Clipboards To Microchips | Small, independent businesses balance IT costs and rewards
The website of Rocco's Gentlemen's Clothing in Worcester features the tagline "Keeping Tradition Alive," and the link for the contact information page is a picture of an antique telephone.“I’m still old-fashioned in some ways,” said owner Rocco Froio. “I still like my clipboards.”
But Froio said that, over the 17 years he’s run the shop, the clipboards have been disappearing. Records of sales, marketing messages and communications with vendors all move through a software program for retailers that Froio has customized to meet his store’s needs.
“The reality is (that) technology is going to save on labor, and that’s how you offset the cost of any investment,” he said.
Heavy use of technology has become the norm even among the smallest of small businesses. But there are many questions that accompany the transition from clipboards to microchips, including what sort of software to buy, where to store customer data and, most importantly, how to keep a computer system from using more time and money than it saves.
Kevin Townsend, president of True Salon, which has locations in Framingham and Westborough, said his company has been using point-of-sale software for 22 years, but over time, it’s adopted more technology.
Where Froio uses a standard retail package with individual tweaks, Townsend uses one designed specifically for salons.
With the program, Townsend said, he has access to enormous amounts of data about how the salon is doing. He can break down reports by how many people had eyebrow waxes compared with leg waxes, or what age groups are most likely to get their hair colored, and then target marketing messages based on the information.
With clients’ email addresses stored in the system, Townsend can automatically send out reminders about appointments or send targeted email blasts to highlight a particular service to the audience that is most likely to be receptive.
“I really don’t know how salons go without automation,” he said.
But too much reliance on all that technology can have pitfalls, Townsend said. Last year, a snowstorm brought a brownout just as the salon was backing its data up to cloud-based, storage. The local data was lost before it could be backed up.
“We had a week when we had no appointment book, not even phone numbers, because we didn’t have the backup done right,” Townsend said. “Now we print it out every night.”
Storage At What Price?
Vendors offer more high-tech solutions to that kind of problem, like instantaneous backup, or systems that are entirely cloud-based so that data is stored in multiple offsite locations. But those kinds of systems are often too expensive for small businesses.
Like Townsend, David Quinn, owner of Quinn’s Automotive in Leominster, uses a system specifically for his industry. Quinn said he’s used software to store customer records and manage sales for years, but fairly recently he switched to a new program that makes the shop more efficient.
Employees previously had to write up estimates manually, calling parts suppliers to get prices, Quinn said, but the new software automatically looks up parts’ availability and prices online. The change has dropped the time to get an estimate from 15 minutes to five.
Still, Quinn said, he doesn’t do everything through the auto repair software. For accounting, he uses the ubiquitous accounting program QuickBooks online, which he likes because he can access it from anywhere.
Quinn said another big factor when he was shopping for software was how easily employees could operate it.
“We don’t want it to be too complicated,” he said. “Most of the programs out there that we’ve purchased are actually user-friendly, so it’s easy.”
Riding The Learning Curve
But business owners say learning new software isn’t always easy for everyone. Most programs today are based on fairly standard interfaces, like Microsoft Windows. But they can still present a challenge to workers who are used to a less computer-dependent environment.
Nancy Rines, owner of City Music in Gardner and Leominster, said the software she uses, which is specialized for music stores, is a breeze for some workers and a chore for others.
“In honesty, I think that the younger employees catch on quickly,” he said. “It’s second nature to them. Some of the older folks say that they’re not particularly familiar with computers ... that’s what makes it easy or not.”
Rines bought the software in 2005, in part because it was affordable, and it continues to work for the business. She said it was an enormous task to set up the system with bar codes for all the products she sells, but it was well worth it. The business now uses the program to keep track of all its inventory, restock at the end of the day, record workers’ hours and compare sales from year to year.
“I couldn’t imagine not having this software,” she said. “I don’t know how they used to do it.”
WBJ Web Partners
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