Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

New IT Clients

David Grenda, Founder, Grenda Computer Consulting

The occasion of my starting work with 3 new clients this month has reminded me of something that many of you may find familiar.

Often what brings a new client my way is a build up of neglect in a computing environment that gets to a point where people really start complaining. Computers are running slow, work is taking longer, pop-ups abound, etc.

These situations are difficult because I have to let them know that unraveling the problems may take a fair amount of effort. Because I don’t know what I’ll encounter, I can’t give a hard estimate of hours required. I generally offer to spread the investment in initial fix-up hours over the next few months if the client would like. Additionally, by the time I am called in the client is often desperate to get running correctly and sometimes angry at their previous IT provider. Both of these elements of course make the kick-off to the relationship even more stressful.

The moral of this story is that computers these days are really like living things. This is especially true if they are connected to the internet (who isn’t?). Mal-ware, patches, security updates, increasingly complex software environments, and users surfing the internet all require the attention of someone who can keep the machine running properly. As I’ve said before, this is often from a well meaning but unqualified source.

It’s easy to ignore your computers if they seem to be working properly. Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish though. Be sure to have them watched after regularly or you may have a serious problem at the worst time.

www.grenda.com

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Small Business and Six Sigma: a Powerful Combination

Marcelo Cazado, New Entrepreneur

Small Business and Six Sigma: a Powerful Combination

Six Sigma is a well structured project methodology that aims to reduce variation in business processes. It is currently used in most of the major corporations worldwide. From a Six Sigma perspective, variation is evil. For instance, let’s assume you have an average of 80% customer satisfaction with your products. Depending on the business, this figure may be fair. However when you start analyzing it and breaking down the data you may find out that while sometimes your customer is 100% satisfied, for many times your customer satisfaction level is around 60%, which is pretty bad. Ideally all business indicators should exceed the customers’ expectations and also they should not present large variations. Six Sigma’s motto is “show me the data”, so it prevents a lot of unproductive discussions based on personal opinions.

For countless times I have been asked if Six Sigma is applied to small business. Some time ago, I was not quite sure if and how a small company could engage in a Six Sigma implementation. But not anymore.

Actually these days I do recommend Six Sigma as a strong and disciplined methodology which brings positive outcomes to any business, whatever size. Although Six Sigma is not the last panacea that solves all business problems, it may be applied to processes where their outcomes are expected to reach a minimum level and where their variation is not desirable.

There are many consultancies companies in the market that could help out small businesses implementing a Six Sigma mindset between entrepreneurs and their teams.

From my previous experience, I consider it a journey worth taking. Certainly quantifiable benefits will exceed the investment on training.

My name is Marcelo Cazado and I am a new entrepreneur. My business is a management consultancy company called Andoha and I may be reached through e-mail at mcazado@andoha.com.

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