What I Do

Who I Help

I help small businesses use technology better. I define a small business as one with 1-50 employees – for-profit or non-profit – and usually without an internal IT Department. I have customers all across the country.

What I Do

Do you want (or need) help with your computers, phones, tablets, email systems, servers, networks, or social media strategy? Do you want to work with somebody who loves what they do, who will talk to you without belittling geekspeak, and who’ll be a partner in your success? Well, I just might be your guy!

What I Don’t Do

Regrettably, I do not help residential users of computers. My clients are businesses or solo-professionals.

Platforms I Work With

I’m an expert with PC’s and Mac platforms, Windows, Linux, and MacO/S. I’m also very familiar with IOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, as well as Android (Droid) and Blackberry. I work on Windows Servers, Mac Servers, and Linux Servers; VOIP phones as well as PBX and Key Phone Systems. I’ve been doing this since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.

How I Can Help

Hey, I’d love to help you! There are four ways:

Hourly Rate

I bill my time in quarter-hour increments at $125/hour.

The No-Cost Consult

Listen, I don’t charge anybody to learn how I can help them out. I also don’t charge for asking questions. I’m serious about wanting to be your partner, and that means I’m willing to learn about your business, your customers, what your needs are, and describe how I could help – without charge. Phone, email, Skype, or even on-site if you’re in Vancouver, WA/Portland, OR. Let’s get to know each other and see if we can do business together.

Block Retainers

Okay, if you’re not a regular client and if you’ve got technical questions, need some immediate help with server or network, your social media campaign, or you’re computer’s just plain busted – and time is of the essence – this track is for you. You can buy five or ten hour blocks of time to ask me whatever questions you have and get your problem fixed straight away.

Request For Proposal

If you have a  large project and need a more thorough response, and want a competitive bid, please use the contact form below to have me prepare a proposal for your company.

Don't Know Which Service is Best for You?

No problem! Just complete the contact form. I’ll contact you within an hour or two and we can chit-chat about what you need. Make sure you leave me your phone number so I can call you back right away!

10 Things Social Media Should Do For You

So I'm asked this one all of the time: what will social media do for my business? How will I know if it's working?

Here are ten things that - at a bare minimum - social media should do for your company. If they're not doing these things, maybe it's time to re-evaluate your strategy.

And maybe you don't have a strategy at all? Picking just a couple of these would be a good place to begin to help refine your use of "social" so that there's measurable goals and objectives and outcomes.

1. Develop a Lead Channel, Direct Marketing List, and Cultivate Referrals.

I frequently write in my books and blog that direct email marketing is becoming more challenging. As of 2010, 89 percent of all email is spam and the technology to blacklist and filter spam is becoming quite efficient, and, consumer's preferences towards email are changing. Social media is a way to develop and cultivate consumer contact for lead-generation and a means to encourage others to pass business along to you.

2. Enable Connection.

Social should enable connection. I like to say that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the juice that brings the web traffic to a website, but what makes them "stick"? It's relationship. Social enables connection. Social should make it easy to connect to cultivate relationships. It makes it easy for a potential consumer to LIKE and follow brands; to subscribe to thought-leaders; to connect with other like-minded professionals. Your company's use of social media should enable connection - in both the front office (between sales staff and customer) and the back office (in terms of professional relationships).

3. Enable Speed and Rapidity.

Social media is pretty convenient. If you can tweet to a brand and say, "I had a problem with XYZ - can you fix it?", and then they're able to address it, and maybe send you a confirmation or update, that's pretty fast and convenient. If a customer or potential client can ask somebody a question on Facebook and get an a response, that's pretty fast and convenient. Think about how social media could be used to make it easy, fast, and convenient for your customers to contact you using social media.

4. Enable Listening and Feedback (and Corrective Action).

People are telling you things about your company all of the time. In social media, the consumer expects that you're listening. You should be. What's your listening strategy? How are you listening to commentary and correcting the problems brought to light by the customer? How do you make it right?.

5. Enable Sharing.

Social should be used to enable others to share ideas into their own social network fluidly and without special licensing, sign-ups, or access restrictions. Your company should make it as easy as possible to share intellectual property, ideas, marketing materials, white papers, video ... any content so that others can share and promote those ideas for you online. Sharing is an intrinsic part of social media. How're you enabling sharing and making it easier for others to share what you do?

6. Enable Accessibility.

Social media should make it easier to get in touch with you and your team. It should make your owner/CEO reachable by click to an audience of spectators. Sites like Quora can pull ideas out of the heads of your leadership and lay it out there for others to read and respond to. Imagine being able to see something online and forward the link to the officer of a company, and get their feedback on the issue. It's about making you and your team closer, more accessible, to clients and investors and shareholders than ever before.

7. Create a Persona Around Your Brand.

I often discourage using Twitter. It's just not an effective tool for building relationships, but it is an effective bullhorn that can pull subscribers into a destination to get more content and become exposed to more ideas. Twitter is a cult-of-personality tool: people follow people because they're interested in what they have to say. You can take a President, for example, as a representative of the brand/company, and create a cult of personality around them, thus personifying the brand. On Facebook, the nature of posts plugged into a wall can create a whole following around the style and substance of the posts, thus fostering the persona and values behind the brand. Social should try to make a person out of your company or brand so that it's more reachable and identifiable.

8. Develop an Audience and Community.

In social media, everybody is their own media company, even businesses and corporations. If every subscriber is offering their consent to be contacted and marketed to, it's an audience willing to receive your message and interested in your product and service. How can you leverage a bunch of always connected customers waiting to hear from you? Why, let us count the ways ...

9. Foster Trust.

Every communication and act on social media reinforces relationship and demonstrates to the customer why you can be trusted. Maybe your message conveys a testimonial, your expertise, your experience, a tactic you used to solve a problem, and so on. It's constantly demonstrating value. Think about that: how is social building more trust with your audience?

10. Allow for Transparency.

Finally, social media is about the deconstruction of institutional power in favor of smaller, more individual power. It's about listening, getting closer to your customer, and building trust. It's about being more accessible. It's about being innovative, fast, and convenient. All of these things make for a more transparent company: a company whose practices are accessible by and visible to the general public.  How does social make your company and its practices more crystal-clear?

There are a lot of things social media can do for your company and this list isn't nearly exhaustive, but it is a starting place. Just a couple of these objectives could become the catalyst for doing some real, meaningful, and astounding with social in your company. Where you go from here is up to you, but whatever you do, work on making social media provide value to every person who offers you their time and attention.

R

5 New Economy IT Strategies

Hey, how're you doin'?

Nice to meet you.

Say, if you're a small business owner and if you and I were to connect for the first time on the street, here are the kinds of problems I'd guess you're having.

Just bear with me for a minute.

• Rising energy costs. You're watching the events happening in the middle east and may feel a bit uncomfortable about oil and gas prices. And as the economy heats up, there's going to be even greater demand on scarce fuels, further driving the price up. Experts are talking about $5-gallon-gas next year. You're concerned and you want to be prepared for it.
• Mobile. Your workforce (if not your customer base) is mobile and wants greater access to information systems using phones, tablets, and from home. You want to accommodate but you're not sure where to start. You're not even sure if your stuff can be used or seen on mobile devices.
• Mixed Messages. Your team's probably tired of juggling cell and company voicemail, email, and instant messaging across many mediums and platforms. Diversity in communication might be up but effectiveness might be down - the right message ain't reaching the right people at the right time.
• Social. You've caught up with social media fad but you're not certain what it's doing for you, or, how it's extending value to your customer relationship. How is this Social-stuff translating into favorable behavior or more work anyway?
• Acquisition costs. Obtaining more capability is expensive. There's an inherent barrier-to-entry with a lot of this new IT stuff. It' not like this economy has made you flush with cash to spend frivolously. You need proven solutions without guesswork.

Wow. That's hitting the proverbial nail on the head.

Now, we'd chit-chat about these issues and I'd eventually come around to showing you 5 new economy IT strategies to address each of these concerns.

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1.  Cloud Computing. If you still own a server the server forces your team to be sitting next to it to access information. You're absorbing and paying for the risk in managing that asset. Own nothing. Own a server? Ditch it! Own a phone system? Why? Buy software? Seriously? Lease capability from vendors and shift your risks to them. Replace your expensive hardware with inexpensive appliances that access web-based resources. Instead of paying for tech services you have to manage and pay for yourself, you'd be using a utility - it's time to think of your technology like water, electricity, or plumbing: it's a service you use and not an asset you maintain. Cloud licensing is subscription-based so you only pay for what you use - lowering that barrier-to-entry for immediate capability.

2. Telecommuting. It's time to sit down and honestly talk with your team about this. The bandwidth's there, the infrastructure's there, the Cloud is there, now it's just a management decision.  Why pay anybody to drive 30+ miles for the privilege to type in your building? Can't offer your team raises or other benefits? Give them the benefit of self-direction and time management, and, the ability to lower their own energy costs by driving less often.

3.  Integrated Communications with Relationship Management. Your land-line, toll, cell, voicemail, email, instant messaging, copies, fax, and social interactions can come under one software, one view, one channel. The capability's there - you just need to implement. What that creates is a single inbox for your players where there's no distinction of medium. Further, all of this content can be married with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems built in to that inbox. Why have your team running around with their heads cut off wondering where something is? Give them the gift of a single virtual inbox.

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4. Shrinkwrap. This is a term I like to use for corporate downsizing in a cool, necessary, and strategic way. You see, with more efficiency, more Cloud, more Telecommuting, you can stop paying those outrageous property taxes you've been complaining about; you don't need to renew that lease; you can rent office rooms when you actually need them; you can shrink the corporate presence to a smaller - and more economical - footprint. Why pay for a facility that's mostly empty? Here's your chance to make structured, strategic changes to your fixed expenses: get smaller.  Become more agile. Think faster than you're competitor who're stuck with buildings, skyscrapers, and other structured/expensive costs they can't get out of.

5. Extend Value. Social media gives you a way to connect with your customers in amazing ways. Now's the time to see how technology can not just automate your workforce but empower your customer to do business with you - how are you making it easier to contact, work-with, and use your product/service? How're you using Social to listen and respond to your customer? Hey - heads up: you're a media company now! "Hi, Channel 5: what's up?" How're you building and cultivating your audience.  How can you use social to attract attention?

Now's the time to get curious as a business owner: what's possible under the budget constraints you have? Can you implement two or maybe three of these strategies to prepare for the new economy? Maybe all five? Whatever. Now's the time to start asking questions. What you don't want to be is just like everybody else, scrambling for options when there's no more time to implement.

That's right: money for nothing and chics for free.

Thanks for reading.

R