By Matt Taylor
Most small businesses know technology could save them time and money—but they’re stuck. Either the tools are built for enterprises, the solutions are too complex, or they don’t have the budget for an IT department. That’s why I started Livable Digital.
I didn't start out as a tech person, far from it. I went to school for history and was far more interested in writing jokes than I was writing code.
I actually remember exactly where I was the first time I read about "the cloud" and how all of our data was going to be saved there. I was sitting in our living room in Owen Sound reading a magazine and looking out the window up at the sky and I thought "they've finally done it, they figured out how to use clouds to store pictures". That's not a joke, I actually thought that.
The experience of being an "outsider" to tech has never really left me and as it turns out it has become one of the most important things that I brought to my career.
It seemed like computers and all that they could do was magic voodoo and I didn't want to get involved. Then, fresh out of school I was hired to be an Admin Assistant for a large construction company in Toronto…in their IT department. My plan was to leave the tech to the smart people and to get them all coffee when they needed the fuel.
But, by the third week I was taking calls on the Help Desk, helping people in Finance figure out why their computer wouldn't start that day and Foremen transfer pictures from their Blackberry to their PC. I also learned that "the cloud" is just a computer that's located somewhere else. Who knew?
After working on the help desk I was hooked on IT, I went back to school for Computer Programming as an adult and continued my new career. I found that unlike most people in IT I was able to understand issues from a personal stand point first instead of a technical one. That Foreman didn't care how his pictures got from his Blackberry to his PC, he just knew that needed them on his PC so he could attach them to a report for his boss. Once I was able to sync them automatically for him his job was made that much easier.
After I studied Computer Programming my eyes were really opened to the possibilities of what software and technology can do for a business and its employees.
One of the first projects I worked on was for a Doctor's office; they had patients fill out digital forms describing their symptoms and for each form the Admin had to write a long referral letter that described the symptoms to send off to another Doctor. They wanted to automatically create the letter with all of the symptoms from the form.
At first glance this seemed impossible to me: the forms were in proprietary software, there were a million symptoms and dozens of possibilities for each sentence in the referral letter. The only way I could figure out how to do it was pretty "hacky", but guess what? The Doctor and Admin Assistant didn't care, they just wanted the referral letter so they could spend more time actually helping their patients. And that's all that mattered.
I started working for a company with around 125 employees and then with an organization with over 1500 employees in essentially the same role: departments or teams would come to me with a workflow that was broken or costing them tons of time and we'd work together to find the best solution to their issue.
I found that solutions usually fall into one of three buckets:
The individuals on a team always knew that there was a problem but they just didn't know how to fix it. From my experience there's always a solution to workflow problems like this and most of the time the solution is a lot simpler to implement than people realize. I view my role as someone who bridges that gap between the tools and the people.
For years, when a department has a workflow that's costing them time, I was the guy they called. But I started to wonder: what does a 15-person accounting firm do with the exact same problem? Odds are they Google it, get overwhelmed by solutions built for companies a hundred times their size, and eventually just go back to doing it manually.
That's the gap. And it's not because the tools don't exist, they do. It's not because the problems are too complex, they usually aren't. It's because almost everything in the technology world is built, marketed, and priced for enterprise. The assumption baked into most software is that you have an IT department, an implementation budget, and six months to roll something out. Small businesses don't have any of that, so they tune out. And honestly, who could blame them?
What's missing isn't the technology. It's someone who shows up for small businesses the way I show up for corporate departments at work. Someone who starts with the problem, not the product. Someone who can look at a 50-person company's messy workflow and say: here's what's actually going on, here's what would actually fix it, and here's how we do it without blowing your budget or disrupting your whole operation. That person doesn't really exist for most small businesses and that's what I'm building with Livable Digital.
I started out just like a lot of small business owners and managers: not a tech person. I know what it feels like to see all of the hype around certain tech products, know that it could probably help you out, but not be able to get it working.
I've seen what's possible with the right support — HR managers who just wanted time to talk to people, Finance directors who knew what they wanted but couldn't get there alone — and in every case, the missing piece wasn't capability, it was a bridge. I know what it feels like to be on both sides of that bridge. That's why I built Livable Digital for people like me — the ones who aren't "tech people" until suddenly they are.
Livable Digital is an automation consultancy for small and medium businesses who want the same benefits from technology that the big enterprises are getting without the enterprise price tag. No massive budget required, no full-time hire needed. Just practical, plain language guidance identifying what's draining your time, and the hands-on help to fix it.
Ready to stop wasting time on manual tasks? Book Your Free Strategy Call, and let's get to work.
You can find me in the cloud.
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Let's figure out what's draining your time and fix it.