June 2018

THE VALLEY BUSINESS JOURNAL
14 www.TheValleyBusinessJournal.com
June 2018
THE VALLEY BUSINESS JOURNAL NAMED ‘SMALL
BUSINESS OF THE YEAR’
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
“But it’s been much more than that,”
said Senator Stone. “In addition to supporting
our business community with
timely information they can use to grow
their companies, The Valley Business
Journal supports hundreds of nonprofit
groups who contribute to the quality of
life in Southwest County.”
Each month Publisher Linda Wunderlich,
and her small staff produce a
newspaper that reaches more than 60,000
readers and can be found, free of charge,
at hundreds of locations around the region.
Wunderlich also serves on the board of
directors of numerous local nonprofit organizations
and has been an active volunteer
at many community events for decades.
At a time when newspapers that once
provided important information to local
residents have either disappeared or drastically
reduced local coverage, people can
still count on The Valley Business Journal
to learn about community events, interesting
people, important meetings and other
items of interests for both their business
and their families.
“Small business is the backbone
of California’s economy,” said Senator
Stone. “I look forward to presenting the
Small Business of the Year to The Valley
Business Journal, a small business that
has done so much for the businesses, big
and small, across the region for almost
30 years.”
Jeff Stone represents California’s 28th
Senate District. The district, which is en-
tirely in Riverside County, stretches from
the vineyards of the Temecula Valley to
the Colorado River and includes the cities
of Blythe, Canyon Lake, Cathedral City,
Coachella, Desert Hot Springs, Indian
Wells, Indio, Lake Elsinore, La Quinta,
Murrieta, Temecula, Palm Desert, Palm
Springs, Rancho Mirage and Wildomar.
For more information visit: www.Senate.
ca.gov/Stone or on Facebook at www.
facebook.com/SenatorJeffStone.
“ In addition to
supporting our
business community
with timely information
they can use to grow
their companies, The
Valley Business
Journal supports
hundreds of nonprofit
groups...
Maximizing Employee Efficiency Through Technology
For most SMB owners, IT is seen as
a cost-center—something that doesn’t
drive profits, but a bottomless pit to be
filled with capital expenditure. Although
this mentality had changed somewhat
as technology has become more and
more integrated into the day to day operations
of almost any business, many
people struggle to see their technology
as something that can provide efficiencies.
Think about your interactions with
computers, smart phones, and printers
in your business. Did that produce an
audible sigh? A subconscious shake of
the head or dismissive eye roll? If that
was the case, you’re definitely not alone.
The technology that many SMB owners
and their employees interact with can be
slow, error prone, and causes little but
headaches. Oftentimes, however, this
is because that same technology hasn’t
been properly managed. Workstations,
smart phones, and yes, even printers
can be made to work for you—all it
takes is some forwarding thinking and
proactivity.
Since printers can be, at times,
the bane of even the IT Professional’s
existence, I figured we could tackle
them first. Printers jam, they throw
error codes in hieroglyphics, and seem
to have a 6th sense capable of determining
the criticality of a specific print
job and seemingly choose hold it up
in kind. Many of these issues are due
to items known as consumables—but
these consumables are outside of what
you would normally think of, e.g. toner
and paper—things like fusers, rollers, and
waste cartridges. They can also be due to
a lack of right-sizing—a small desktop
printer that you purchased for $60 at an
office supply store may be able to keep up
with one user, but certainly not an entire
accounting department. Before purchasing
a printer, consider the role that it is going
to fulfill. A large multi-function printer
can seem like a huge expense initially,
but it will pay dividends with its extended
lifetime and more enterprise specific capabilities.
Additionally, many companies
offer so-called managed print services,
where a piece of software residing inside
your network monitors the printer for its
supply needs, and can trigger automatic
shipments—preventing those late night
runs to the office supply store for that
presentation you really should have finished
yesterday that’s happening at 8am
tomorrow.
Now that we’ve gotten the biggest
frustration inducer out of the way, why
not tackle the piece of technology you
probably interact with the most at work—
your desktop or laptop. I’m sure many of
you have experienced that annoying error
message that pops up every time you
log in. You know the one. You’ve read it
once, it appeared to be in ancient Greek,
it never seems to do anything, but you
have to click Ok every morning and then
one day it mysteriously disappeared. Or
perhaps you’ve received the dread BSOD
(Blue Screen of Death), something equally
inscrutable but causing you to have to
turn your computer off and on again just
to get some work done—and hope you
didn’t lose any work in the process. Our
computers and the software that they run
are critical components in almost any business,
and small interruptions can really add
up. Think about that error message in the
above example—clicking ok every morning
doesn’t really take too much time for
an individual. But what if that same error
message is happening to 30 people, every
morning? How fast do you think those 2
seconds add up, and how much lost productivity
does that translate into over the
course of a month? Or a year? You would
be amazed how much more streamlined
well maintained business infrastructure
can be. Regular updates may seem like a
time consuming process, whether they be
for your computer or software on it, but
they can prevent many of those strange
error messages you receive. An up-to-date
and centrally managed antivirus application
can prevent viruses from getting into
one computer and spreading across the
entire network. Hours, even days of productivity
can be lost, not the mention the
expense of having “The IT Guy” come out
and fix all those infected computers, from
something like a Cryptolocker infection.
Most of you are seeing a pattern
develop here: much like your car, the
technology that runs your business needs
preventative maintenance. However, it also
needs to be the right fit for its duties. You
may be ‘saving money’ by not updating
your desktops until one breaks down
completely, but an outdated machine
is both slowing down the employee
using it, and likely prone to infections
(by not being regularly updated) and
software incompatibilities that only
further exacerbate the issue. By making
the technology in your business
work for you, simply by keeping it up
to date and well maintained, you gain
tremendous efficiencies for your staff
and by consequence your business. That
doesn’t even factor in the less tangible
benefit of well-maintained technology
for your employees—less frustration,
less downtime, less time spent fighting
with technology, and more time doing
what you hired them for—their job.
Mythos Technology is an IT consulting
and management firm that provides
Managed Technology Services including
hosted cloud solutions. For more
information, please visit www.mythostech.com
or call (951) 813-2672.
TECHNOLOGY
by
by
Tristan
Steve Fillingim
Collopy
www.mythostech.com