Soar Higher with Jason Ballard: Leveraging Technology to Maximize Business Efficiency
Jason Ballard:
This is Coach Jason Ballard, and I'm a business wingman. Over the years, I've learned a lot from working in our family construction business, serving as a senior officer in the United States Air Force, and running 12 different organizations around the world. Many, many people helped me get to where I am today, and it's my mission in life to serve as a personal wingman to others. That's what this podcast is all about, providing knowledge, tools, resources, and mentorship to help people soar to their highest altitude.
Welcome back to the Soar Higher Podcast. This is your host, Coach Jason Ballard. Really excited to be here with you today. It's going to be another great show. We have an awesome guest on the show from the tech sector that's going to talk to us about technology, and how to leverage technology and data to make our businesses better, to make better decisions, right? We're talking about how to best maximize our productivity across the organization, and be smarter, be more intentional, leverage the resources around us a lot better when it comes to technology, to help us be more successful, be leaner, meaner, and smarter in what we do. So we're very blessed today to have Greg Williams on the show. Greg's the VP of Strategy at Western Computer, which is a nationwide software and cloud solutions provider that helps organizations innovate, maximize their IT investments, and achieve higher levels of success for their clients. So Greg, welcome to the show.
Greg Williams:
Thank you, nice to be here. I appreciate your time today.
Jason Ballard:
We are glad to have you. Greg is a technology expert. He understands it on a very technical level, but also can break that down and help us understand it from a higher level as well. So Greg, tell us a little bit about you and your background, and how you got to where you are today.
Greg Williams:
Sure. So I was an Economics major in college, but I always knew I wanted to be in the software industry. I had some family that worked in business application software, and when I got out of college I got a job with a software company and I've always been where accounting and software intersect, which is accounting enterprise-level software, it's a base software that every business needs to run their business. We're the first application you typically install, and the last application before you go into business, because we all have to file taxes and audit our financials and you need software to do that. So I've been doing that for 25 years now.
Jason Ballard:
Nice. Software and technology meets accounting. Boy, that's an interesting crossroads to be at, huh? Well, let's dig into the conversation. When you look at businesses, the folks that you work with in your company, and the folks that you guys are helping in the most beneficial manner, when you take a look at all these clients, what are you seeing in industry? What are businesses, when it comes to technology and innovation, where are folks struggling the most? Where are the folks in need the most right now?
Greg Williams:
Yeah, so most of them that we see are struggling with automation, and they're also struggling with just knowing the basic numbers within their business. So if you think of small startup businesses, for example, they will typically have an outside accountant doing their accounting for them. So he's probably running QuickBooks or something like that, or she, and they will give all the reports on the business to their accountant, or maybe they're using QuickBooks in more of a real-time basis. Then they're typically making decisions based upon their bank account balance, entrepreneurs are in a lot of cases.
They're not really thinking about, "How is my revenue trending up and down? How is, what costs should I be accruing for? How is my spend going every month? Is it increasing or decreasing?" They're thinking, "Oh wow, one of my customers just paid me so I have a nice bank account balance, so I can go out and spend some money."
Jason Ballard:
Wow.
Greg Williams:
And that's not the way you want to run a business. So when you get to a certain point within a business, you can bring the accounting in-house, and that's where companies like mine come in, is helping you set up the systems to do that properly.
Jason Ballard:
All right, well tell us a little bit about your company and what kinds of things you do to help people. Are you focused in small business, medium business, large business? Tell us a little bit about those things?
Greg Williams:
I would say we're focused on small to mid-sized businesses. Now everyone's definition of small is different. Most of our customers are 10 million in revenue and up, and once they get to a billion dollars in revenue, let's say, then they're going to want to be talking to one of the big accounting firms like an Ernst & Young, or someone like that. So we fit in the small to mid-market businesses, helping them to optimize their systems across accounting, across warehousing, manufacturing, project management, all the different systems, back office systems that you may have that touch your financials, we're going to help companies optimize those.
Jason Ballard:
With technology, it seems like we're just challenged with it so much because there's so many types of technology systems and tools out there, and then they change so rapidly. So how are you guys adapting to all of this rapid change? How do you help your clients go through all that? Do you use a bunch of different tools, and bring them together? Do you have a certain kind of systems and tool sets that you bring and package? How do you navigate that and help people with that?
Greg Williams:
That's a great question. We are fortunate enough to be a Microsoft partner, and so we lean on Microsoft technologies, and Microsoft has everything for a small business. They have the Microsoft Office suite, and then they have the accounting applications like we use, called Business Central, and then they also have CRM systems that compete with a Salesforce or something like that. So if you go down the Microsoft route, you can get everything from one vendor and be assured that it all works together. If you don't go that route, then you're going to be dealing with three or four different vendors, and trying to make those systems talk.
Jason Ballard:
Yeah, what are the pros and the cons there? I know some people like to stick with one, put all their eggs in one basket, and some people are okay with that, some people hate that. Versus having different vendors provide different things. What are the pros and the cons from your experience on that? Which one's better or are they?
Greg Williams:
Yeah, I call that best-of-breed versus integrated systems. When you go with, let's use the advantage of the Microsoft Office Suite for example, because I think a lot of people can relate to that. The alternative to using Microsoft Office is to have, I guess, you could have Google Docs, but then that's not going to do your meetings. So you need Zoom, and then it doesn't have a messaging app, so you're going to go with Slack. So you can pay for three subscriptions and have three different vendors, or you just pay one Office 365 subscription to Microsoft, and get Teams for meetings and messaging and Microsoft Office for all your Word and Excel and those types of things. Now you may find that Slack, for example, may have some features that Teams doesn't have, but then it's another application, and another subscription to manage.
Jason Ballard:
Gotcha. So it sounds like you're leading us down the path of integrate this stuff together as much as possible. There's the camps of the Apple users and the iOS people that like their integrated things between their Apple computers and iPhones. Then there's kind of the Android people, the Windows-based people. I fall into that camp myself, but my daughters are more iPhone-related. And I guess it gets into personal preference, but it sounds like you can save money, and you can have less stuff to keep track of, and take inventory of all these different things if you integrate these things, assuming that those things meet your needs, right?
Greg Williams:
Exactly. Yeah, you can have less to administer, save money. Then in the future, if we think about AI, Microsoft is the best of a lot in OpenAI, I think, $10 billion let's say. They're building an AI platform that works across all your different applications. So in the future, if you need to look for something, you can use Microsoft AI tool called Copilot, and it's going to look for it across email, across Teams, across all your different applications you're using, it's going to find that data for you, and make your users much more productive. If you go another route, then let's say, you have, if you're using Google Docs, then it may do a great job of searching AI across your Google documents, but it's not going to reach into the other applications that you have.
Jason Ballard:
Yeah, I think that's important for people to be thinking about this stuff. I know a lot of people use the Google suite for the Google Meet, Google Docs, Google, Gmail, those kind of things for running things, and that is great. Those are great tools, a great company, and they're pretty lean. They're light and lean. Microsoft's a little heavier, because there's usually a client software you have to load on the computer to run it, to run it better. Whereas Google's a little more internet-based. You've got to connect to it online to read it and look at those things. There's some pros and cons, I guess, there.
But as you think about your business, and whether you're a $5 million business, or a 10 million, or a 500 million, or a billion-dollar business rate, you have to think about the more systems you have, the more things you got to keep track of, and the more stuff you've got to integrate in between the systems, right? Because isn't the data ... Because at the end of the day, technology systems are great, but isn't the real gold, isn't the real value in the data that lives in these systems and in these various repositories? Isn't that the real gold though?
Greg Williams:
Yeah, that is. It's access to your data, and leveraging your data. Most businesses over the last 15, 20 years, they've collected a lot of data in these systems, but they haven't learned how to harness it and use it yet. AI is going to help us with that. So having it in a platform where it's more accessible is really going to help you take that next step with your business. Then on top of Microsoft's value around the Office suite that I just mentioned, they're the only one of those vendors that also has ERP and accounting applications. So you can have the accounting application that your accountants use and your users use to enter orders, and manage inventory in the warehouse. It shows up right within that Microsoft Office suite. It's all right there, in the same platform. Whether they're on their iPhone or an Android, or on their Windows PC, they can access all the same information, all the apps.
Jason Ballard:
Yeah, I think it's important for people to understand. Some people like Microsoft stuff, some stuff Microsoft may be best suited for, other things, they may not. But when you're thinking about your money invested, everybody's investing more in the technology, because it's powerful, right? It saves in manpower, it saves in efficiencies, it processes things faster, more accurately. But you do have to keep in mind how do you maximize the power of technology to get to the data? Because at the end of the day, from a business standpoint, data equals information, and information equals knowledge, and knowledge equals power.
The more knowledge you have, the more information you can process quickly as a decision-maker and a company allows you to gather information, process information, and in turn, make really good, accurate, high quality decisions faster than your competitor, theoretically, you should be winning. You should have a competitive advantage. But if you don't have these things talking to each other, or integrated in some form or fashion, can that be counterproductive?
Greg Williams:
Yeah, it can be. And I'll give you an example of what AI is going to do for us. In the past, a lot of companies were really dependent on what we call, "Exception-based reporting," which means I'll use, let's say, you're a distributor of hunting and fishing supplies, in the morning as the owner, you want to come in and say, "Hey, what orders didn't we ship yesterday? What are the orders that came in that we couldn't fulfill? I want to focus on those and see, is that list growing? Is it shrinking? How are we doing managing our back orders?" To do that, you may need help from an IT guy in the past to say, "Hey, run me a report of all the orders that we didn't ship yesterday, and by the way, tell me the ones that are over a certain dollar amount."
Then the IT guy would've to go in there and he would have to write a query that says, "Select from the orders table the orders that are greater than a thousand dollars," and he'd have to write some code to do that typically. With AI, we're going to be doing that in the future with natural language, so you won't have to ask your IT person anymore for that information. You'll be able to type into the computer, "Show me the orders that didn't ship yesterday," just like that. And then the computer being generative AI is going to take this step further and be like, "Do you want to know the orders out of which warehouse?" And then you'll say, "Just my east warehouse." And then generative AI, you can go a little further and say, "Okay, the orders from this vendor that has a stock-out, let's exclude those." And you can keep narrowing down that data without having to know how to run reports or really be an Excel expert. So it's going to democratize data for the masses.
Jason Ballard:
Well, the thing that I think is really powerful about it, is it's plain English. You can type or talk to these things. So, "Give me a report on X, Y, and Z," and it will go do that. And I think as you gets smarter, it will be more intuitive to the things that you you're talking about there, Greg. And it'll allow you to almost have a conversation with the tools-
Greg Williams:
That's exactly.
Jason Ballard:
... with the technology, and translate it. It's like you're talking English and the computer to deliver what it needs, needs to talk ones and zeros, right? It's like English talking to somebody in Chinese or something, some different language, and you've got to translate that back and forth and understand what each other are talking about to deliver the same information back that you're looking for, and have a smart interaction, right?
Greg Williams:
Yeah. So one of Microsoft's visions is using that to blur the lines between all your systems. So you're asking it that data and it's like, "Oh, I found in your accounting system that there's this back order report. Would you like me to surface that for you, ecetera." That's the future of these types of systems where it's working across different systems and say, "Oh, by the way, we found a customer service message on your chatbot, where a customer was chatting with you on your website saying, 'Hey, where's my order?'"
Jason Ballard:
That's really cool. I think technology's great, and oh my gosh, companies are creating just monster loads of data. Data all over the place, just terabytes and terabytes of data all the time, and you've got to store all that and put that in the cloud, or put it on a server, or something somewhere, right? But one of the challenges that I see, I want you to talk about this a little bit, is how much data do we have? How good is the data? How accurate is the data? And where is all the data at?
You've got a system in the cloud over here and another system in the cloud over there. You may use Salesforce, and that's in the Salesforce cloud, and you may use an ERP system and that's different, that's in a cloud solution, something. And you've got a local version of this in Microsoft Word, and Excel and Office over here. Knowing where your data is, how much of it is out there? Nobody has a clue. They have no idea. The report they're pulling from department A may be similar than department B, and department A and B don't talk to each other very much. So the system should be able to understand what's out there in the ecosystem, and connect these dots, because most people don't, right?
Greg Williams:
Yeah. There are tools that big companies have for building big data warehouses, or data lakes in the cloud. That hasn't been acceptable to small businesses yet, but big companies have a way to aggregate data across multiple systems in the cloud, and then report on it. But Microsoft's really democratizing that by putting it in all their tools for the small business, so you don't have to worry about it. They're going to find that data for you across their different systems.
Jason Ballard:
So when you think about your suite of tools in your business, when you think about how to integrate those, how to harness the full power of that, because you can go out and get an AI translator that you can talk to, that can go do a lot of this stuff for you. But if it's not all connected, you're not going to get good data. And if the systems aren't tuned a certain way, then you're not going to get good data. So what are some of the best practices? What are some of the best things that you've seen, where no matter where you are, whether you're a small business or a larger-sized business, best practices that you see working the best for folks out there these days? How do you package that?
Greg Williams:
Right. Well, I think there's a few different ways to do that. One is to use some type of reporting tool that combines data from multiple data sources. That's harder for a small business to do, easier for mid-size business that has some IT expertise. In the past we used to have to carefully define that data set. We'd have to say, "If we have a customer from this system, a customer from this system, the CRM system is the master. So use that one and dedupe the data." We used to have to do a lot of work. I call that formatting the data as you're building the data warehouse. But nowadays we're able to format the data as we're reading it, so we can have somewhat messy data and depend on AI and algorithms to pull that data for us.
Jason Ballard:
Okay.
Greg Williams:
It's more what we call a big-data approach that, again, is getting more accessible to small businesses than it used to be.
Jason Ballard:
Okay, now I think you guys are in your organization, at Western Computer. You guys are really experts on Microsoft specifically and all of their suites. Tell everybody some of those types of systems that you're using-
Greg Williams:
Sure.
Jason Ballard:
... and implementing in different people's workspaces and how those are working, and how to best apply those. Because I think Microsoft's pretty widely known.
Greg Williams:
So our most popular application is one called Business Central, which is an accounting and ERP system. It is, think about it as a step-up from QuickBooks. And we have, there's over a 100,000 companies worldwide using that system in the small to mid-market. It's very popular through the whole world. Another system we have is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, which is Salesforce's number one competitor. Think about it like a Salesforce, except it's built on the Microsoft platform. They also have a customer service application, and a marketing application. So they have both front office and back office applications, and everything is built to be connected to the Microsoft Office platform.
Jason Ballard:
When you've seen folks buy all the Microsoft, I'm just going to use Microsoft as an example right now, when people use all of the Microsoft tools and resources, and they're all in on Microsoft, what are they really benefiting out of that? Because some people are like, "Yeah, well if you give one company all of your money, then it's hard, something doesn't go well. It's hard to kind of break that apart and go forward." There's some fears there, but what have you seen? Has that blown up on anybody? Is that really a valid fear?
Greg Williams:
We haven't seen it blow up. I understand some people, they say they don't want all their eggs in one basket, and we do have some customers running Business Central, that use Google Docs, we have a few of those, instead of Microsoft Office. But guess what? There's always, folks in accounting always have a copy of Excel around, because accountants will typically only use Excel. So then you already have a disparate tech stack, but I believe it's a safe choice to invest with Microsoft. They're very fair in their pricing. They don't have constant price increases like some of our competitors do. It's also the most secure data platform in the world. I mean, the Department of Defense uses it, or US military uses it, the government, they're all using Microsoft platforms every day.
Jason Ballard:
Yeah, when I was in the military, even years ago, we always had Microsoft, at least on the desktop. I mean, we had different, other kind of systems running all the different systems. Sometimes they were UNIX-based, sometimes they were some proprietary thing that ran, a specific part of the mission. But for your more standard office environment types of tools and software and resources, yeah, it was Microsoft, and still is today as far as I know.
So let's talk about leveraging one type of manufacturer. Let's say Microsoft offers all of this all in one package for business, which I think is great. It's powerful, it's integrated, it's all the same protocols, it's interlinked. There's buttons inside each one, where you can go back and forth and see things and share things. But when you're thinking about business, especially small to medium-sized businesses, I haven't met a business owner yet that says, "I think we're just going to sit tight for the next five years, and we're just going to do status quo, and we're not going to really grow. We're not going to really go anywhere. We're just going to be a bump on a log in our business." I have never met a business owner to say that, they always want to improve, always want to grow, always want to get into different markets or do different things.
Greg Williams:
Automate more, right?
Jason Ballard:
Automate, and they're always moving forward in some form or fashion. So when you think about business growth, when you think about scaling, when you think about maturing, you have to think about the technology to do that with. One of the biggest limiting factors to growth that I've seen in business, running my own businesses, or coaching people in their businesses today, is the technology will not allow you to scale beyond a certain point.
Greg Williams:
Yes.
Jason Ballard:
I run into this all the time. Because they have different things going on, and you don't know what's going on in all these things every day, you do lack some control. You do lack knowledge in all of these things, where if you have it integrated into one provider as much as possible, that is scalable, you can evolve that, you can do that much easier and faster. Is that at your experience as well?
Greg Williams:
Yeah. We spend a lot of time helping companies graduate from QuickBooks into Business Central. That's a common project for us. Occasionally we'll get a serial entrepreneur that comes to us and he's like, "Hey, I'm pre-revenue, but I want to put in a real system like Business Central now, because I don't want to go through the pain of replacing QuickBooks two or three years from now. I'm really going to scale this business." That's someone that's done it before. Then you get other businesses that try to keep those startup systems as long as they possibly can, and ring every penny out of them. They're the ones that have very painful upgrades eventually, because they've built all these bad processes around an inferior system. They just kept it too long. So that's an interesting question there, because I think that you should try to get to, it doesn't need to be Business Central, but you should try to get to a larger, more relational system as soon as you can.
Jason Ballard:
I think the bottom line here for folks, as I'm understanding this with you, Greg, when you think about growth and scale, and taking advantage of market opportunities when you have those opportunities and to sometimes go fast, go lean, being scalable in technology means there's some standardization to it. The more you can standardize your technology, more you can standardize your desktops, the more you can standardize the applications and the tools that you're using, the faster you can go and the more you can scale that, because it is standard. Everybody's using it, using it in a universal manner. The other thing is repeatability. The things you are doing have to be repeatable, efficiently, in a lean and fast manner. Nobody can scale if things aren't repeatable, if they are not standardized.
Greg Williams:
Mm-hmm, that's right.
Jason Ballard:
And some people in business, especially small businesses, they really get hung up on that. And we will argue with you sometimes about being standardized and repeatable. Like, "Oh, we don't get hung up on processes, that's going to slow us down. We're ready to pivot. We're just going to do what we need to do." No, yeah, that sounds great today. And you may be able to do that for a week or two or a month or two, but in the near future, the wave of that will catch you and bite you, and you will drown in that. Because now you've got to manage a lot more, and be a lot more leadership engaged to circle the wagons, to fill in all the gaps of you not being standardized across the company, you not being repeatable. That's where the magic really happens. So just keep that in mind when you are thinking about how to grow and scale your company, "Well, are you repeatable? Is it standard?" And if not, what needs to happen for you guys to make it that way?
Greg Williams:
The other mistake I see, is with some small business owners that they're not in touch enough with the heavy lifting that their people are doing to get their jobs done every day. So they don't value automation enough, until it gets out of control. When they start to scale the business, the only way they could scale is to hire more people. So I often tell them, "If you think technology's expensive, try hiring people to do it."
Jason Ballard:
Yeah, that's a really great point. I'm glad you brought that up. I was going to ask you about that. With the emerging technology, with some of these innovative things that we've been talking about in this podcast, do people need more people, or less people? What's the people dynamic as you evolve the technologies? Because a lot of people say, "Well, I'm going to invest X amount of dollars into this new AI, or this new technology, and then I'm going to cut a bunch of people to pay for it, because I don't need because the machines are doing it for me." So does that work? What are you seeing in industry when the balance of technology and systems and people?
Greg Williams:
Well, it depends on where you're at within your business life cycle, and how much some of these tools are going to help you in terms of scaling versus hiring. But if you look at, the average business in the '70s or '80s had five times the accounting staff they do now. They had people processing accounts payable invoices manually. They had people following up on the phone on invoices and stuff. Now a lot of that's automated. So some of it is just keeping up with what other businesses are doing, so you don't fall behind. Because if you have to do these things manually, then you're just not going to be competitive. Your cost structure is going to be way higher than your competitors. That's the first thing that I think of, that's just very basic. Then when it comes to taking advantage of some of the emerging technologies, I don't advise businesses to jump on that too soon, but I ask them to think about investing in systems that make it so they can jump on those when they're ready to mature.
Jason Ballard:
Yeah, that sounds smart. So as we go forward, I was reading some stuff about your company, and some of the things you guys are doing, and it seems like we're evolving down this path where people can, instead of going out buying everybody's applications out there, where you're helping people develop their own applications and use technology to do some coding and organic things? Where are we at in the industry with that and where is that going?
Greg Williams:
Well, one of the things that's really interesting about Business Central in particular, is that it has a huge army of third party applications available for it. They have an app source, like an app store just like you would for your iPhone.
Jason Ballard:
Good or bad?
Greg Williams:
It's good. Let's say that you're a distributor of equipment, and you decide that you want to start renting equipment as well, not just selling it. That's a complex financial transaction, renting is. And it can take a lot of, so in the software packages that traditionally have done that are expensive and hard to support, and they're very specialized. You can go on the Business Central app store and choose from three or four different ones to plug into your application, and just start using it with some basic training. You don't have to buy a separate application. So that's an advantage. Or let's say you want to start accepting credit cards. You can choose from 10 different solutions that are just going to plug in and let you start taking credit cards. So that's an advantage of going with one of the more popular applications out there, is that they have a large ecosystem around them.
Jason Ballard:
Wow.
Greg Williams:
And if you think about it, that's how iPhone won the phone wars. They had all the applications right away and supported them well.
Jason Ballard:
Yeah, their Apple Store and, I guess, equivalent to the Android Play Store or whatever, right? Yeah, that's powerful. That is really, really powerful, and it's agile. I think a key to business success is being agile, being lean, and being able to have access to these things, and fire them up, download something and go where you can be mobile, you can be on the go if you will, adapting to whatever you're trying to deal with, right?
Greg Williams:
Mm-hmm, that's right.
Jason Ballard:
One of the things I want to ask you about, all the technology's great. All of the data is great, but at the end of the day, business needs to make money. They've got to be cashflow positive, they've got to be profitable, they've got to keep growing, they've got to keep innovating, they've got to be maturing and advancing their products and services. So from a decision-maker level, what are the things that decision-makers need to be thinking about or leveraging differently?
So from their seat at the CEO table, their companies running, and information's flowing, people are doing what they're supposed to be doing. So leaders can keep a finger on the sense of what's going on and make decisions timely, real time, as needed, to sense what's going on, make corrections or make changes on the fly if need be, and better manage the business, to make sure all of these cogs and wheels are turning the right direction and producing the right results. How do you do that? What ways do you help people achieve that?
Greg Williams:
Well, I think, you hit on some of it earlier in the conversation around having good processes, and making them repeatable as much as possible. And once you have good processes, then it's time to have good technology that can help you automate and enable those processes, and then report on it. You have to have good real-time data, or else you're running the business blind.
Jason Ballard:
That's one of the challenges that I see, is that decision-makers either don't trust the data, spend too much time in the data drilling into it, and then one thing doesn't add up with this thing over here, and then they second guess the people, and the process. And they can get lost in that, and then they hesitate in making the decision, and then it drags on another week until they get that down pat. I think that's where I think standardizing this, and testing that, and getting that in a manageable manner where you're consistently getting accurate data through the system, I think, can be helpful.
Greg Williams:
Yeah, the biggest challenge I see there for small businesses is when they're running important processes based on the spreadsheet that someone has to manually update, that's the number one challenge I see.
Jason Ballard:
Anything manual is not going to be good. It's going to have errors. If anybody's doing anything manual, one of my favorite things I like to see is they'll have a system, they'll have some technology application, they will log in, they will use it, let's say, Microsoft Central or QuickBooks, or something for accounting. They've got data in there, and then they will extract the data out into an Excel sheet, and that Excel sheet will be transitioned into another sheet that's formatted a different way, that goes into another system to produce some kind of data results in another system. So they're taking things out of one, putting them into another, and that is a train wreck waiting to happen.
Greg Williams:
That's right.
Jason Ballard:
So I think as we wrap up here on this episode, really great discussion with you, Greg. I mean, you're clearly doing some amazing things out there in helping people understand the complicated world of technology. Because it is complicated, it's technical, it's hard. It really is hard and frustrating to get all this stuff to work right. And it's not cheap either. So as we wrap up here, Greg, what are, I guess, maybe your top two biggest pieces of advice you would give business leaders today when they're thinking about making their company more competitive, more efficient? What are the two big takeaways you'd empower them with?
Greg Williams:
First, is if you have any systems left on-premise, get them in a cloud, because the ransomware threat is real, and we see it every day with companies' data getting hacked and held hostage.
Jason Ballard:
So when you say on-prem, you're talking about owning their own data center? It's physically in their building where their business is and all that, right?
Greg Williams:
Either it's a server closet, or even a local hosting company. You get on one of the major clouds that has military grade security, whether it's Microsoft or Amazon or someone like that. But get onto one of the real clouds, would be the first recommendation to make. Because I can't tell you how much pain I see small business owners go through every month, because they get ransomwared, and the interruption of their business because of that. So that's the number one thing that we try to help companies with.
Then the second is when you look at new systems, think about not just how those make you more efficient, but how they provide the data that you need to run the business. I think some companies get so focused on how easy the system is to use, and how fast they can do a transaction, "How fast can I enter an order? Instead of what data am I getting out of this after the fact?"
Jason Ballard:
And is it good data, is it configured the right way? Because one of the challenges I see is dashboards and data tools can be set up and configured differently. The stuff that the CEO cares about is probably a little different than the person in Accounting counting the beans every day in the Accounting shop. And it's different than what the Marketing people are tracking in their systems.
Greg Williams:
That's right.
Jason Ballard:
So they need to be, again, repeatable and standardized to where you can take the same data sets and configure the output, the visuals of that in the dashboard differently for different people in the company, that need to understand the different dynamics. The CEO doesn't have time to look at every little thing. They want to see the big rocks that matter the most to them, to make good business decisions for the company holistically. So, well, Greg, man, great to have you on the show today. You've been an awesome guest. I think we've learned a lot about technology, how to use it, how not to use it. Folks who want to learn more about you and your company, Western Computer, how do they reach out and contact you, learn more, maybe even work with you in the right situation here?
Greg Williams:
So they can reach out to us on westerncomputer.com. We have areas you can chat with us, areas you can enter a form and get an email back. We have lots of different options to connect with you. You can also reach out to me on LinkedIn, Greg Williams at Western Computer on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to find, and I respond to all my messages up there.
Jason Ballard:
Excellent. All right. We're also going to take all of your contact information you've provided, and put that in the show notes of the episode. So people, no matter what platform they're listening to this, whether it's social media, or the normal podcast channels, they have access to it there as well. So we can just click on you, and get right to you. Great to be with you today. Thank you so much. Folks, at the end of the day, there's a million technology things out there you can use in your business. Doesn't mean they're all right for you. Figure out what is right for you. Rather, if you're all in on Google, all in on Microsoft, or et cetera, whatever you're using, make sure it's integratable, make sure it's scalable. Make sure that these systems can talk to each other seamlessly without a bunch of IT guys in the background coding stuff to make it work, and customizing things.
That's going to be really hard to maintain. It needs to be repeatable, and it certainly needs to be standardized. The more you can standardize your stuff in your business and make those practices repeatable, the better that's going to be. You should also be thinking about technology, not as in applications and tools and data and all that, that's all important, but you really truly need to think about your technology and your innovation-side of your business, and have that integrated in with your broader strategy for your company to achieve whatever goals you're trying to achieve. You need a strategy. You need to think through that deeper than somebody coming to you every once in a while saying, "Hey, I need this software. Hey, I need this tool," and ad hoc coming to you, wanting you to buy all these things. Now it needs to be part of the greater good of things, because you don't want all these disparate things out there.
Greg Williams:
That's right.
Jason Ballard:
Just because somebody in one department doesn't talk to somebody in another department doesn't mean you don't already have that tool. They just don't know about it. So this stuff being centralized, and the approvals for these things being centralized is really key, because you'll end up spending a lot of money on things you already have. You'll also come to find out that you may already have bought things that you're not even fully even utilizing yet, and somebody's wanting to go out there and buy another thing that you already have, just because they're one hand's not talking to the other.
So these things really allow you to be lean. They allow you to innovate, they allow you to really move quicker through the business journey. I think that's what Greg has really captured for us today. So hope you got a lot out of it. Next week we're going to be talking about really cool topic, one of my favorites, entrepreneurism in leadership, and how to conquer your next great achievement. How do you go from one level to the next? We talked about it today. We're going to go really deep into that next week with our next guest. So you won't want to miss that. Hope you have a great week everybody.