Two new franchisees, St. Laurent and Yonge & Bloor are almost ready to go!  Their new franchisee training is scheduled for July 25, 26, 27 in Toronto and we have space for a couple more franchisees.  This will be the last training at $19,500 after this prices increase to $24,900.  If you have been thinking about joining CT, now is the time!  Contact us for more info at canada@technologysolved.ca.

CFA’s Franchise Choice Award
Computer Troubleshooters Canada is proud to announce we have been awarded the 2012 Franchisees’ Choice Designee, presented by the Canadian Franchise Association (www.cfa.ca). This award is very special to us as it recognizes the incredible relationship we have with our franchisees. Thank you to all our franchisees who made this possible!

Most business owners would agree that it’s easier to provide more solutions to an existing client than it is to find new customers. Repeat business comes from providing quality and value, but also from keeping in touch with your clients, reminding them of your services and promoting things you think they can benefit from. Email marketing is an easy and effective way to remain at the top of a customer’s mind for that next transaction, as long as your email marketing messages are appropriate and effective. Although it may seem difficult for a small business to manage an ongoing email marketing campaign, there are many simple and effective tools designed to make this easy and affordable. This month we highlight what to look for in an email marketing tool.

Social media allows users to interact with each other and discuss shared interests. Popular social media sites include: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, MySpace, Wikipedia, Digg, Delicious, Friend Feed, Flickr, Ning, Skype, Stumbleupon and many more. However, the three most popular sites include Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

If you are not currently on these sites, try one for a week. You may be surprised with who you find: competitors, vendors, news sources, your dry cleaner, even your elementary teacher. You will certainly notice the number of businesses that not only have accounts but also are advertising on the sites. Here are some tips to help you establishing yourself online:

Experience Social Media – If you are not already established, visit these sites and choose a user name for you or your business. Start connecting with friends, family, and neighbors. Also start connecting with clients, vendors, news outlets, and leaders in your industry.

Find your Audience – You know all of that money you spend trying to reach your audience with television, radio, newspaper, and even search engines? Your audience is already using social media – you just have to find them. Use the search function on the site and type in your ideal buyer keywords. You will find groups dedicated to your industry, hobby, neighborhood, and even your pet.

Create a Social Media Plan – Identify the goals of your social media strategy. Do you want to increase your customer base? Offer advice? Increase sales? Increase website traffic? Find your high school sweetheart? Whatever your goals, write them down and create a plan of action to achieve them. Plan how you will measure the success of the strategy.

Measure Your Results – One of the key benefits of social media is how easy it is to measure. Measure the number of followers each week using a simple spreadsheet. You can also measure how many times your company is mentioned, linked, or your content is redistributed.

When you become a Computer Troubleshooters franchisee, we can help you and offer advice regarding your social media strategy.

Once you’re there, look for Computer Troubleshooters on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We look forward to interacting with you online.

If you’re thinking about starting a business, then technology might be the very last consideration on your mind. With a long list of tasks in front of you (like getting a logo and stationery designed, finding an office, and working out your marketing plan), you may just requisition your home computer to start running your new business.

New computer or your home PC? – For a while, your home computer may be adequate to handle the necessities of your business. However, if your computer time is conflicting with the children’s need to surf the internet for their homework, it may be time to consider a dedicated business computer. Study any system specifications carefully and check the manufacturer’s websites. Many ‘cheap’ retail deals are superseded models, cannot be upgraded easily or may not connect to a bigger computer network, which will all be important as you grow. Also, talk to your accountant about any tax benefits that may be gained from leasing instead of purchasing your IT assets.

Voice over IP – When considering a phone number for your business, take a look at your Voice over IP options. The quality of this technology has improved significantly and it can provide great local, national and international phone rates. Today’s systems can plug into a standard cordless phone and your internet connection, so your computer doesn’t have to be turned on for you to make and receive calls. It makes a fantastic ‘second line’ for businesses that run from your home. You can have your office phone answered outside of business hours and still receive personal calls on your standard home phone line.

Internet domain name – Once you have decided on your business name, look at registering your internet domain name. This will prevent someone else from registering it. Having your own domain name (like marysmith.com) will give your emails a more professional look and enable you to have a simple webpage established. Don’t think you have to spend a fortune on a comprehensive website before your first day of actually doing business. As long as your contact details (phone number, email address, fax number, and location) are easy to find and you have some great information about why your business is different from your competitors, you will be giving the search engines something to find. This is much better than an ‘under construction’ picture or no internet presence at all. Use your domain name in your email address to look much more credible than someone operating from a free email account (like myname@gmail.com). You can still use your internet provider for your email service. Make certain to check what protection they have in place against email viruses and spam. Remember to include your website and email address on all of your stationery and marketing materials.

Email marketing – Investing in an email marketing program provides you with a great communication channel to keep your business in front of your future customers on a regular basis. Supplement your email marketing with monthly newsletters and occasional special offers. Get permission to store your customer’s email address from the day they start doing business with you and you’ll build up an impressive database.

When you choose to join as a Computer Troubleshooters franchisee, we can help you with all of the above. We offer monthly marketing emails, can help you with your VOIP options and will support you all the way.

6 Ways To Protect Your New Apple i-Pad

Have you always dreamed of running your own business?

Do you have a passion for technology?

Do you want to be part of a growing team?

Computer Troubleshooters is the largest IT franchise with close to 500 locations in over 25 countries.  

Click here to learn more http://computerfranchise.ca/request-information/

Every year the Canadian Franchise Association surveys their members regarding their franchisor.
We are happy to announce that Computer Troubleshooters has been presented with TWO awards!

The Award of Excellence 2011-Bronze in recognition of excellence in franchisor/franchisee relationships in the category of Non-Traditional/New Emerging Franchisees .

The Franchisees’Choice Award 2011 in recognition of achieving high satisfaction scores from our franchisees.

We are very proud to be recognized for good relationships with our franchisees. We work hard to make sure the franchisees are being supported and our franchisees work hard to make the franchise the success that it is.

With our newest franchises up and running in Edmonton-Northlands, Calgary-Northwest and Sasaktoon and our next New Franchise training scheduled for September we are looking forward to a great summer!

Where is computer and network support going?

So you run a small business. Perhaps it is run out of your home or you have a small office space. You have worked very hard to build a client base. You have put together a business plan and a budget. Your client base and their information is everything to your business. Then one day you turn on your computer and you get the message “Operating System Not Found”. That’s okay, because with a computer you just reboot and everything is okay. Not this time. You open the yellow pages and call the closest computer support company who can come right now and fix your problem. No big deal, the tech will just go click click click, the computer will start, you will write a cheque for $100, thank the tech, and get on with your day. Unfortunately the tech tells you that your hard drive is dead. Pandora’s box has been opened. You have a deadline to meet and all the information is on that computer. Your blood sweat and tears building your business is on the computer and the tech tells you that the approximate prices is $1000 to recover your data, install a new hard drive and reinstall your system. It will take about 2 or 3 days. You have no backup if the recovery does not work.

This is a fear for all small business owners, and it is a very legitimate fear. Unfortunately most small business owners do not budget for computer support and a surprising number do not have backups or a contingency plan should their computer break down. Why?

I think it is largely to do with the past, present and future of computer support. I also believe that computer support has not kept up with the requirement of businesses who rely on their computers more and more every day. So where does that leave us.

It is important to look at the past to help predict the future. In the late 80s early 90s personal computers were still new to businesses. The computer was a glorified word processor. The computer support companies were truly enhancing businesses. The computer was not relied upon and was not a communications tool. Then email and internet came along. All of a sudden we could send email between computers and software was helping businesses run. Still, this was enhancement. Computers were helping companies run with new software packages and increased communications. At this point in time, the shift occurred where computers went from being a nice enhancement to a business to a necessary tool and businesses relied on computers. Companies saved on labour but did have to pay for computer infrastructure and support.

Then came the Y2K bug. Nobody asked for the Y2K bug. Businesses big and small were spending large sums of money to ensure they were ready for the Y2K bug. Now companies were not hiring IT professionals to enhance their business, but instead to defend their business. Companies had to pay for computer support they did not want. On Jan 1st, 2000, not a whole lot happened and companies grew weary of the computer support companies. Faith was lost. But then new problems kept creeping up such as viruses, hardware failures, internet security, and more recently, spyware. So for the past number of years we have been defending businesses both big and small. This was not preventative maintenance. We get oil changes for preventative maintenance, we do not purchase shields for our cars to protect the car from malicious attack. Yet for a computer this is common practice.

What is the future? Nobody wants to pay to have their network and computers defended. There is also a mentality that computer support companies get paid when a company is down. Why is that? Shouldn’t computer support companies get paid to keep a client up and hence it would be a breech of contract if a client is down? This is the future. If the support companies revenues are directly linked with the uptime of the computer systems, would there not be an incentive to keep them operational? If this was the case, and computers systems stayed operational, we could again focus on enhancement. There are some exceptional new technologies to improve business operations. Now is the time to again make the computer a tool and not a necessary evil.

I am an IT Service provider. I earn a good living by providing IT services for a collection of businesses both large and small. I have also helped 32 other Computer Troubleshooters start their franchise across Canada. Our revenue comes from implementing projects and monthly support of the infrastructure once the project is complete. We have survived the cycles of the IT service provider. There was a time when we made lots of money selling hardware. Then we made lots of money doing virus cleanups and power supply replacements. More recently we have put all our clients onto managed service plans. All of these were great sources of revenue for the honest hard working IT Support provider. But here comes cloud computing. How will the IT Service Provider survive the wave that comes with hosting your entire IT infrastructure with large companies such as Radiant.

The benefits to the customer is immense. You get a team of highly skilled and certified technicians supporting your infrastructure. You pay a fixed monthly cost and little to no upfront capital expenditures. You get an SLA of “four nines” uptime (99.99%) but you still have backups, just in case. Above that, you only pay for what you use. Being that the systems are virtual, if you need 100GB of disk space, you buy 100GB of disk space. If you need another 10GB, 10 more GB are allocated. It is virtual, it is dynamic. But above all this, security. The cloud computing environment is a highly secure environment.

As a service provider recommending that a client build an infrastructure, you simply cannot beat the Cloud Computing sales person who recommends a fully virtual environment. They pitch a far more reliable environment than is possible to build for a client with a limited budget. They will produce spread sheets, projections, graphs etc all showing that the total cost of ownership of virtual environment will save them 50% over the five year life span of the servers you are proposing. And they won’t even bring up soft costs until the end, just to emphasize their cost savings point.

Do we close the doors on our IT Support business and go work for Radiant? Do we close our doors and pump gas? Or do we jump onto the bandwagon and start moving our clients to cloud environments?

The short answer is, don’t panic. Let take a look at the typical one man consultant. The biggest challenge a one man consultant has is “taking the next step”. Typically what we find is that a one person operation caps out at around $4000/month profit. It is hard to do much more than that. Hiring a few outside consultants like a bookkeeper and an answering service can offload some work, allowing that same consultant to reach for $6000/month. Most of the growth is done through referrals and word of mouth, largely because there is no time to do marketing, and frankly, there is no time for more clients anyway. Traditionally, hiring a tech is the next step. This is a very difficult step to take because the profits are entirely eaten up by the tech’s salary, and it takes too long to build the profits from $4000 to $8000 and the banks start to lose their sense of humour.

The other big challenge a one person operation has is skill set. Most consultants can build a computer, install an operating system, setup a server, build a local area network etc. But when it comes to the intricacies of building a wide area network or an exchange server, things can become much more difficult. Then technology changes and we have to re-learn all the things that we learned before, this time for the 2007 version or 2010 version.

Then there is risk management. All consultants like to think they have the best backup solution in the industry. Some might. But on that day when the client calls and says that their server won’t turn on, there is not a consultant out there who doesn’t start getting nervous. Then there are the sleepless nights when you start thinking about a client’s office wondering if their backups are as good as you initially thought because you haven’t tested a restore in 6 weeks. What would happen to the consultants company if one of the clients had a catastrophic failure. Who would get sued in this situation. And it is not just backups. What about a breach in security. What if you have a client storing personal information in a database, and that client has a security breach.

Cloud Computing solves all of these problems and more. The first step is to move a single client onto a cloud infrastructure. This eliminates all the basic day to day work that is involved with supporting that network infrastructure. After the project of moving the client to the cloud infrastructure, sure, your revenue from that client will drop quite substantially. But this drop in revenue will be far less than the cost of hiring a technician. But more importantly, the workload you have for this client has dropped proportionally more than the drop in revenue. If the client was a $1000/month on a managed service plan, but took up 10 hours per month of your time, you are effectively working for $100/hour. If that client then drops to a $600 client, but now only requires 3 hours of your time, you are effectively working for $200/hour. Not to mention a good cloud computing supplier, such as Radiant, will pay you a commission, so your client is actually a $650 client. Most importantly you have cleared up 7 hours per month of time. Within a month of marketing with that 7 hours, you should be able to find 2 new clients who pay you $600 for 3 hours work – effectively bringing your revenues from 10 hours work from $1000 to $1950. You are potentially doubling your revenue by moving clients to cloud computing.

But this only touches on the potential for the consultant. There are two other main factors to consider. The first one is by moving a client to a cloud environment, the work involved at the client tends to become much lower level. Most of the work is desktop type work, as the servers are all maintained in the cloud, and administration work such as adding users. This type of work can be done by a $2500/month junior technician rather than the challenge of finding and paying a $5500/month senior technician. Now your salary costs are cut in half. The second is projects. When a client has an environment that “just works”, they tend to be very happy with their consultant and the trust is built. When trust is established, the client will listen to the consultants for new ideas. As consultants it is our job to find projects that will enhance what we do for the client. This could be a new Phone System that will save them money. Maybe it is a SharePoint site to increase productivity. Perhaps it is a security camera system to decrease theft. The possibilities are endless. The best part about it, projects tend to be far more interesting, and far more profitable.

I do not know many people who got into the computer support business to fix computers. Most saw fixing computers as a step towards running a business. Four or five years later they are still fixing computers. By moving to cloud computing, the computer consultant can start to run a business. It is an opportunity to not only survive the next cycle of IT, but thrive in it.

McDonalds was the first burger franchise and since then Burger King, Wendy’s, A&W and Dairy Queen have all followed suit. So why can’t we have 5 or 6 different computer support franchises? Fact is, I don’t have a problem with competition. Competition will keep us on our toes. It will ensure that the consumer gets the best product possible at the fairest price.

The key word in there – FAIR!

So the latest franchise that I stumbled across the other day – who shall remain nameless is quoted on their website as “North America’s IT Service Professionals franchise”. YOU HAVE ZERO LOCATIONS. How can you possibly be North America’s IT Service Professionals Franchise when you are one person, working out of your basement, in a small town 50KM south of Vancouver. Not Possible!

This rivals my favorite franchise, who dispatches all the work, invoices the clients and lets the franchisee take home a whopping (excuse the burger franchise pun) 50% of the revenue. That’s not a franchise, that is subcontracting. And if 100% of your revenue is subcontracted from the same company – that’s called being an employee.

There is another franchise who again shall remain nameless. They are based in Ottawa and have a few good things going for them. I have to say I respect what they are trying to do, and competition is not only good for the consumers but also builds awareness of quality professionals who want to do good work. My only complaint is that they list 12 locations, but at least 1/2 of those listed are repeated phone numbers.

My point is this… the reason for purchasing a franchise is largely for two reasons. One is brand awareness. The other is knowledge and experience. Computer Troubleshooters has been franchising computer support for 10 years. We have the experience building IT Businesses. We also have 31 locations in Canada, 500 worldwide.

If the price is the same – why choose somebody other than Computer Troubleshooters? Of course, don’t take my word for it. Ask around!