SpireTech Blog - Category: Business
Articles related to business, management, marketing, employees and so on.
On Feb 25th, SpireTech turned 28 years of age. We were busy, so we didn’t actually take time to celebrate – but the fact that we’ve been in business longer than some of our employees have been alive is a testament to our fortitude. We’ve come a long way from how we started – which was installing and maintaining NetWare servers and CAD systems at Engineering firms. Our last “birthday party” that included clients was when we turned 20 – and we remember that day fondly, as well as many of the clients who attended, and are still with us today. We’ll plan another celebration when we turn 30 in 2023. Hopefully you’ll be there.
We’d like to take a moment to thank and express our appreciation to all of our long-term clients. You help provide stable employment to our technicians and their families. We are grateful for your loyalty, and will continue to earn your trust every day.
The “Valentines day weekend” Ice storm wreaked havoc on tens of thousands of people and businesses. We monitor client networks throughout the metro area, and many clients were without power and/or internet for periods of time.
Fortunately, our office and datacenter has redundant generators and redundant internet, so we were able to continue operations with minimal impact – even though most of our employees are working from home during Covid. Two employees were either without power and/or internet, but fortunately our “bench” is deep enough that impacts to customer service were negligible while helping clients get back online.
2020 was a year of fairly flat growth at SpireTech. We imagine this has a lot to do with economic uncertainty related to Covid. We’re hoping that the floodgates will open for new business as the vaccine becomes available, businesses re-open, and pent-up demand for work that has been put on hold will get things moving again. We feel for all the small business owners that were forced to close or restrict activities during this time.
Review of 2020 Business Activity
We spent a lot of the year focused on improving security, moving to the cloud, and enabling work from home. Some of the areas we worked on include:
- Rollout of new services supporting and installing M365 business voice
- New M365 Security Pack service offering designed to increase client tenant security
- Increased service desk staff to reduce response times
- Increased focus on training – each staff member is encouraged to spend 10% of their time each week on continuing education and skill development
- Implementing EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) business management processes
We’ve also been continuing to attend conferences and quarterly IT business peer group events (virtually) to keep up on current trends and best practices. Read more...
When businesses seek help with their technology, many consider simply reaching out to a generic IT company or specialist. But there’s a wide range of available IT services that can provide a more tailored fit for your business, and managed IT services are one of them.
You may or may not have heard of the term “Managed Service Providers” or MSPs, which are professional companies who offer managed IT services. We’ve put together a definitive guide to managed IT services—including what MSPs do, why the managed services model was developed, and what the benefits to using an MSP are—to help you learn more.
History of Managed Service Providers
Prior to outsourced managed IT services, small and medium-sized businesses often faced expensive technology issues because they didn’t have the enterprise-level solutions large businesses had access to. For example, an Internet outage could cause an SMB to lose an entire day’s worth of productivity because they didn’t have a team to quickly restore their network.