How to Think Like a Techie
There are three certainties in life. Death, taxes, and tech going wrong.
You’ve been running your business a while now. You’ve got systems. Plural. Things talk to each other, mostly. And yet here you are, staring at an error message that wasn’t there yesterday, wondering if the universe has it in for you specifically.
Yes, even I need tech support sometimes. I don’t know everything about tech. Nobody does anymore. It’s not the 80s. There’s hardware, software, APIs, integrations, webhooks, and enough acronyms to fill a spreadsheet. Nobody holds the whole picture in their head.
But there’s a skill in getting tech support well. Skip it, and you’ll burn hours, money, and goodwill you don’t have spare.
How people get it wrong at this stage
When you were starting out, the mistake was asking a Facebook group which CRM to use, or falling down a three hour research hole comparing tools that all do roughly the same thing.
You’ve moved past that. The mistakes look different now.
The first is quietly building workarounds. A tool doesn’t quite do what you need, so you patch it with a Zap, a spreadsheet, and a prayer, and never write down what you did or why. Six months later something breaks and you have no idea where to even start looking.
The second is trying to solve it yourself at 11pm because you don’t want to “bother” anyone, or because last time a support ticket took three days to get a reply. So you poke at settings you don’t fully understand until either it works again or it’s worse.
Both cost you more than the problem itself ever would.
What to do instead
You are the head of your own IT department, whether you asked for the job or not. That doesn’t mean fixing everything yourself. It means knowing what needs fixing, and who’s best placed to fix it.
I’d love to tell you tech will stop breaking once you’re established. It won’t. Anyone promising that is either lying or about to send you an invoice with a lot of zeros on it.
First, get out of panic mode
Before you touch anything, calm down. However that looks for you. Step away from the screen, make tea, shout into a cushion, sleep on it if you can.
This isn’t optional. Tech problems need the calm, logical part of your brain. Panic uses a different part entirely, and it makes worse decisions.
You don’t have to solve it alone. You also don’t get to hand it to someone else and disappear. It’s your business. You’re accountable for it, even when someone else does the fixing.
Who to ask
Start with the support built into the tool itself. You’re already paying for it, whether through a subscription or your time learning the platform. Use it.
The wider internet is a fine second stop, but treat it as one opinion among many, not gospel. Someone in a mastermind group might use the same tool completely differently to you, with a completely different setup underneath it.
How to ask badly
Two ways to guarantee I switch off the second I see your message.
The angry version: “X has been broken for HOURS and it’s driving me insane, does ANYONE know what’s going on with this thing?”
The helpless version: “I can’t get X working, I’m clearly rubbish at this, does anyone smarter than me know what I’ve done wrong?”
Neither tells me anything useful. I still have to manage the emotion in the message before I can even get to the actual problem, then dig out what you were trying to do, what you tried, and what happened instead. That’s a lot of unpaid detective work before anyone’s even looked at the tech.
Both also quietly hand the problem to someone else, usually for free.
How to get help fast
Here’s the version that gets a reply within minutes, not days:
“I’m using X, trying to do Y. I’ve tried A, B, and C. I expected D, but got E instead. Any ideas where I’ve gone wrong?”
That’s it. Specific, calm, and it shows you’ve already done the thinking. People want to help this version of you, because helping is quick and the outcome is clear.
And when the fix takes longer than five or ten minutes, expect to pay for that time. Diagnosing a problem properly and explaining it clearly is a skill. It’s one I charge clients for, same as any other professional would.
Your tech support cheat sheet
Before you ask for help, have this ready:
- What you were trying to achieve
- What you already tried, in order
- What you expected to happen
- What actually happened, including the exact error message
- What system, browser, or software version you’re on
- Anything else that might be relevant, even if you’re not sure it is
Hand that over and you’ll get better help, faster, and probably cheaper.
If your systems are the kind that leak your energy instead of giving you time back, that’s what I help fix. Get in touch.
