There are corners you cut and corners you don't and years to learn the difference.

Here are some areas where you can save money.

Phone services

Phone services are often horribly overpriced.    Transitioning to VoIP can save thousands per year but there are many things which can go wrong.   We can walk you through the process to insure you are fully informed of both the risks and benefits and we can make the transistion as painless as possible.

Websites

Hosting a simple website on a top tier cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services costs about $5 per month.   A domain registration costs around $20 per year bringing the total to perhaps $80 per year.    That said, some websites are more involved, require more resources and may be much more expensive to operate.   In this case we're just looking at a few simple pages for an informational website not unlike what about 80% of our clients have.   If that describes you and you are paying $1200 a year for your website, there is probably an problem.   Websites can be confusing and some companies will take advantage of this to essentially charge you for nothing.  

Office Networks

Computers and networks can be an endless money pit.  Companies are trying to sell you endless things and then make those things obsolete so you must buy endless more.   There is unfortunately a huge conflict of interest here.   We try to eliminate that as much as possible.   In general we will provide you with a list of needed hardware and a link to an amazon list to purchase it.    We find buying something on Amazon and marking it up 30% to in general be somewhat distasteful and an unethical business practice.   There are things we stock because we need to have them available immediately such as cables, adapters, replacement parts etc. and we tend to provide them with reasonable markup to cover our expenses in stocking them. 

As a general rule we try to avoid hardware that requires some sort of yearly subscription to operate and we give preference to open sources solutions because often they are not only free but superior in quality.  We don't believe in promoting endless subscription based products because we get a kickback.

In general we want you to have complete faith that if we recommend a purchase it is because you genuinely need it and it will benefit your bottom line.

We have decades of experience in Linux systems and we use them because they are robust, reliable and typically have much lower hardware requirements.    We often work with non-profits and startup which are extremely limited in their funding and Linux has been invaluable in building workable and cost effective solutions.

Frequently businesses cobble together computers into a "Network" only to find it rapidly devolves into a "Notwork."   This is a result of several things.   Firstly, proper networking is difficult and can take years to learn to properly design and navigate.   Secondly, the failure is by design.   Microsoft has planned all of this out.   They have a path that leads from a small home office to a global enterprise.  Unfortunatly that path has a hefty price tag and involves buying a never ending series of microsoft products and ever more powerful hardware.    Most often the business owner buys a number of inexpensive windows home computers and this sets the trap.  Soon there is a collection of poorly connected compters that kind of sort of work together but generate an endless series of problems and glitches in the process.   Problems managing users arise as each account on each machine is totally independent and unconnected to the other machines.  File sharing becomes a nightmare.  Print sharing doesn't work properly.   Files are scattered across the network and backup becomes difficult.

This is a situation we see constantly and constantly unravel to bring order to the chaos.   We turn the nightmare into a managed network and eliminate the problems which constantly recur while reducing support costs and disruptions immensly.    It is often a long, slow, ugly process and one that we can avoid if you don't make the mistakes early on.   

Printers

Few things can cause as much disruption and frustration as printing problems.    Cutting corners, buying cheap printers, ink jets etc. never comes to a happy end.   Bite the bullet, get a good printer.   Network printers avoid many of the print sharing issues and provide easy managment.   I highly recommend them.   Brother makes several entry level multi-function printers which work well, I have several dozen in service and they give me few problems.   In general laser printers perform better, last longer and cost less to operate than ink jets.   If you occasionally print color, I recommend an ink jet which uses cartridges with the print head build in so there is no danger of ink drying in the machine and if there is a problem with the print head it can be fixed by replacing the cartridges.