As co-founder and CEO of managed service provider IT4, over the last 20 years Brett Jaffe has grown his business from a hardware reseller and computer repair shop to a fully outsourced provider of IT services. The key to this long-term success is simple: relationships. Granted, this isn't a new concept. Visit any corporate web site and you'll find marketing blurbs touting devotion to customer relationships. But, there's a big gap between the saying and the doing. Day in and day out, it's tough to provide the service and attention that inspires customers to think of your company as more than just another vendor -- creating and fostering relationships have to be deeply rooted in the corporate culture. More
Posted by Christa Ayer on June 22, 20100 comments
Talk to any SMB owner and they'll tell you that along with the thrill of watching a business grow comes the agony of managing that growth. As their business gets more complex, certain areas of the organization start to require more than just entrepreneurial drive and a small yet dedicated group of employees to hold them together. Nowhere will this be more evident than in the IT department.
For the average SMB IT department -- usually consisting of one or two people -- outside skills and manpower in the form of a managed service provider can be a big help handling day-to-day IT operations such as e-mail and e-mail security, server maintenance, and data storage and backup. This frees up internal IT staff to work on projects that drive new growth More
Posted by Christa Ayer on June 16, 20100 comments