Meet Joe:
Joe is a Wisconsin native with a long history in the Milwaukee SMB community who owns a local tech company for 20 years. After divesting that he invested in a couple of startups. One of them is security-related and the cool one is Lite Zilla, a Milwaukee manufacturer of jumbo lite brites, yes, just like the ones you played as a kid. His day job is Mother G, a compass MSP that goes beyond offering managed services. They're 100% dedicated to providing lightswitch dependable technology to Wisconsin SMBs.
What would be your number one technology tip for small businesses?
My number one tip would be to check your security settings. If you don't know what that means, find a partner or a vendor who can help you check your security settings. A lot of small businesses, when I say confused, they feel like they're small so nobody wants to hack them. The reality is, it's all automated, it's all a business. In 2020, for the first time, the amount of money flowing through cybersecurity hacks exceeded the amount of money in the illicit drug trade in the world. They're not picking on you, because they want your secret widget designs, they're picking on you because you have an IP address, it's that simple. Look at your security, look at your vendor security. There been a couple of vendors in town, who you know, have been exposed, who've been hacked and once they get through there, they've got your keys to your kingdom. So be really, really careful, only the Paranoid survive.
Can you speak a bit about how COVID impacts SMB technology?
One of the big ones is the whole work from home thing and the whole remote connectivity, but that certainly ties back to the security factor. Those are all entry points into your company network. There's a lot of great tools out there. We use a lot of Microsoft Teams, and I've been using it for a couple of years since I joined Mother G. Probably the biggest impact of COVID is that a lot of those remote communications, remote collaboration, productivity tools have pushed down into the Small Business space because people couldn't come to the office. By the same token, on that security side, the bad guys are certainly taken advantage of people's uncertainty, people's conductivity, and frankly, people's people's goodwill, in terms of sending phishing emails to make a donation or support people who are out of work, that kind of thing and it's the bad guys trying to get your credentials and empty your bank account. So the security risks have gone up in the last nine months since everything shut down last March. So those are the two biggest impacts is the connectivity stuff and the security risks.
What are your thoughts on the future of SMB technology?
Not to beat a dead horse, but security is only going to get bigger. The other big thing that we're seeing with a lot of customers is looking at the productivity factors. One of the hidden benefits, if you will, of the whole experience of the last nine or ten months in terms of SMB technology is people starting to think differently. A year ago, there were a lot of small business owners who would think that everybody's got to be in the office and they can't be productive if everybody's not in the office and that's not the case. Now, at the same time, there are better and less good ways to do it. I think one of the biggest things looking forward to the future is how do we, as business leaders, and as business owners, you know, you own your business. You've got a staff of X number of people, you want to keep them both happy and productive, you probably have an entirely new appreciation today than you did a year ago, in terms of the struggle that some of your employees have. What does that mean to them on a day in, day out, based on how can the technology help to bridge those gaps, keep them productive, while helping...
