Most businesses don’t start with a complicated IT setup, and they don’t need one.
A one-person business might have a laptop, a free email address, a mobile phone, a basic website and a handful of online services. Important files might live on the laptop or in a personal cloud account. For one person, that can work perfectly well.
The challenge is that businesses rarely stay the same size. What works for one person can start becoming difficult when there are five, ten or twenty people relying on the same systems.
It isn’t that the original setup was wrong, you’ve just outgrown it.
Then You Hire Someone
The first employee can change things quite quickly.
Suddenly there is another email address to set up, documents to share, calendars to coordinate and business information that someone else needs access to.
You also start having to think about who owns important files, how these can be accessed, password management, what happens when someone leaves and whether important information is backed up.
This is often where a business email platform and productivity suite starts to make more sense.
From Free Email to Business Email
Microsoft 365 is one example of how technology can start supporting a growing business rather than simply helping an individual run one.
Instead of relying on a personal email account, a business can use its own domain, such as [email protected], with individual accounts for each employee.
But the benefit isn’t just having a more professional-looking email address.
A business setup can also provide a foundation for, OneDrive cloud synchronization, SharePoint shared cloud storage, Teams for communication, multi-factor authentication, access controls and centralised administration as well as shared calendars and mailboxes etc as needed.
The important change is that the technology starts being built around the business, rather than around one person’s account.
Your Files Start Becoming Everyone’s Files
A sole trader might quite reasonably keep documents on their laptop or in their own Cloud Drive.
As the business grows, those documents can become company information rather than one person’s information.
What happens if the laptop fails?
What if the person who normally manages those files is away?
What if another employee needs access to an important document, or two people need to work on it at the same time?
These are the kinds of situations where properly managed cloud storage and collaboration tools such as OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams can become useful.
More People Means More Access
With one person, access management is fairly simple. You have access to everything because it’s your business.
With five, ten or twenty people, that approach becomes much harder to manage.
You may need to think about:
- Who can access particular files and systems?
- Who has administrator access?
- Are shared accounts still being used?
- What happens when someone leaves?
None of this necessarily means the business has a security problem. It is simply a natural consequence of having more people, more information and more systems.
As the business grows, access needs to become more structured.
The Technology Starts Growing Around You
There is another common part of business growth: adding technology one piece at a time.
“We need an accounting system.”
“We need a CRM.”
“We need somewhere to store those files.”
“We need a way for everyone to communicate.”
“We need another subscription.”
Each decision can make perfect sense at the time. The problem is that, after a few years, you can end up with a collection of systems that don’t necessarily work together particularly well.
The business hasn’t necessarily made bad decisions. It has simply grown organically.
At some point, it can be useful to step back and look at the bigger picture.
Does everyone know which systems they should be using? Are important accounts tied to individuals? Are files stored somewhere the whole team can access? Are backups actually covering the information the business relies on? Are devices being monitored and maintained?
These questions become more important as the business becomes more dependent on technology.
Don’t Upgrade Just Because You’re Growing
It can be tempting to think that growth automatically means buying more technology. It doesn’t.
Sometimes it is refining or improving on the systems you already have. Sometimes a particular service needs replacing because it is no longer suitable.
The goal isn’t to have more technology… it’s to have technology that suits the business you’re running today.
When Is It Time to Take Another Look?
A free email address and a single laptop might have been exactly right when the business was one person.
That doesn’t mean they were wrong. It means the business has changed.
As more people, customers, information and systems become involved, your IT needs to evolve with it.
The warning sign isn’t necessarily that something has stopped working.
Sometimes it’s that everything still works, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make it work.
That can be a good indication that your business has reached the point where its IT needs to grow with it.