Small Business IT mistake 2: Old Equipment

The most common small business mistake we see is old equipment. The office struggles with a bunch of decrepit pentium IIIs running Windows ME, crashing regularly and taking five times as long to do a job.

It's quite understandable for a business owner to hold onto old kit. IT equipment is a major capital cost and upgrading computers always involves money, time and pain.

But that cost and time is worth it. Slow old computers are a false economy. The whole idea of computers is help people do their jobs better and quicker.

One of the worst clients I had was a food distributor that had a terrible old machine. Every afternoon he received emails from his clients with the next day's orders. Almost every day his machine would crash.

In one year he spent over two thousand dollars in unnecessary support costs. What's more, he lost a number of days orders. I would guess that one dodgy computer cost him ten of thousands in lost orders and disaffected customers.

Saying "the computer is down" is one of the worst possible images your staff can give customers. It looks shoddy and unprofessional.

Ten years ago customers might have nodded sagely and accepted "the computer done it" as an excuse. Today they won't, they’ll take their business elsewhere.

Five year old equipment is the limit. Older than five years and computers become unreliable. Once past that five year limit the odds are high that you'll see hard drives, power supplies and motherboards failing.

One of the strangest attitudes I see in home and small business IT is the owner knows their systems are old and decrepit. But they are waiting for the Next Big Thing™.

The problem in the computer industry is there will always be a Next Big Thing™. When this big thing arrives there will be another coming soon after.

Often a business finds itself rushed into replacing the old computers when one gives up the ghost, or they find the new printer or software just won't work with the older equipment.

This is when businesses make the next mistake; they grab the first thing they see when they need the new computer, they either pay too much for substandard equipment or buy on price and suffer the consequences.