Smart Dolphins has been chosen as one of two finalists (cheers to our companions for this honour: Cairnview Mechanical) for the Annual Greater Victoria Business Awards. We are up for the Business of the Year Award (11-25 employees). We were runner up for this award in 2008 – could this be our year???

A big thanks to our very special partners and clients who supported our nomination with wonderful letters of reference. Over the coming weeks, I’ll share some of these letters through the blog here. I found these letters to be very reaffirming of what we have done and what we are trying to do. THANKS!

The winners will be announced at the award ceremony on April 27th. It will be exciting to see if we win, but, as cliché as this sounds, we really can’t lose. We get great publicity and most don’t remember who won and lost. More importantly, the recognition is very nice. The Pod has worked very hard over the past few years and to have an external panel of business professionals judge that we have something special going on really fuels the fire. Regardless of the result, we’ll be celebrating.

I’m personally a little crushed by what turned out to be poor planning on my part: I am going to be away for the award ceremony.

Lastly, a big thanks to our team. There is always a part of me that is a little surprised when people keep showing up day after day, nevermind the fact they pour their blood, sweat and tears into a “job”. Thanks for throwing yourself at this, my fellow Dolphins. I hope you all feel a HUGE amount of pride for this recognition and for the amazing things you do every single day.

Skip the mouse – use these keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Word instead:

Jump to next space: Ctrl + Arrow Keys
Jump to next space and select: Ctrl + Shift + Arrow Keys
Toggle Bold: Ctrl + B
Toggle Italic: Ctrl + I
Toggle Underline: Ctrl + U
Undo: Ctrl + Z
Copy: Ctrl + C
Cut: Ctrl + X
Paste: Ctrl + V
Select All: Ctrl + A
Shrink Font Size One Point: Ctrl + [
Increase Font Size One Point: Ctrl + ]
Print: Ctrl + P

Who needs that mouse anyway?

This place had five or six computers in the reception area, a computer in every room, and several thousand dollars in monitor arms and other medical equipment. They had Windows 7 on every desktop that I saw. They obviously aren’t afraid to spend money on technology and they appear to see the value in having a nice clean, professional, high-tech medical office with up to date, secure operating systems.

So what the hell happened to their data?

All I can do is speculate here, but I’m going to guess that whoever installed all of this great equipment for them severely neglected the backup system. Thousands of dollars in new equipment and monitor arms, and I would assume more thousands in service to install it all, but the backup system left me standing at the reception desk this morning repeating my first and last name to the medical office assistant as she re-entered me into the computer. It was by pure luck that I still got to see the doctor, who was great by the way.

If this was a customer of Smart Dolphins they would have lost an hour’s worth of data in a worst case scenario. The day they signed up with us, we’d order them an amazing new backup system and we’d install it for them as part of our monthly fee. This type of crash would be nearly impossible. Our backup system backs up every single hour of every day, and we monitor it 24/7 to ensure that it is always working. Backup problems (which are rare) are caught and resolved on the same day because we give them a very high priority.

I bet this crash cost them over $10,000-$20,000 in wasted staff productivity and missed appointments, and that’s extremely conservative. I’m also guessing they probably aren’t able to quantify it. I bet it also cost them some customer satisfaction, as people would have shown up for appointments only to be turned away. Perhaps some of those customers never return and thus further thousands of dollars in revenue over the next decade are lost. Perhaps word of mouth from a dissatisfied customer costs them referrals, and more thousands of dollars.

All because the backup system wasn’t robust enough. It’s probably because it wasn’t valued enough when it was put in. It’s probably because somebody treated the backup system as an expense, rather than valuing it for the investment that it truly is. Sadly this is not the first time I have visited a doctor’s office on a day where they were recovering from data loss.

It wouldn’t even surprise me if a doctor put it in given what I’ve seen in the past. The amount of doctors in Victoria that think ‘IT on the side’ is a good use of their time is just astounding to me. That’s a whole other discussion though which I won’t get into today and I’m going to assume this isn’t the case.

There’s two points to all this:

1. When you neglect things like your backup system (or your security, as another example), the risk you take on is exponentially more expensive than whatever those solutions would have cost in the first place. Well planned technology is not an expense, it is an investment in your company’s health and well-being. It keeps your highly paid employees working, it keeps your manufacturing or services from grinding to a halt, and it keeps your customers happy.
2. You should be demanding that your IT provider take these things seriously. If your backup system seems cheap then it probably is, and the results will show. If they don’t understand point #1 then I would fire them immediately and find somebody who does, because all they are doing is putting your business and the livelihood of you and your employees in jeopardy.

I was watching my wife surf the web last night and was thoroughly aggravated by her excessive keystrokes. She started her jump to a new URL by typing “www.” and concluding with “.com”.  So unnecessary!

If you’re looking to go to www.google.com, don’t type the whole thing out.  Simply type “google” and then press CTRL and ENTER together. This will automatically append the extra bits to the beginning and the end for you.

Think of the excessive electrons that are being used worldwide because people don’t know of this tip. Make sure you spread the word and help save the world from this horrific waste!

I believe that the way most of us mash Reply to All and abuse our DLs is poisonous to our efficiency and creates a lot more noise than people realise. Consider this: An email sent to a 10 member DL which is replied to 4 times throughout a day has been read or at least skimmed 50 times (the original + 4 replies). Most of the time we only think about how these things affect us as individuals, but if you expand some of those DLs and think about how many people are reading some of those messages it can be quite disheartening. At Smart Dolphins these ‘unnecessary’ emails equate to thousands per year, but I’m happy to say that this is shrinking.

Here are a few simple suggestions that you can put in place at your business to help cut down on the email noise.

1. For the great majority of your emails that utilize DLs, use the BCC field. The BCC field masks the recipients, meaning that only the original Sender will show up when the Reply or Reply to All buttons are pressed. This obviously assumes that only the original sender needs to see the replies (which is true in a lot of cases). So many DL messages are simple questions or FYIs, with a great majority of the replies being simple answers or thank yous intended for the original sender. These make great BCC candidates.
2. If the sender wants replies to go to specific individuals, those people should be included in the CC box. This allows recipients to simply click on Reply to All and their replies will go to the intended people rather than to the entire DL.
3. Similar to 2 above, in cases where the sender feels that the DL should actually be replied to, place the DL into the CC field rather than the BCC or the To field. It’s important to use CC rather than To because it shows consideration of the email policy and that the sender consciously chose to open the email up to replies to the DL. If people were to use the To box then you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference people who were ignoring your email policy, and people who were consciously following it. This allows you to police the email policy somewhat, because anyone who still uses the To field will clearly not be following your policy and so can be reminded of it.
4. Or if you really want to cause a stir, give us a call and ask us to disable the Reply to All button for all of your users. Some very big companies have done this with great results!

This is just one small piece of the fairly large email noise puzzle, but I hope it helps you!

Do you want to get to the top of your email list quickly?  Same with Twitter?

Simply press and hold on the clock at the top of the screen and let go and the list will automatically scroll to the top (many apps will support this feature).

You can also just tap the clock at the top and it will skip up a lesser amount of time.

BAM!  That was easy!

What does Proactive mean? Proactive means doing stuff that isn’t simply in response to client needs that have arisen unexpectedly. Sounds easy enough in theory, but in practice it is crazy-hard to do in any significant quantities. Reactive IT work is like a black hole; Fighting technology fires will suck all available free time if you let it. It’s like quicksand. How an IT company gets out of reactive mode isn’t easy or obvious so most don’t ever truly get there even though almost all want to.

For the greater good, I’ll share some of our secret sauce on how we have managed to do what most can’t.

We made several leaps of faith:

1. We decided that all clients needed to make a commitment to us – we started requiring a monthly agreement. To get out of the IT death spiral, you need to invest in being proactive over the long term; we demand clients do this with us.
2. We didn’t hedge our bets by making the Proactive model optional. I don’t believe you can promise to be truly proactive to some clients while you are still committed to some purely reactive customers. See notes above about black holes and quicksand. We used to have a lot more clients than we have now. A LOT more. This was a huge leap of faith for us.
3. We take on full responsibility for our clients’ needs by charging fixed prices; we generally don’t charge extra when there is more reactive work to do. This aligns our incentives with our customers. Everyone wants the reactive noise to die down.
4. We charge enough to be able to have the resources that allow us to be proactive. This is a tough one because most companies won’t pay what is necessary (especially when cheap, reactive IT service is so readily available). You have to get used to lots of people saying no thanks (or more commonly, simply not returning your calls or emails), which is not fun and doesn’t feel successful. You have to have strong belief to face all that rejection and still know you’re on the right path.
5. We dedicate entire Dolphins to proactive roles. Several people at Smart Dolphins get the luxury of completely ignoring the noise of all the reactive work and can focus on proactive work. This is incredibly powerful.
6. We invest heavily in tools and processes that allow us to be proactive. I have some very large invoices to prove our commitment to being proactive. I also have years of my life spent on building the “Smart Dolphins Way” with the team. Without all the points above, an IT company simply will not make the necessary investments in time, money, blood, sweat and tears into the tools and processes to be truly proactive.
7. We built our culture around being proactive. It is at the core of who we are. It is cult-like.

In short, we have thrown ourselves at being proactive. We burned the ships and attacked the enemy (reactive work) knowing there was no turning back. We haven’t just talked about it. We didn’t just use wishful thinking. We took a leap and continue to take leap after leap. That is why I feel comfortable sharing our secret sauce with the world, including our competitors. I don’t believe any of our competitors could catch us now (but I would like them all to follow our lead).

Of course, there is still so much more we can do; in many ways, we’ve only just begun. Next week we bring on another Dolphin who will also be completely dedicated to being strictly proactive. When we discussed these plans with the team, I was wondering if the Dolphins carrying our reactive load would squawk for more help with their workload, but they didn’t. Not a peep. They get it. Everyone here gets it. We see it happening. It is clear. We’re truly Proactive.

Thanks to a previous Pod Pointer, you already know how to restore closed tabs in your web browser.  But what do you do with all the tabs you already have open?  How do you choose between them?

You can switch easily between tabs in your web browser with a few simple key combinations.  Here are the secret keypresses that will supercharge your browsing experience (or at least save your mouse finger a little work):

CTRL+Tab – Switch to next tab
CTRL+Shift+Tab – Switch to previous tab
CTRL+<1 through 8> – Switch to a specific tab (CTRL+1 for first, CTRL+3 for third, etc.)
CTRL+9 – Switch to last tab

The above shortcuts work in Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox.

Tab on!

I’m sorry to many of the business owners I’ve met with in the past to talk about Smart Dolphins and your technology. I’ve done many of you a disservice. I’ve let you down and it probably will cost you thousands of dollars and much frustration.

I have begun to see that I care too much what others think of me and that being liked is too often a priority for me when I’ve met with some business owners. I wanted you to like me so I agreed with you when I knew you were wrong. I knew that your beliefs were costing you and instead of truly challenging you on those things and trying to educate you based on my 12 years of experience in this business, I was too focused on “building a relationship” and being cordial.

I’ve had a growing awareness of this problem, but the penny dropped for me this this month. I met with a business owner recently who was having a lot of problems with their computer network and their IT support vendor (“vendor” might be generous: They had a “kid” who had a “real job” and was only available on weekends and evenings). This situation was the poster-child for why Smart Dolphins exists. This company had huge risk, costs and were missing a ton of opportunity because they looked at these things through the wrong lens. They were trying to minimize their IT support vendor costs while also expecting great results. They were looking for a minor miracle.

I wasn’t in the meeting long with this person before they wanted to know “how much do you guys cost”. When I gave them a ballpark, the meeting came to an abrupt end; this business couldn’t “afford” our price. They had to continue to find a way to minimize their vendor cost and hope and pray for a different outcome. This was clearly not a “hot prospect” for Smart Dolphins, but it was clearly someone that needed some guidance. I didn’t give any. I let this person continue their insanity (doing the same thing and expecting a different result) without challenging the logic. What a waste.

Again, I’m sorry. I failed you. I’m sorry to all the others that I have let off the hook like I did here.

I have challenged some decision makers and I have educated many on the true cost dynamics of their IT networks, but there have been many situations like this where I walk away, quietly disagreeing with someone’s reasoning.

This public apology and admission here is part of a new leaf that I am turning over. Business world, prepare to be challenged.

So, I’m also going to take this opportunity to submit an apology to the many business owners that I’m going to meet with in the future. I can’t promise you that we’re going to be Best Friends Forever. I might still part with a differing opinion, but you’ll know about it.

Learn how to easily select blocks of text in Microsoft Word with this quick tip!

Within a Word document, you may need to select some text that extends past your viewing area.  When you click and drag with your mouse and go beyond the screen, the selected portion just ZOOMS past where you actually wanted to copy, and you end up with pages of selected text that you didn’t want.  Then, you have to click somewhere within the document to undo the selection and try again.  Try this trick!

- Place your cursor at the beginning of the text you want to select

- Click your mouse once and release, do not hold

- Using the vertical scroll bar on your Word window, scroll to the place you want to end

- Place the cursor there and hold down the SHIFT key and click the mouse button once

Yeah!  The text you want to be selected is selected without the mouse racing past and selecting more than you wanted.  You can now copy and paste just like you would any other selected text!