Does my Home Improvement Business Still Need a Server?

As many of you read­ing this post are doing your 2017 plan­ning and per­haps pur­chas­ing end of the year office equip­ment, I thought it was time­ly to answer the ques­tion, ​“Do I still need a phys­i­cal serv­er in my office?” The short and sim­ple answer is that many small con­tract­ing com­pa­nies do not need a serv­er any­more. Tech­nol­o­gy has advanced so much in recent years to where most soft­ware com­pa­nies have moved their prod­ucts to the ​“Cloud” (online). Each year, a local serv­er becomes less impor­tant and more expen­sive to main­tain. If you are try­ing to save mon­ey on your IT needs, I’d rec­om­mend tak­ing the steps to see if your busi­ness can sur­vive with­out a local serv­er. A serv­er plays a num­ber of dif­fer­ent roles depend­ing on how you have it set­up. It can help with inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion between users (com­put­ers), cal­en­dar sync­ing, sending/​receiving emails, back up of finan­cial data, stor­ing files and print­ing of doc­u­ments. All of these fea­tures can be done using online pro­grams.

All You Need to Run a Busi­ness with­out a Local Server

The first step to get­ting rid of your serv­er is select­ing if you want to com­mit to Microsoft or Google to run your orga­ni­za­tion’s email, cal­en­dar, con­tacts & files. Start there. Both com­pa­nies offer very sim­i­lar ser­vices for just about the same price. It cost range is between $4 to $10 a month per employ­ee. For exam­ple, if you sign up for Google’s ser­vices, called ​“G Suites” you’d pay a month­ly (or annu­al fee) for each users which would give him/​her access to a com­pa­ny email, shared con­tacts, cal­en­dar and a fil­ing sys­tem to store folders/​files. Every­thing would be run using the Inter­net with a num­ber of options for offline fea­tures (if the Inter­net is not avail­able). I did a pre­sen­ta­tion ear­li­er this year explain­ing how to run a busi­ness ​“in the Cloud.” Take a look at these two screen­shots that visu­al­ize what I am talk­ing about:

Essen­tials of your busi­ness (every­one needs 1 & 2)

3, 4 & 5 Are Almost Just as Important

As you can see, I rec­om­mend and use G Suites. This is real­ly not because Google is that much bet­ter than Microsoft­’s 365. No, Google just got into the online game before Microsoft. They were still stuck on push­ing Microsoft Exchange and help­ing peo­ple stick with their local servers. Google came out on top years ago when they cre­at­ed ​“Google Apps for Busi­ness” (changed to G Suites in the Fall of 2016). Many busi­ness­es began to move their com­pa­nies to Google Apps because it saved on IT cost. Per­haps the biggest rea­son is that it did not tie the com­pa­ny or its employ­ees to work from just one cen­tral loca­tion. When you use tools like G Suites, Microsoft 365 or even Apple’s iCloud plat­form, you can work from just about any­where in the world with an inter­net con­nec­tion and be just as pro­duc­tive. When I worked in my dad’s paint­ing busi­ness from around 2000 – 2008, we called the local com­put­er repair guys ALL THE TIME. I am not jok­ing. They seemed to be in our offices every sin­gle month, pay­ing them thou­sands and thou­sands every year to keep our com­put­ers, our servers, our email etc work­ing. If one lit­tle thing stopped work­ing, BOOM, there went a day of non pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Since switch­ing to the cloud, besides an inter­net out­age, I have nev­er had an IT guy come to my office to fix my G Suites. I am also able to help many of my cus­tomers around the coun­try fix most ​“prob­lems’ remote­ly by shar­ing their screen or show­ing them how to ​“fix” it them­selves. So with­out mak­ing this post longer, my goal here is to real­ly just say that if you are stuck on a serv­er and run a small busi­ness, con­sid­er mov­ing to an online plat­form. If you com­mit to using it, it will save your com­pa­ny per­haps thou­sands of dol­lars in IT cost and may even help save your files and stor­age in the event your local serv­er crash­es or nat­ur­al dis­as­ter happens.