In any kind of team investment environment such as real estate, having an Information Technology expert is critical to success. There are many talented people who have degrees in computer science and whom I would never work with because they lack necessary business skills that I look for. The days of having an IT consultant who does not have any understanding of businesses are long gone. If your IT help does not have any business or investment training whatsoever, do not spend any time vetting them and move on. Here are two examples of what I now use to see if they have a basic understanding of the business side of the internet

1) If your IT team member is unable to install a widget on a website they are overseeing, they need to be fired immediately!  Widgets (such as what we have with Ratehub’s Mortgage rates) are fairly standard with any WordPress application and have been since approximately 2003. Not understanding widgets or being unable to install them on a website currently in use is comparable to not upgrading your mobile phone over the past decade!

2) If your IT member is building you a blog, have them present you a purely business case as to why they are using WordPress, Joomla or Drupal for the site. These are three most popular blogging formats with WordPress overseeing approximately 20% of the internet. If you are not using any of these very popular current formats, have your IT member thoroughly explain to you from both a technical and business perspective why they are not leveraging the most modern technologies available to developers today.

Before someone meets you today, chances are they have gone to your website and already evaluated you based on that impression. A loss in a joint venture or other business opportunity could result because of your IT consultant’s deficient and potentially outdated skillset.