Power Surge

Of course, some small businesses have been slow to embrace technology. Sheree Thomas, president of Smoke Busters of Texas Inc., has grown her Cedar Park odor-elimination service to six people in six years without the benefit of anything more than a fax machine, pager, cell phone and a single PC which, she confesses, she uses mostly for playing solitaire.

"Right now I don't even have Internet access," says Thomas. "But I hate to admit that. I feel so backward." Thomas says she intends to get e-mail soon to communicate with a company that's marketing a smoke-cleansing product she invented, and she may consider putting up a Web site to help franchise her company.

The study found entrepreneurs as a group are lagging behind big businesses in networking their computers--only three in 10 firms have LANs, and just 10 percent of those without LANs are planning to install them in the next year. In addition, many entrepreneurs lack internal e-mail--just 23 percent have it. And only 32 percent of those with Web sites are taking precautions to protect the sites' integrity.

For many relatively low-tech entrepreneurs, lack of gadgetry is a personal preference. Jane Wesman, president of Jane Wesman Public Relations Inc. in New York City, got e-mail for her six employees a little more than a year ago and still asks employees to use paper planners and keep their addresses in a desktop card file.

Paper-based information can't be lost in system crashes and disk failures, contends Wesman. And, for her purposes, she considers a low-tech system faster. "It takes me one second to look up a name in my Rolodex," she says. "I don't have to close one program and open another to get it."

But while entrepreneurs may differ in their levels of devotion to technology, the general trend is clear. Nearly four in 10 surveyed said they plan to buy new PCs in the next year. And nearly half the owners who use the Internet at work feel they're not taking full advantage of its business potential.

This article was originally published in the November 1998 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Power Surge.