My name is Amy Babinchak. I am the owner of Harbor Computer Services. This is the story of how Harbor Computer Services came to be and how we’ve grown in to who are are today.
In the nascent beginnings of my business I was essentially working two jobs. One as a systems engineer for a software company that had me travelling 3 weeks a month, flying into places around the Country to bail out the local systems engineer from a messed up deployment of our software and restoring the customers faith in our company. I had to fix both the technical issue and the customer dissatisfaction issue. It was grueling, and I wasn’t happy travelling that much. It was always my experience that the better you become in IT the more travel you end up doing. Meanwhile, being a person that wants to help others, I ended up with a collection of small business clients that I was helping on the side. They accumulated over time as referrals from the individuals I was helping at the school districts I interacted with during my day job. I was asked if I could help their uncle, cousin, wife, husband with an IT problem at their small business and of course I said, sure. I would talk them through it over the phone from the airport, stop by after hours or on weekends and I would witness just how lousy their current situation was. I offered advice and implemented changes. They came to trust me. This unexpectedly turned into me being their primary IT support person.
I like to help people.
I got hooked on working with small businesses because I was impressed with the passion that many of them had for the work they were doing. I felt that passion in myself and for my chosen career. I had a drive that can only come from within and makes you want to keep going, doing more and more because you simply love it. These small business owners had that too. They had no problem accommodating my crazy schedule, meeting me afterhours and on weekends because they loved their business and wanted to make it better. And I wanted to make it better for them too. I found a synergy that couldn’t be denied.
Small business owners think like me and I like them
I worked myself into a state of exhaustion and I mean that literally. I had found what I loved but it was killing me. I made the decision to quit my job and focus on small business only for a while. That while turned into my new life but I didn’t know that then. I asked my clients to sign a contract agreeing to pay me every month in return for my continued work. Every one of them did. I was now a business owner with contractual clients.
I have a need for a certain baseline of security in my life
As I continued to encounter small businesses and understand their needs and the technology they were using I found myself introduced to small business server. What an amazing product suite for small business it was. It contained everything they needed from an on-premises server but I didn’t know the product. Because I love technology I threw myself into learning everything about it. I understood the underlying technologies, server, DNS, DHCP, Exchange, IIS, SQL I was even certified in those. But I had never seen or heard of ISA the firewall product in this suite. So I started learning it online and I dove in deep and began to participate in forums and mailing lists dedicated to the product. Not too far into that I realized that I actually knew quite a bit and I began offering advice and solutions to my peers online. This eventually led to the receipt of an MVP award from Microsoft. I had gone to my first conference the year before at the invitation of a Microsoft MVP and encountered other Microsoft MVP’s for the first time. What a thrill to be recognized by my peers as an expert.
Sacrificing money for a long time I hired a few technical people to help me in the business as it grew. After becoming an MVP I found myself offered opportunities to speak at conferences and contribute to books. I also had started a technical blog. I found that my passion now included learning and teaching too. This was really an expansion of wanting to help that I identified in myself earlier.
I love to learn. I love to help and I love to teach
I expected my new technical staff to be the same as me. I felt and still feel that the relationship with the small business is the most important part of the job because without it we cannot offer good solutions to their problems nor help them use technology to reach their goals. We’d be outside looking in. Instead of inside as a part of the team. We all need to be learning and growing in our technical expertise all the time. My staff needed to be people with a passion for technology and a love of small business. We needed to have that one-on-one relationship with our clients. That I expected my new staff to be like me is the thing that forms the personality of a business. Small businesses are an extension of the owner.
We need to be part of our clients’ team and our relationship with the client is the #1 thing
From this point the business was set on a definite path and it had its personality. Loving and committed to small business. Learning new technology. Bringing solutions to our clients because we were part of their team. A group with passion for the career path they have chosen.
Our strengths
I found the strengths in my business by looking at our origin story from before day one until the personality of the business became clear.
• I like to help people
• Small business owners think like me and I like them
• I have a need for a certain baseline of security in my life
• I love to learn. I love to help and I love to teach
• We need to be part of our clients’ team and our relationship with the client is the #1 thing
The interesting thing about our strengths is that none of them speak directly to technical expertise. And yet under lying all them is an assumed competency. I can’t stand it when I don’t know everything about a product or solution and I expect my staff to be experts. I need to dig in deep and become the expert. So that love to learn needs to be expressed more definitively as a strength
• We need to be experts in each of the technologies that we offer to our clients
I read once that if you put 10,000 hours, which takes about 10 years to accomplish that you will the #1 expert in that thing. 10 years into Harbor Computer Services we won a big award from Microsoft; Small Business Partner of the Year. It was confirmation that we were doing the right thing. This occurred at the height of the 2008-2010 economic depression and all of our clients kept us on, even as they all laid off 20-25% of the employees. It was a double whammy of acknowledgement that we’d accomplished our reason for being which was to do great things for small businesses.
I’ve also heard that if you read one article about a thing, say Office 365, for example that after only 18 months you will be one of the world experts in that topic. I have adopted this philosophy in learning too and my staff trains together for 4 hours each week toward this end.
Our tagline
Many businesses have tag lines and I’m a big fan of them. It tells you something right off the bat about that business and it’s a great conversation starter. Before I successfully defined my unique value proposition I struggled with creating a tagline. For many years we simply use Small Business Specialists. We used that phrase before, during and after Microsoft’s appropriation of phrase. While it communicated our market focus it didn’t communicate our uniqueness. However, once I sat down to think through the above narrative of our origin story a new tagline, the conversation starter, the thing that brings us to providing technical support and solutions to small businesses in the first place became evident.
We care about your business
It’s not fancy or complex or trendy. But it conveys trust, relationship and our reason for wanting to work with our clients. This phrase speaks to the small business market. Small businesses run on relationships and trust and we care about small business.