When I started selling computers as a business in 1997 I had aspirations of building a business empire. I had no plans to spend the rest of my career as a tech. I wanted to run a tech business. I wanted to be, first and foremost, an entrepreneur. Selling and repairing computers was not my primary goal. Building a business was the main objective. My position as a tech was intended only as a temporary one until I could afford to hire someone to take my place. Years later, I was still waiting.
I knew how to build and repair computers, but I didn’t know much about the computer business. My competitors were certainly not willing to help me and there were few resources available at the time that I could turn to in order to educate myself. I learned it all the hard way, by making business mistakes. And I made a lot of them.
When I joined ComputerRepair.com in 2004 (now known as OnForce ) and Yahoo! newsgroups such as computerbusiness@yahoo.com in 2005 I found that I was not alone. There were a lot of other techs who jumped into it the same way I did, dealt with the same problems and made the same mistakes.
One of the problems I had with running my business was keeping up with all the new technologies and all the industry “buzz” words. Acronyms like “NAS” and “SAN” were thrown around in the field and terms such as Software as a Service, Web 2.0 and,more recently, Managed Services were freely exchanged during phone discussions and seminars at trade shows. It’s a dirty little secret in this business that when two or more IT professionals meet and such terms are interjected in the discussion, the heads nod silently and at least someone becomes a deer in the headlights but no one asks what they mean because no one wants to come across as out of touch or less informed about the business than their peers. It’s kind of a geek ego thing.
So some in business run around and say things like “the vertical systems market is opening new opportunities for resellers in the channel” and “we just tapped into selling Managed Services to our SMB clients and we’re looking to expand into the enterprise by Q1 of 09” and the rest have no idea what these individuals are talking about. Well, you can. You just have to keep up with the latest news and industry trends.
One of the best ways to do this is by reading industry trade publications .
Every industry has at least one trade magazine that the professionals subscribe to and follow to keep up with what is going on in their industry. The IT industry is no different; in fact, our industry has one of the largest – if not the largest – collections of trade magazines, white papers and web based content on the entire planet. There is a plethora of them covering every niche and sub-niche in the IT marketplace.
These publications- the magazines, white papers, multimedia webinars, etc. are rich with news and content about products, services, issues and trends in the industry. Some of it is self-promotion, some objective. It can be analytical, speculative, dry or entertaining – but it’s all readily available to everyone who needs or wants to know more about what is happening in the IT industry and how they can leverage that knowledge to start and grow their own businesses.
If you want to learn and keep up with the latest “buzz” words in the industry, reading trade publications is a must, since some of the terms are created, coined or spread in these publications. In other words, you will learn about them right from the source.
These magazines are a great way to educate yourself because you can read them at your leisure, you can subscribe to as many as you need or want or you can focus on the ones that are specific to your area of the business.
The best thing about these publications is that nearly all of them are FREE. Of course, you need to work in the industry. All you have to do is fill out a qualifying form to show that you are an industry professional.
Understand that these publications are not aimed at laypeople or the general public, so the form is necessary to filter out those who are not qualified. It takes a few minutes to fill out the form, but once you do and are approved, you are in. Overall, it is well worth the investment. After all, they are free, and you can’t beat free.
The goal of The Force Field portal is to help IT pros who are in business or want to be in business equip themselves with the information and knowledge they need to be successful. One of the paths to that goal is to provide access to the latest news and trends in the industry to help entreprenurial techs educate themselves and understand how to do business with the rest of the players in their field.
When we first launched the portal in beta form late last year I painstakingly collected a personal list of trade magazines that I felt were useful and relevant to my peers and posted them in both the FF forums and the IT Business Resource Directory . Many of these are publications I actively subscribe to and learn from. In the last few years I have learned a lot about running an IT business from reading these periodicals. I posted the list so you can subscribe to them and learn from them as well.
To make it all easier for you to browse the list and subscribe to them, we recently launched theforcefield.tradepub.com , a collection of leading industry trade magazines from respected publishers. Instead of sorting through the original list in the forums or in the directory and going through the time consuming task of contacting the subscription department of each publication, I felt it would be better to display them all on the site and make it as easy and convenient as possible to sign up.
In addition to the magazines you can download white papers, webinars and podcasts across 34 industry sectors. It is a one-stop shop for the leading trades in the IT industry and I think it is well worth it.
Sign up for a few today and the next time you meet up with other IT business pros at a trade show, forum or meeting and someone mentions a new buzz word, you’ll be able to tell them what it means.
