More than just checklists….
I wrote last week about the importance of checklists for all aspects of your business. Expanding on that I learned a valuable lesson at the weekend in the most unlikely of places, in a hospital.  Our youngest son has had some medical challenges which started before he was born, he was given a 1 in 10 chance of survival when it was first diagnosed. However, he didn’t let it hold him back and battled on growing stronger each day. By the time he was finally discharged from hospital he had been an inpatient for almost 3 years, but he is unique. This means that he has to be managed muc

A checklist for everything
When I first started in I.T I was young and able to absorb everything I read and memorised it all. Then as the years passed by I learned more about processes for performing regular tasks in my work and they became my own. So much so that they were engrained within who I was and I never needed to look this type of information up. However, as I have gotten more involved in the business of running a business and not just owning a job it has become much more difficult to remember this so fluently as I used to. This gave rise to processes. Many people have come across Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) which are common practice in large organisations but not so in small businesses, wh

Error running Active Directory Users & Computers in SBS2008
I ran into an issue on a new SBS2008 server at a clients office recently. Whenever I tried to launch Active Directory Users and Computers on the SBS2008 server it would come up with a Visual C++ Runtime error and the message read: “The Application has requested the runtime to terminate it in a unusual way. Please contact the application’s support team for more information” The first job was to install all of the available updates which did not resolve the issue so a search of the usual online communities was in order and after a short search I came across someone with the same issue

Power of Community
My experience of the IT community up until running my own business was..well inbred to say the least. The company that I worked for previously bordered on almost grooming you to distrust other IT companies as if they were the ‘enemy’.  To my shame this was a feeling that was exaggerated in some of my future engagements after leaving there and setting up on my own. However, about 2 years ago I joined the BNI which is an international business referral network which brings different businesses together to allow them to pass business once a certain rapport has been made. I will always remember the first meeting

It’s been a while
It been some time now since I last posted something up. Part of this is because I have been very busy trying to develop the business and grow it which as those of you who have businesses know it takes some effort to do. Also in doing that I have been a little disorganised, while I make no promises as to how organised I am now what I can say is that I am always trying to improve on this. What I have learnt over these last months is that I have spent most of the last few years just “getting on with it” without actually knowing what ‘”it” is that I am trying to achieve. Through the introduction that I had made to a book called