Common IT Pain Points For Small Businesses & Orgs

One major challenge small companies face is not being able to afford formal IT leadership to manage major tech planning and projects.

Everyone seems to be paying for some kind of quote-unquote IT Support, or has a random employee acting as their unofficial “IT Guy / Gal.” This tends to lead to a bottleneck of problems that can only be resolved by having someone come in to help implement sensible tech strategies that make sense through long and short-term planning.

In the digital world, your business can quickly get left behind if you aren’t seamlessly executing the best possible customer experience between your business’ on and offline properties. This can best be accomplished by giving your employees stake in your brand by providing them with digital tools that empower them to do more.

The struggle is figuring out how to integrate new technologies into your programs with minimal budgets and limited employee capabilities. Figuring it all out as a non-specialist can be extremely overwhelming. Third-party solutions rarely offer exactly what you’re looking for out of the box.

This is usually where we come in. Simply enough, we assess where you’re at, help you figure out where to go from there, and remain sensitive and adaptive to your needs throughout the process. Sometimes our clients hire us to execute game plans, and other times we work directly with a third party to make sure you’re getting what exactly what you need and want–nothing more, nothing less, and at a fair price. We function as an on-call IT director, regardless of your budget constraints, and we care about the short and long term success of your organization as much as you do.

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Education Pain Points

Most schools are faced with incredible challenges. Teachers are underpaid and over-worked, often working from stale, outdated lesson plans. Administrators are thanklessly expected to work miracles. The government is of little help. It’s no surprise that the United States far from the top in worldwide education rankings.

Yet: it’s hard to find a school that’s not bursting with some of the most passionate, inspiring human beings on the planet. This why the consultants at Nullen will always have a soft spot in our hearts for schools, and will to do any and everything we can to help schools thrive. The greatest feeling in the world is when we receive a kind note from one of our former students.

• Montessori Programs around the world are struggling to integrate technology into the traditionally anti-technology Montessori Method. Technology is an afterthought in the certification process. It’s challenging for them to develop new capabilities, and difficult for leadership to see the value in investing time and money into it.

• Public school systems are often handed technology in bulk with absolutely no direction on how to integrate it properly into their programs. Of course, you can’t just throw money at problems and expect them to be solved. We can help public schools develop curriculums that embrace technology in natural ways, unites teachers, and fosters regular collaboration.

• Private schools often need help crafting the technology component of their school-wide budgets. Sometimes too many choices can be problematic. We’ve worked directly with private school programs to develop custom technology programs, build computer labs, and help teachers school-wide create a comprehensive continuum between grade levels.

• Students are no longer allowed to be children. We’re driving the creativity out of them, over-filling their schedules, and are not taking the time to listen to their needs. Each new generations is born with permanent mobile connectivity to the internet. They have the wealth of the world’s knowledge at their fingertips, and it’s critical that they learn how to use it safely, creatively, and to solve problems. We should stop forcing them to memorize information and instead  teach them how to determine whether the barrage of information coming at them from every media channel is true or false.

All businesses are similarly challenged with the task of educating and inspiring personal and professional growth among their employees. Many employees similarly feel overworked. Not only can we help you teach your employees in the realm of technology, but we can inspire them by showing the value new skills bring to the table. We can solve your in-house problems with them. We try to learn your business inside and out, and as we’re providing you with strategy and solutions, we can also provide your employees with the tools they need to be more self-reliant. We spent years successfully leading a technology revolution in an anti-technology environment, and it required continual education services that were adapted to the needs of every single employee.

We’d be more than happy to lead similar projects, whether big or small, for you.

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Common Marketing Pain Points

Everything for all businesses changed with the invention of the mobile smart phone. In 2007, Steve Jobs stepped on the stage for the first time to introduce the iPhone. In no time at all, the sweeping changes that resulted are dominating every single industry that exists. We look at our phones, on average, 46 times throughout the day. Our attention is now our most valuable resource. As a result, advocacy-based marketing approaches are now the only ones that work. If you’re not eliciting an emotional response from your customers and non-customers in everything you publish, you’re doing something wrong.

The biggest opportunity comes from creating a seamless online-offline experience for your customers at every touch point. Most loyal customers will immediately leave a brand or stop buying a product the moment they feel misled or used. Traditional marketing approaches no longer work. No one trusts a hard sale anymore, and people only watch commercials if they’re funny, inspiring, or offers tremendous social value.

Advocacy is the most valuable thing for a business to obtain in their customer base, their employees, and their leaders. The easiest way to inspire people to become advocates is by providing them with things that pleasantly surprise them. Taking an advocacy-focused marketing approach and creating a consistent harmony between all digital properties is the key to unlocking new growth. It opens up tremendous opportunities for innovation.

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Common Website Pain Points

Everyone has a website. The dot com boom of the late 1990’s led businesses to see the importance of having an online presence. Since then, of course, things have evolved quite a bit. In the past, you made sure your business showed up in the yellow pages or had recurring ads in the local paper. Now you need to make sure your website shows up on the first page of every relevant Google search.

Beyond optimizing websites for search engine results, we also need to make websites mobile-friendly. Our cell phones have become an integral part of who we are and how we engage with the world around us. People expect businesses to provide a completely seamless experience between their physical location, their website, social media properties, and beyond. Businesses benefit in tremendous ways by having their brand’s messaging consistent at every one of these touch points. 

Your website has the capability of being a much more powerful tool for your business than you may imagine. Each day powerful tools are becoming more affordable, if not free. Massive corporations aren’t the only ones that can have a cool website that does convenient things.

Get in touch if you’d like to collaborate on a website project with us.

Common Nonprofit Pain Points

Nonprofits are faced with incredible challenges and double standards in comparison to corporations and small businesses.

One of the biggest challenges we’ve personally experienced comes from seeing employees being pressured to do more without additional compensation. Nonprofits often need interdisciplinary talents just to keep their organization afloat. Incredible creativity tends to occur when people have their backs to the wall and have to use what’s around them to survive. However, it’s not fair to accept burnout as the award for those that have dedicated their lives to the cause.

Our interdisciplinary talents can help fill these gaps in your services, planning, and execution. We can bring relief and help reinvigorate burnt out employees. We love working with passionate teams of people that thirst for the capacity to do more. It takes a special kind of person to work for a nonprofit. All of our services can be tailored and customized to your organization’s specific needs, capabilities, and tight budgets. Just as your employees go out of their way to do everything they can to grow your cause, so will we.

Take a look at some of our other service lines and think about how they could apply to the your organization’s challenges, and connect with us!

Interview Pain Points

Many organizations struggle with creating original content to share on their websites and social media channels. One of our favorite services is interviewing our clients’ customers, employees, leadership, and founders.  We’ve conducted interviews for every organization that we worked for, and have interviewed everyone from 4 year-olds to 104 year-olds. Once you get people comfortable, people start telling their stories transparently and honestly, and it leads to genuine, heartfelt content that our clients’ audiences naturally connect with.

We can also train your staffs to develop regular content in-house. Whether it’s a regular podcast, an interview show, or an ongoing YouTube channel that helps you grow your brand and demonstrates your expertise, we can help you build it.

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