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business tips

Best Well-known Tactics For Finding a $100 Million Idea

So you want to go into business, but are not sure what business to get into? How do you think the pros do it? Successful entrepreneurs don’t just happen on a good idea, you know. As a matter of fact, in a recent article I read, a survey was done of 45 company founds. Each one of them started their company, grew it into an unbelievable empire, and then sold it for more than $100 million or more or took that empire public for $300 million or more. Did they reveal any secrets during the survey which a Small to Medium-sized Business (SMB) could use? Let’s take a look:

You need to satisfy their need — not your dream.

You might be surprised to know that most successful businesses don’t necessarily follow the road of passion; more than likely they became successful because they were smart enough to look into a niche where people needed help.

Example: Dick Costolo, founder of Feedburner, responded to publishers that had content but didn’t have any way to distribute it to clients.

Listen to what your customer’s biggest problem is.

Established Information Technology (IT) specialists are very good at doing this. They listen to the client and then go into action to resolve the issue — whether it be with data backup and disaster recovery or keeping a client’s equipment and data secure.

Example: Cardiologist Donald C. Harrison was successful with his idea for his medical device company AtriCure because he thought long and hard about how he could develop a medical device that would help his heart patients in a way that provide them with a much better life.

Work from the bottom and use your experiences — not your head.

How many times have you started from the bottom of a company and worked up through the ranks? You didn’t think you knew everything right off the bat, did you? You had to learn from your experiences. Use your experiences as a one of the best well-known tactics for finding a $100 Million idea.

Example: Billionaire Tim Krauskopf of FreightZone had his idea that he gained when he started driving a semi in the trucking industry.

Great ideas come from collaboration.

Brainstorming can be one of the most effective ways for creating great ideas.

Example: Rock Mackie knew Tomotherapy was a feasible idea only after three of his graduate students collaborated with him sharing their own separate and important discoveries with him that combined resulted in a new and remarkably better CT scanning technology for treating disease.

Think you have a good idea? Sell it.

How many times have you thought you had a wonderful idea that might work for a solution. Oftentimes, if you don’t try it, you’ll never know. Bounce your idea off of someone else. What do they think? Sell your idea to them as only you can do.

Example: Jim Dolan of the Dolan Company found out early that selling is the fastest way to uncover issues with a product so you can come up with a solution and get on with other things.

Get help when you need it.

Don’t think you have to market your idea by yourself. There are plenty of Hamilton IT support companies in your area that would only be too willing to listen, offer feedback, and work right alongside of you to help you find a $100 million idea on how to make your SMB business be the success it can be.

Example: Mahendra Vora, a launcher of multiple highly successful technology companies didn’t just rely on himself or colleagues; he even put his ideas into the hands of his customers.

Do you need help with your idea? Contact your Hamilton IT Support team at Solve-IT today and let’s get started.

 

Microsoft

Windows SBS 2008 Recovery

Recently, I ran into an interesting situation where a client’s computer (MAC) decided to have a Microsoft Outlook issue. Outlook crashed; and when it re-opened, it identified an issue with the client’s identity. Subsequently, it requested a rebuild of the user’s identity. Sadly, the rebuild was performed rather than the proper procedure of erasing the identity and recreating it. (I only service one Apple PC, so I don’t encounter this a lot. I only found out the proper procedure after the damage had already been done.)

Subsequently, the profile was rebuilt to the server; but all the calendar entries had been wiped out, as well as about 1GB of data was vaporized from the client’s exchange store. Needless to say, the client was overly pleased with the results. The client had not elected to use my preferred backup application, but at least had the Windows Small Business Server backups running.

I began the procedure to recover missing data from a specific email box as described by Microsoft. This requires the technician to perform a complete restore of the entire mail store (based on size and server speed, anywhere from 1-4 hours) to a redirected folder on the server. Once that is complete, you create an Exchange Recovery database and associate the required mail store to the recovery mailbox.

Following that you attempt to mount the mail store (AKA database) on the server so that it can be viewed and restored from. So far this all sounded rosy save for the initial recovery mechanism. If the file mounts successfully from the restore, you perform a mail merge operation and recover the user’s missing information and are off to the races.

Here’s the sour point: when you attempt to recover the database, the logs are likely missing and the database won’t mount gracefully. This will leave you in a heap of trouble since now you need to repair the database before you can mount the database (this is almost sexual, but I will leave that to another topic and this wouldn’t be a site you would be browsing for that type of story.)

Microsoft has made it much easier to run the old command lines for eseutil /d and eseutil /r by automating these commands for you. Keep in mind that since they have automated it, you can’t set the locations of the temporary databases (DBs). So if you have no space on the email store drive, this will fail. The major issue is the time taken to repair the DB before you can even begin to recover the mail.

Once I realized that my newly recovered database wouldn’t mount, I started the repair mechanism. Three hours later I was finally able to mount the database. At this point, I went through the basic steps of merging the user’s particular mailbox back into the existing email box and was successfully able to recover the missing 1GB of messages and their calendar items.

The end result of the story was that the user paid about $400 in service time to recover a singular failed mailbox because they didn’t want to spend $700 to buy a proper backup application.

Happily, the Microsoft application worked as advertised. I wouldn’t want to rely on it if I am interested in saving the client time in terms of recovery and lost productivity due to missing email.

remote access

Can Teleworking Save Ontario Companies Money?

Earth Day is April 22nd; what is your Canadian firm doing to help improve the environment?

Canadian corporations who promote teleworking and allow key employees to work a minimum of twice a week from home can help save over $53 billion dollars annually. That is not all there is to it; you could reduce greenhouse gases by a considerably huge amount and save almost 390 million litres of gas, says Canada’s first major national whitepaper on telework.

“WORKshift Canada: the bottom line on telework”, a report released by Calgary Economic Development in collaboration with the Telework Research Network, used census data and analysis of over 400 case studies, research papers and other documents related to telework to show the positive implications that the proper and regular implementation of telework could have on the country’s economy, environment and society.

Adopting telecommuting a minimum twice a week can help employers save $10,000 a year, and employees will also be able to save as much as $600 – $3,500 annually as a result of reduced commuting and work-related expenses. Other positive changes we will be seeing are an increase of 20% in productivity, a 7% reduction in attrition and increased employee empowerment and morale.

Teleworking will also be playing a major role in protecting the environment from degradation through greenhouse gases. And money is not the only thing teleworking will be saving. Teleworking can emerge as a quick fix to solve labour shortages and reduce energy consumption and pollution. With so many things that teleworking could help you change, you should not be wasting any more time ignoring teleworking. If you are an employer, incorporate teleworking into your organization; and if you are an employee, go convince your boss now.

Thinking it isn’t possible? It is. According to Kate Lister, principal researcher and lead consultant at the Telework Research Network, four in ten people can do their jobs at home (at least part-time) and eight in ten can do all their work from home.

As a Southern Ontario IT security focused company, Solve-IT can help your business set up secure remote access systems which promote secure teleworking. If your Niagara and area business is looking into the possibility of allowing key employees to work from home or other locations, consider contacting us today for a review of your VPN and remote access solutions.