IT problems; one bit I hate about being a small business owner…

If only it was this peaceful a morning all the time

It all started 3 weeks back; it was a pretty typical Monday morning and having just completed sending my morning LinkedIn voice notes over a cup of coffee in my Shiageto mug (you can see a glimpse of it in the photo above), I was ready to check my emails before diving into a day of client calls, workshops and other such fun.

Fortunately for me, my Google autofill slapped in my username and password into the webmail I was using but it kept telling me “Error with account, log in not possible”.

“Hmm,” I thought after the 28th attempt to log in, “WTF is going on? This is not idea!”

No worries, maybe autofill got it wrong, let me just try typing it manually — as if this was the one morning Google had decided that autofill wouldn’t do the job it was intended to do.

Nope, even my manual input kept getting the same outcome; something was up.

For context, the email server for Shiageto Consulting I was using was actually a free one that had come with my website when I first set it up. Although not the greatest piece of software, I had got used to using it in the 2.5 years since I had started my company and hadn’t thought about upgrading it but that was soon all about to change…

And so my problems began

Diving into my personal email account, I searched for any emails from the email server company. Lo and behold, there in my Junk folder were several emails from the company telling me that my inbox was massively over the permitted usage and they were suspending it.

When I say massively over, I was using 9800% of my allowance so in some ways I was surprised they’d let me get away with it for so long. I rang them to see if they could reinstate my account and was told that the options were simple:

1. I either had to delete emails and get it back down to my limit within 24 hours OR
2. I could upgrade my account at a cost of close to £1000 OR
3. I could find an alternative email server company

Maybe it’s because I don’t like to be held to hostage (as well as the fact that I’m both a bit frugal and a bit of a hoarder so I knew pruning my emails that drastically within a busy 24 hours would not be possible) that I leaned towards option 3.

“This’ll be easy”, I thought. “I’ll have a quick check on email server packages, pick one and switch everything over by the end of the day.” How naïve I was!

Here’s the boring technical bit about why it wasn’t simple [you can skip to the next section if you want my key takeaways]

Suffice to say, I did what any good strategist does. I wrote down my business requirements (write and receive emails easily with plenty of storage, anything else was a bonus), my defining principles (maximum I would pay, minimum level of security, minimum amount of storage) and then got searching.

After an hour’s comparisons [it turns out there are a sh1tload of email servers] I settled on Microsoft 365 (the fact that I got additional features like Microsoft office, Teams, and more was perfect).

“Great, I’ll just set up my account, switch over my email hosting, then download my old data and sync it; that should be no problem at all.”

If only…

Here’s what happened:

1. I already had a personal Microsoft account that was linked to my business email address. I had set it up to get access to clients’ Teams areas when I first started Shiageto and when I tried to switch this over to a business account, this caused a massive issue which threw me out of all client Teams and Sharepoint areas. Not only that but it meant I could no longer use Microsoft authenticator to even access my account.
2. To switch over from a personal to a business account using the same email address requires speaking to the Microsoft Data Protection team; they are an elusive bunch who didn’t reply to any emails or calls for over a week. When I finally did get hold of them, they were only able to reset my account from personal to business and any other problems I had to speak to a different team.
3. Once my account was reset, I then had difficulty installing a local copy of Outlook (my new email app)— this turned out to be an issue with outlook downloads and needed a patch to fix. I only discovered that after about 2 hours of calls to the Microsoft helpdesk.
4. Ok, now I had Outlook up and running as a business account but I didn’t have my historical emails (something that was important as it had all my contacts, records of past and ongoing conversations, calendar invites, as well as an organised folder system). I tried everything to set up Outlook to collect old emails but it kept failing. I rang Microsoft again to help but they couldn’t find a solution because the way my original email server company had set things up they had sneakily used a different format which would not allow emails to be collected by other email apps.
5. Instead, I needed to pay my original company a ridiculous fee to download all the data and send it to me in a format that Outlook could recognise. According to the agent I spoke to this was actually a very short process but a good money earner for them.
6. With my old email data now uploaded into Outlook I was good to go, but hang on a minute, I still couldn’t get into any of my client’s Teams or Sharepoint areas. So, yep, you guessed it, it was back on the phone to Microsoft Support.
7. This new problem seemed to bamboozle the 2 technicians I spoke to at Microsoft. They kept insisting that all I needed to do was ask each client to send me a new invite and all would be fixed. I assured them that I had tried this and it didn’t work but still they insisted that this was the solution.
8. I finally found an answer myself by reading internet chat groups/chatting to IT literate friends. The solution was that each client needed to completely delete me from their database (not just a soft re-add). Until this was done then my profile would be in limbo forever seeming like it could connect to their shared areas but never actually doing it (like an oasis mirage in the desert to a very thirsty person).
9. So began my next task which was to contact ever client’s IT team (for they were the only ones with the power to reset profiles) and get them to do this simple task. [You may get my sense of sarcasm here as so far I have reached out to all my clients and I am only a third of the way getting them all to do what is the equivalent of turning it off and turning it back on again; it takes a lot of time as an external person to raise a ticket within a client’s IT team and even longer to get the problem fixed, even if it is simple].

What’s been the impact?

So there you go, that it a short synopsis on the problems I have faced. As you can see, IT problems are not necessarily easy to decipher when IT is not your main focus. Even when the solution is clear (and I believe that this wasa fairly simple problem), it has still cost me almost 3 full days of business time to sort (what with endless phonecalls to helpdesks, searching on internet forums and attempting to fix things myself).

Much more costly than the loss of focus and time is the reputational and operational impact to my business. During this transition:

• emails have gone missing as I have juggled two different email servers,
• responses I thought had been sent hadn’t gone through causing great confusion,
• client meetings have hastily had to be rearranged to a non Microsoft platform to accommodate my lack of being able to log in to Teams,
• workarounds to share documents with me have had to be created and many more issues have arisen because I was thrown out of Sharepoint.

What are my takeaways?

The last 3 weeks have been immensely frustrating to say the least but it is always important to see what I can learn so as to improve things for the future. This definitely taught me a lot; namely:

1. When your business reaches a certain size you need to question whether it is still worth your time and potential risks of trying to cover all roles. Whilst being an enthusiast who was willing to sort out my own IT problems in the early days of Shiageto was fine back then, now I have much more to lose and more important things to focus on it may be time to get professional support in this (and other areas). Plus leaning on professional friends (as I have historically done for IT, Legal and HR issues) can only be done for so long.
2. I was always told that if you throw enough money at a problem it stops being a problem…but this is not always the case as it can easily resurface — I could have easily have just paid the fee with my first email server company to upgrade my storage and I wouldn’t have encountered any of these problems. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist or wouldn’t have become a problem later on. Even though it has been painful to resolve, I now have a solution that will last much longer, is more secure and more future-proof.
3. Calling IT helpdesks is still one of the worst things you can spend your time doing (it’s up there with calling a customer service desk). First of all it takes ages to get through to an agent (particularly nowadays with the impacts of cutbacks, staff shortages and skimpflation) and you get passed from endless department to another. Then, more crucially, it can be very hard to get an IT agent to understand your problem if you do not know the technical terms AND, even more challenging, to get them to believe you might know what the answer is [I spent a lot of time being patronised that I didn’t know what I was talking about and each time it felt like it was a game of snakes and ladders with me being sent back to the start by trying to “Turn it off and turn it back on again”. Trust me, I’ve f**king tried that already].
4. Clients will sympathise with your problems but only up to a point — whilst the first day or two, they will say “Oh that sounds terrible” and give you some leeway, at some point they expect you to have sorted out your problems and not let it impact their business. This is entirely fair and so point 1 above becomes even more important.
5. Always check your junk email as there may be key messages you are missing :0

Right, that feels like I’ve prattled on long enough about my troubles. Hopefully this gives you a good flavour of some of the additional headaches you have as a small business owner and, for my clients in particular, a bit more of an explanation why I may have been a bit distracted/crap the last 3 weeks.

It’s definitely time to get back to doing what I (and the team at Shiageto) loves; namely sharpening the IQ, EQ and FQ effectiveness of all those around us — at your disposal if you want to find out more…

Faris is the CEO and Founder of Shiageto Consulting, an innovative consultancy that helps firms and individuals sharpen their effectiveness.

Success = IQ x EQ x FQ