Small naming decisions can have a big impact on your IT. Making a quick call to ask how this might affect your business IT prior to making a change can save time, money and stress
Full Transcript
L: Hello my name is Lorraine of District 32 and I’m really looking forward to these conversations, we’ve just had one there’s a second conversation today but you’re giving us um tips on what to look out for in it that we just wouldn’t necessarily consider. Good morning, Peter
P: Hi Lorraine how are you? Thanks for having me and yeah, I’m enjoying being able to sort of give the viewers the listeners whatever some ideas about what to look out for that you wouldn’t normally think of when you’re thinking of I.T and today we’re talking about business names, and you’re thinking what is an I.T guy got anything to do with business names and I don’t. Don’t get me wrong I’m not a business coach, I don’t do anything else you know it’s not my deal you know. We have a client let’s call him Bob.
Bob is a business owner and through the course of the business he’s changed owners and changed structures and he had to re-register an ABN. Okay because the business name and the business structure have changed and as he did so he tweaked the name of the business and the trading name of the business. This meant that the ABN didn’t match exactly his registered domain for his website and let’s call it ABC trucks. Now the original name was OBC trucks okay and now it’s a b and c trucks or something along those lines, but it’s you know Kevlar trading as ABC trucks or Kevlar proprietary limited or Kevlar trust or Kevlar whatever and by the way I’ve changed all those names it’s none of those names in any way shape or form. So, what we have to do then is we have to go to the regulatory Authority which is Auda which manages all the.com .au and .au domains and verify with them that the business that is applying for the domain is actually entitled to the domain because you can’t give a website called swings and playsets.com.au to a business name that’s called ABC trucks.
L: I just thought anybody could buy anything Peter? Not anymore?
P: Well .com and .net there’s a lot less regulations right but .com.au and .net.au and .au, anything with the .au on the end there’s a regulation process okay and some business owners actually don’t understand that there’s this matching thing and so we got to a day ahead, a day before and we realized that the Auda weren’t going to allow the new business to have the domain so he’s had to maintain the existing business name and register that so his accountants and lawyers are fluttering around in a fluster making sure that the domain the email addresses all the intellectual property of the business is maintained.
L: Wow
P: okay because they’ve done this accounting and legal structure thing which we had nothing to do with and don’t want to, just a reminder no.
L: Yep
P: But the impact of that sometimes crosses over into it. It’s important when you have changes like that, a phone call, a coffee, beer, you know a spit ball what are you doing guys? You know we’re thinking about doing this and this is the idea, will this have any effect on IT? That’s what I spend my day doing and I encourage and I talk to my clients about how they can do things better how they can in IT world and then as we’re talking it was like okay what have you got planned for the next three, six months, 12 months where are you going?
Are you having a buyout? Are new businesses coming in? Are you having a merger? Partner splits? Whatever, will that affect the business name and the registration? Will that affect the security of the emails and the websites?
How you interact with property is maintained? All those bits and pieces, they sideline along the IT area. Now some of it is not my field of expertise and I gladly give that up and I do not profess to anybody that I’m an expert in anything else except the IT side, but when your IT has formed such a backbone of your business if you tweak that too much, you’ll break it and if you break that you affect the business. You affect the business then you know that’s just that’s a recipe for disaster so you know the lesson to learn and we managed to get Bob sorted out we had 24 hours to spare um you know a several million-dollar company, 20 employees um you know 10, 15-year history so there was a lot at stake all because they’ve made a change and hadn’t even thought about it.
It was only when the new customer forms came through for us it’s like hang on a minute, we’ve got a check and balance here and we said hang on a minute there’s an issue. So, it always pays to make a five-minute phone call to say is this going to affect anything?
L: Peter thank you very much for sharing that and we’ve just figured out what the series is called it’s the “pick up the phone Series” right and we can just proceed that with everything for the rest of the year.
P: So, I like having coffee have a beer thing but you know if you want to pick up the phone, we can do that.
L: But we’ll call it that series but in brackets or coffee or beer right, but we’ve got a series name. Thank you very much these are things that definitely would not think of we don’t know what we don’t know it’s not our game it’s not our industry it pays to have that coffee, beer it’s you know 30 years of experience going you know what to watch out for.
Peter Trenaman GroupSupport thank you very much for sharing your time and I look forward to our next pick-up-the-phone tip thanks for watching all the best thank you.
