences between all of these networking devices and why you might choose each one for running your business.

Stop me when this sounds familiar: you have 15 browser tabs open, each with its own, specific username and password required to log in. Despite what you’ve been told, there’s the infamous sticky note on your monitor, reminding you of your most utilized passwords.

From the business owner's perspective, this mess always results in frustration and missed deadlines, and honestly, it’s hard not to blame your team members. Before you jump to conclusions, however, you should consider something.

Not to skip over the holidays, but the new year is rapidly approaching, and it is more than clear that—short of a Y2K-level event—artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere. Quite the opposite: AI is being adopted en masse, and for many, it’s without any oversight or strategy… or appreciation for how dangerous it is to feed data into AI without any thought or consideration.

Running a business isn’t cheap. Nobody can blame you for wanting to save a few bucks wherever you can. That said, one place you should not pinch pennies is your business technology, particularly when it comes to updates. While that old computer may still look like it’s perfectly fine, technology being broken is measured on a spectrum. Yours could easily be holding your business back and costing you potential income.

Let’s estimate just how high these costs could be, and how to resolve them moving forward.  

Business is all about friendly competition, and you might be wondering how your competitors reach out to leads to turn them into paying customers. With automated technology solutions like customer relationship management software, it’s as easy as can be. If your competitors are using innovative new technology solutions in this way, you might also be wondering, “How can I use technology to beat them at their own game?”

The success of a business is heavily dependent on the smooth operation of its technology. When the technology it depends on fails, it can disrupt productivity and ultimately alienate customers. Obviously, this is bad for the profitability of the endeavor. One key to avoiding many of the technology pitfalls you could encounter is a conscious change from a reactive strategy to a proactive one. 

Technology should be an advantage for your business, not another headache. You have enough to go around as it is. But for many business leaders, managing their company's IT can feel like a constant battle against unexpected problems and costly downtime.

When it comes to IT support, there are two main approaches: the old-fashioned "break-fix" model and the modern, proactive model known as "managed services." While break-fix might seem simple on the surface, it often creates more problems than it solves. Managed services, on the other hand, offer a more strategic, reliable, and ultimately more profitable path forward.

Employees often face a variety of challenges when learning new software, which can lead to frustration, decreased productivity, and resistance to change. These struggles are not always due to a lack of technical skill, but are often rooted in a combination of psychological, organizational, and training-related factors. Today, we will go through some of the most common ways employees struggle with learning new software.

You want a productive team, therefore, you want to be responsive to their needs. That being said, there comes a time when you have to question if their requests are in the best interest of your operating budget. Today, we want to explore how you can balance the needs of your employees with the needs of your business’ budget.

You want the money you invest into your business technology to come back in the form of productivity and value, but how often would you say this is true for your business? If the answer is “less than I’d like,” then you might need to reexamine your IT spending and adjust it in a way that makes a difference for your business’ needs and goals. Today, we’ll examine what your infrastructure is trying to tell you and how you can make better spending decisions to make the most of your budget.

When you hear the words “digital transformation,” what do you envision? SMBs might be intimidated by such a buzzword, especially if implementing new technology is something they avoid due to the perceived price tag. But digital transformation is something all businesses can afford and benefit from, and we’ll show you how.

Your business data holds vital information, but it needs to be organized and presented in a way that makes this information accessible. Visual representations will be immensely helpful as you translate this data into a form that is more comprehensible to everyone. Let’s go over five ways that data visualizations and interactive dashboards can help you express your information to those invested in your success, whether it's your team or your external stakeholders.