You Can Call for I.T. Help Without Hiring a Whole Crew

By KEN BELSON

SMALL-BUSINESS owners often juggle tasks from accounting to finding customers to keeping existing ones happy. But the one task many busy managers avoid is taking care of computers, networks and other technology. Installing software, setting up broadband connections and backing up servers can be time-consuming and complicated.

Yet because many small companies often do not have specialists in information technology on staff, when critical technology fails business can grind to a halt.

“It’s hard to keep up to date on security, business continuity and compliance with credit-card rules,” said Rick Ruiz, who runs I.B.M.’s global technology services group. “A large company can weather a computer glitch, but a smaller company can be put in a bad situation.”

This is why some I.T. specialists are expanding their operations to help small companies with limited resources. Big players like I.B.M. are providing off-site servers and keeping them safe from viruses and other threats. Technology providers, including Geek Squad, which is affiliated with Best Buy, are moving beyond helping consumers to focus more on small businesses.

For instance, when Tamika Tatum, general manager of Yardley’s Salon & Spa in San Antonio, helped open the 10,000-square-foot salon five months ago, she hired Geek Squad to install the three computers and software she had bought at Best Buy. Several months later, she called Geek Squad again to connect those three computers to three others that she had purchased for the back office.

“Management is just me and the owners, just when they can get free,” Ms. Tatum said. “I don’t have time to be an I.T. person.”

Geek Squad charges the same for business and residential services — setting up a basic two-computer network, for example, costs $159 — but the company expects small-business owners to call more often for help, so that should increase sales.

“They’re much less likely to let a minor problem persist,” said Jeffrey Severts, a vice president of Best Buy. “If their technology is failing, they’re losing money and will move as quickly as possible to move to back it up.”

Mr. Severts and executives at other retailers that provide office supplies are expecting the number of small businesses to grow as more boomers retire and start the kind of companies that begin in living rooms or garages with off-the-shelf equipment and cheap broadband lines.

The challenge for Geek Squad and other technology providers affiliated with retailers, like Circuit City’s Firedog, is to figure out which customers are buying goods for personal use and which will use them in their offices, whether at home or elsewhere. The line, it seems, is often blurred.

In February, Geek Squad sales agents, who have concentrated almost exclusively on consumers, started asking customers in Best Buy stores whether the laptop computers or wireless routers they were buying were for home or business use.

Amy Wright, a collision repair consultant who works from her home in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, had Geek Squad set up her computer and digital camera and the wireless Internet connection in her home office, as well as the Sony video recorder her husband uses. When it came time to upgrade her computers, printers and monitors, she spent about $2,800 at Best Buy.

“You can call them for help, but you don’t have to have them on a full-time basis,” Ms. Wright said of Geek Squad.

Small companies are also relying on I.T. specialists, sometimes several time zones away, who provide remote support, like monitoring the security of servers.

Keith Dion, the owner of Press Any Key, a technology provider in Brookfield, Conn., is the de facto I.T. staff for the Warm Company, a quilt maker of 50 employees with an office in Lynnwood, Wash., and warehouses in North Carolina, Washington and Vermont.

From the East Coast, Mr. Dion keeps track of the workstations at these locations and makes sure that the bar-code system is working and the company’s data is properly stored. When something goes wrong, he and Erica Johnson, the assistant vice president of Warm Company’s operations in Lynnwood, discuss the problem, sometimes using Webcams.

By having Mr. Dion handle the company’s technology remotely, Ms. Johnson has been able to cut costs. In 2007, it spent 0.53 percent of its revenue on technology, down from 0.97 percent two years earlier in 2005, she said.

“We have ideas, but we don’t know how to implement them,” said Ms. Johnson, who is working with Mr. Dion to digitize more office functions to save paper. “We don’t have time to learn it all.”