It’s true. We cut our IT costs by 85%, and it was not from outsourcing our IT overseas.
In fact, we kept everything right here in the U.S.A. This post is not directly related to our business, but I feel compelled to share it in the hope that it will be helpful to others’ businesses. (Note: I am in no way affiliated with Google.)
How we broke the status quo and saved thousands
We worked with the same IT company for about eight years. Our main problem seemed to be keeping Microsoft Exchange emails working. It was a mess. Most of our cost was associated with fixing emails. Every few months, we had to pay to fix the email on top of our monthly fees. We did not see any way around this problem.
This was around 2009, when almost all companies were using Microsoft email. (Many still are.)
I thought it was ridiculous how much effort was required to access my email from any computer. I could access my personal email easily from anywhere.
Why couldn’t my business email be that easy?
The answer was that it could! With the help of Google apps professional email service, we could now have Google operating our email with our own domain name appearing in the email address. So instead of @gmail.com, we could have @wellsdrew.com
And so our new system was born. There was a great deal of resistance in the company at first; even though I knew it was a better system, it was a change and they did not like. Now, however, they love the new system, and it’s safe to say they could never imagine operating the old way again.
Google Professional is very low-priced; at $50 per user per year, it’s an amazing deal. Moreover, not only do we enjoy our new email service, but we also enjoy full functionality 99.9% of the time. In the last 5 years, it has probably been down less than three minutes that I can remember. Anyone hosting their own email would find it very difficult to compete with that (and of course Google’s resources are impossible to compete with).
Google email comes with online storage and their own versions of MS Excel and Word, called Spreadsheets and Documents, respectively. You can share your documents with your co-workers and collaborate in real time. Additionally, you can create presentations, forms, and even drawings.
Finally, Google offers a service called Google Drive, which allows you to place a file into a folder on your desktop to be instantly uploaded to Google’s cloud storage, where you can access the file from anywhere at any time.
The bottom line
Again, I am in no way affiliated with Google, but I wanted to share how using Google services has changed our company for the better. If you are considering your options to improve your own business, I strongly recommend Google Professional.