Welcome to Boomtown

For the inaugural blog post I thought I would share a couple of the inspirations behind why we formed Boomtown.  The first is that my wife owned a retail store in the home décor space. She is so talented and is able to mix old treasuries with modern pieces that her customers truly loved.  But she was continually frustrated with dealing with her IT stuff (in addition to book-keeping which she really doesn’t have a penchant for ;).  Guess who her informal IT support was?  Me.  While I was able to help with most of the issues given my background I found it frustrating too.  I didn’t necessarily have the tools and in certain cases the specialized experience to address.  So we would look for help online and ask for recommendations from other shop owners.  Neither produced very reliable results, was time consuming and worst of all didn’t get the problem fixed yet we still got stuck with a big bill, usually $600 per incident.  Clearly something was broken with this approach.

Concurrently, over the last few years a myriad of new software tools have come to market.  They are inexpensive, easy to use and can really improve a store’s revenue performance and reduce upfront and ongoing costs. All of these tools are delivered in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) format.  The problem here is that most business owners are too busy to know about the benefits of them or have trepidation about “upgrading” to them.  Mentally it seems like there is unknown upside for unlimited downside.  The reality is there is only upside – but folks need someone to help them start-up and support them. The other implication of the SaaS trend is that the network in the store becomes critical. When your payments begin running thru it, when your store operations are managed thru it and so on, it cannot be down.  Being down means lost business. Our mission is to solve these issues cost-effectively.‍

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Welcome to Boomtown. With our help I hope your business booms!