Wondering how changes in technology will affect your business? Check out what business expert Gene Marks has to say on how new technology will impact old school business owners.
Video Transcript
When you talk about old school business owners, I meet a lot of those kind of people, right? You know, and particularly where I'm from in Philadelphia. We sell, you know, technology services. We have about 600 clients in the Philadelphia area so we meet a lot of those guys. And they're my age and older and they're used to doing things in a certain way. The best example I can give for you is, you know, just a personal example, so we had like a plumber that came to our house just a couple weeks ago to fix a problem in my house and old time family business. I know the owner, 50 employees. The guy's like my age or in his 50s, and the plumber came out, did the work in my house, did fine, finishes the job, you know, has this little bill of receipt and work order that he fills out. I had to sign the work order, hand it back to him. He says, yeah, give our office a call so you can give them a credit card, and then he leaves. And I'm thinking to myself, man, this is just not the way it's gonna be in 5 to 10 years from now. So when you're talking about the old school guys, you know, service companies, small businesses, when they look at sort of, you know, the cloud technology, mobile technology, software that's available to help things do faster, these are not things that they're going to decide on their own. They're going to be pushed into making those decisions. And they're going to be pushed in two ways. They're going to have competitors. There will be another plumber in the area who is able to do better work, quicker work, and better service because they're using some type of mobile or cloud-based technology to work and help out with their customers. So that'll be one thing that'll push them that way. The other thing is their kids. A lot of small companies are family owned. And there are a lot of kids, a lot of small kids, that grew up on Facebook and cloud-based applications and you know they're going to go to school, and they might work a few years in big corporations and then come back to the family business and they'll be looking around and being like, oh, my God. What are we doing here? This is like 1975. And those are the kids that will push their dads or their moms into moving forward with technology. So, those old school sort of business people, they made money and they – smart people that profit over the years, but they will be forced into adopting technology over the next few years. Their competition will do it, their kids will do it.
