Why Cabling Still Matters in a Wireless Office "Why do we need cables? Everything’s wireless now." It’s the reasonable first question, and it’s wrong. Every wireless access point in your office needs a cable running to it. Every PoE camera, every VoIP desk phone, every printer, every desktop that lives at a fixed workstation —…
The Small Office WiFi Problem Small offices consistently under-buy WiFi. The typical story: someone bought a $200 consumer mesh three-pack for a two-thousand-square-foot office, it worked fine for three people, and then the office grew to eleven, added a conference room with video meetings, and started dropping VoIP calls. Now the meeting room WiFi is…
Why Small Businesses Struggle With Printers Printers are the single most complained-about piece of small-business IT infrastructure. They jam, they drink expensive ink, they refuse to accept a driver update at exactly the wrong moment, and they eat billing hours from the person nominally in charge of IT. Most of that pain is avoidable. It…
Why a UPS Matters for Small Business Every small business owner has lived through the version of this story where the office lights flicker for two seconds, the router reboots, the file server drops a database write halfway through, and someone loses an hour of work. Or the version where a storm knocks out power…
The Cost of Undocumented IT Undocumented IT is the tax small businesses pay for every good outcome they don’t get. A key employee leaves and takes six years of tribal knowledge with them. A backup restore takes eight hours instead of ninety minutes because nobody wrote down the sequence. A vendor’s phone line is the…
This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through our links we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we would use ourselves. The Storage Question Every Small Business Eventually Asks "Should we buy a NAS or just use cloud storage?" is one of the most-asked small-business…
This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through our links we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we would use ourselves. The Small-Business Password Manager Decision Every small business that survives beyond a few employees eventually decides between 1Password and Bitwarden. Both are excellent. Both…
This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through our links we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we would use ourselves. What a Business VPN Actually Solves Business VPN needs are different from consumer VPN needs. Consumers want privacy on public Wi-Fi and to bypass…
The IT Structure Small Businesses Grow Into (and Out Of) Every small business goes through the same IT-leadership progression. Early: whoever’s the most technical wears the IT hat on top of their real job. Growth stage: a full-time IT support person, often a generalist. Later: a full-time IT Director or Manager. Somewhere between the "IT-of-one"…
Why This Is the Wrong Question, Sort Of "Should we use free software or pay for the paid version?" is the most-asked question from small-business IT decision-makers. It’s also the wrong framing. The right question is: what’s the total cost of the software over 3–5 years, including the productivity cost of the limitations, and what…