Words of wisdom from the great Albus Dumbledore for your IT business

The greatest wizard who ever lived… the only one that You Know Who was ever scared of… The longest beard in the wizarding world (probably), Dumbledore has a whole lot of credentials under his cape. But did you know that lots of his most epic advice can be easily put to great use in the IT business world? Join us on a tour of some of his greatest pearls of wisdom, and how you can apply them to supercharge your IT business growth! Ready? Accio… great advice!

1. “Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it”

When you’re working with clients, your communication skills are just as important as your technical skills. Fact. Albus Dumbledore knew better than most of us how important the gift of the gab is, and how it’s true that saying the wrong thing can lose you the trust of your customers in a single moment, while speaking at their level can help to form loyalty and respect. Remember, your customers may have had a bad experience in the past with other service providers, so channel your inner Molly Weasley, listen to what they need, and reassure them, too.

2. “Youth can not know how age thinks and feels, but old men are guilty if they forget what it is to be young.”

It pays dividends to remember that you’re the one with the experience! Your clients are excited to get the ball rolling with new IT initiatives, whether that’s moving to the cloud, expanding their workforce, or creating a remote-first culture. It’s up to you to rein in the excitement where necessary, and provide the value of your expertise and experience to help them to crawl onto a broomstick before they can fly after the golden snitch. Your clients are looking for a trusted advisor, but they’ll only listen to you if you show that you remember what it’s like to be fresh and new!

3. “The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.”

As an IT service provider, this is a call to action for… incident response! In a complex IT environment, you can’t always know what tomorrow will bring, whether that’s human error from the customer causing a data breach, a system failure due to an unexpected bug or malfunction, or even a natural disaster as we all experienced with COVID-19! Predicting the future may be impossible, and unfortunately Professor McGonagall isn’t about to appear with a time-turner any time soon, but you can have some robust processes and documentation in place to stay a couple of steps ahead.

4. “We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.”

This is great advice both for working with customers, and also for holding together your own internal team, for example if you work in Corporate IT, or if you have a team of technicians who are employed by your Managed Services business. The more united you are, from the processes you follow for security, compliance, and communication, to the language and customer service you offer those who need your support – the more likely you’ll become as strong and cohesive a team as the Chudley Cannons at the Quidditch quarter finals.
Take something as simple as your SLA. If everyone doesn’t follow the same song sheet when it comes to response and resolution times, customers will quickly get frustrated, and the whole business could end up getting a worse name than Sirius Black does at the beginning of book 3.

5. “It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow up to be.”

In the era of the Great Resignation, there are more people leaving their jobs than ever before, and more vacancies for skilled staff, too. If you’re worried about getting the right people in place – take this advice from Albus Dumbledore, and think about upskilling the team you have! After all, just because your technicians might have a background in physical hardware, that doesn’t mean they can’t learn about software for example.

Offering training to your current team could be a great way of showing that you want to support their professional development, and boost morale within your core culture rather than bringing in new and expensive candidates externally. The top skills in demand at the moment are for AI and algorithms designers, networking development, software computing, and both UI and UX design. Ready to lift up your employees to new heights? Wingardium Leviosa!

6. ‘Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.’

Sometimes, the worst things can happen not out of malice or purposeful harm, but just because no-one is thinking about your IT systems with intelligence or foresight. Yes, on occasion it will be all hands on deck for a ransomware attack or the loss of the CEO, but more likely – you’ll have gaps thanks to poor patch management, lack of visibility, clumsy onboarding, or a misunderstanding between your technicians.

We’re a bit biased, but we bet if our favorite headteacher was working in IT services, he would love Atera as much as he loves a sherbert lemon, for its streamlined remote monitoring and maintenance that keeps everything visible and manageable from a single dashboard, so that nothing falls through those gaps. Automated patch management, easy IT automation profiles for onboarding, a robust script library to save you more time in the day, and reports that you’d be proud to take to the Wizengamot… we’ve only just scratched the surface!
Want to wave a magic wand and give Atera a try immediately? You’re in luck, your 30-day free trial starts right here.