If your computers have been showing a black screen or crashing after a recent Windows update, there is a fix out now. Microsoft pushed a patch for a Windows 11 bug that was causing Explorer to crash and leaving people staring at a black screen.

An Update Broke It, Another Update Fixed It

This is exactly the kind of thing that shows up and makes people nervous about keeping their computers updated. A security update introduced a bug, and now there is an update to fix the update. That is just how this works sometimes.

And I know that feels frustrating. But the answer is not to stop updating. Security updates have to keep coming, even when they occasionally introduce a problem like this. Falling behind on updates creates a much bigger risk than a temporary bug.

Stay Current, Even When It Is Annoying

We track this stuff so our clients do not have to worry about it. When a bug like this surfaces, we know about it. When the fix drops, we push it. That is the whole point.

If you are managing your own machines, make sure Windows Update is running and that this latest patch gets installed. Do not let it sit.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Central Florida.

Microsoft just took down a major phishing tool marketplace that was supplying criminals with kits to target US businesses. That is good news. One less big operation out there means slightly safer inboxes for all of us.

But I want to be honest with you: something like this gets replaced fast. Phishing kits are the kind of thing that AI is just going to make easier to spin up anyway. So while I appreciate Microsoft going after these people, I would not relax your guard based on this alone.

The Threat These Tools Were Built to Exploit

These kits were designed to target Microsoft 365, the same platform most of you are running right now. The way this attack works is not complicated. You get an email that looks like it came from your boss, or a colleague, or a vendor. It says something like, hey, change where you’re sending that payment. And because it looks like it came from inside your own system, people trust it.

One US investment firm lost $1.5 million from a single email. One wire transfer. Gone. And these are people who should absolutely know better. If it can happen to them, it can happen to a 10-person service business or a small manufacturer who is just trying to get through the week.

The Real Problem Is Default Settings and Untrained People

A lot of small businesses are running Microsoft 365 with the default security settings, and the defaults are not good enough. That is not Microsoft shaming, that is just reality. The platform has the tools. Most people just never turn them on.

And then there is the human side. This is not purely a technical problem. Your team has to know what a phishing email looks like. They have to know that if something feels off about a payment request or a change in instructions, they pick up the phone and verify it in person. Do not trust an email. Do not even trust a camera, because those can be faked too.

What to Actually Do About This

Start here, right now, before anything else:

• Turn on multi-factor authentication for every Microsoft 365 account in your business. If you do not have that on, you are at serious risk. Full stop.
• Talk to your IT provider about whether your 365 environment is configured correctly. There are settings outside the Microsoft defaults that make a real difference.
• Train your team to recognize phishing emails. This does not have to be complicated, but it has to happen.
• If you are in financial services or any regulated industry, some of this is not optional. There are standards you are required to meet, and ignoring them creates legal exposure on top of the financial risk.

You are not going to be perfect. Nobody is. Because it is a human problem as much as a technical one. But getting the basics right closes the door on a lot of these attacks before they ever get close to your bank account.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Central Florida.

A US investment firm just lost $1.5 million because of a phishing scam that ran through Microsoft 365. And honestly, the fact that it was an investment firm makes it worse. Those people should know way better than to let this happen.

But here is the part that matters for you: the platform involved is the same one that most of you are using right now. Every day. To run your business.

How This Actually Works

The attackers got into the Microsoft 365 email environment and manipulated communications to redirect a payment. That is it. They did not need to blow through some sophisticated firewall. They just changed where the money was supposed to go.

This technique works precisely because people trust email that looks like it came from inside their own company. You get a message that looks like it came from your boss, or a colleague, saying hey, change this payment, send it here instead of there. And people do it.

If you get an email like that, get up and walk down the hall. Talk to that person face to face. And do not think a video call makes it safe, because they can fake that too.

The Settings Problem Nobody Talks About

Something I see constantly: most small businesses are running Microsoft 365 with minimal security settings. The defaults are not enough. They were never enough.

At Advanced Computer Solutions, we configure 365 correctly from the start, and we have staff training available on top of that. If you are in financial services, you are probably legally required to have some of this in place. I know nobody wants to hear that, but the regulations exist for a reason.

One email caused a million and a half dollars in damage. That is not a technology problem alone. It is a human problem. The technical settings reduce your exposure, but your team still has to know what to look for.

What to Do Right Now

Start here, in this order:

• Turn on multi-factor authentication for every Microsoft 365 account. If you do not have MFA turned on, you are at serious risk. Full stop.
• Train your team to recognize phishing emails. Can they spot a fake? Do they know what to do when something looks off? If you are not sure, that is your answer.
• Talk to your IT provider about your 365 configuration. Ask them specifically what security settings are enabled and what tools they have to check your exposure.

You are not going to be perfect. This is a human problem as much as a technical one. But there is no excuse for skipping the basics when one wire transfer can cost you everything.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Traverse City & Northern Michigan.

I read through a story about small businesses bringing their real AI wins to Capitol Hill, and honestly, the article itself was a pretty shallow dive. But the idea behind it is solid, and it got me thinking about what I’m actually seeing in my own work.

The greatest value AI brings to smaller businesses is the ability to move faster. That is so totally true. I’ve lived it.

The Document Thing Alone Is Worth It

I recently took a scanned copy of a seven-year-old paper shipping document and used AI to turn it into a fully editable Excel file in about a minute. That same job would have taken an hour to recreate manually. One minute versus one hour. And that is barely scratching the surface of what this stuff can do.

I also heard a story about a contractor whose team member said they’d love to have a certain report. Literally two minutes later, another team member came back and said, here it is. How did you get that? Used the AI on the documents. That’s it. That’s the whole story. And that’s a real win.

The Spreadsheet Problem Has a Real Fix Now

I’m talking to clients right now who are running their entire business on giant Excel spreadsheets and struggling with it, because spreadsheets aren’t databases. Multiple people can’t edit at the same time, reporting is a mess, data integrity is a coin flip.

With AI, you can take that spreadsheet, plug it in, and say create a database for this with all the user interface I need. Now you’ve got a full database. Multiple people can edit it at the same time. You can get real reporting out of it. You can build in data integrity checks. You can do AI stuff with it. That is a completely different business operation than what you had before.

If all you’re doing with AI is saving a few minutes here and there, that’s fine, that’s great. But you can go so much deeper than that.

What to Actually Do With This

Ask your team what manual process slows them down the most. Then look at your tools and find out what’s already been automated that you’re not using. A lot of the newer cloud-based tools are adding AI right into the product. I was cleaning something up in QuickBooks and paid a little extra for the AI feature. It paid for itself in about two minutes.

• Find one recurring task in your business that follows a predictable pattern and research whether a low-cost automation or AI tool can handle it.
• If you’ve got old paper documents you’re still working around, test an AI on one of them this week.
• If you’re running a business on a spreadsheet, that’s worth a real conversation about what a proper database setup could do for you.

Give me a call and I can walk you through a lot of what’s working right now.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Traverse City & Northern Michigan.

This one is for my manufacturers. The Army has reopened a $50 billion contract opportunity, and it is exclusively for small business teams. Companies with 100 employees or less. That means you.

As far as I know, small business set-asides have always been a thing in federal contracting. But this one is worth paying attention to, and I want to make sure my manufacturing friends in Michigan and Florida are aware of it and actually do something with it.

This Is Not a Solo Competition

What I found interesting about this one is the teaming angle. This is not just one company winning a big contract and going it alone. Small businesses are meant to collaborate here, package up work together, and go after it as a team. So if you have always assumed federal contracting was somebody else’s game, that changes things a little. It is no longer a competitive situation between you and the shop down the road. It is a team USA situation.

Talk to other manufacturers in your network. If you know companies that complement what you do, this is worth a conversation.

My Family Has Been in This World

My family has a long history of working with the Department of Defense, making sure small businesses built the right things to the right specifications for Uncle Sam. So this is not abstract to me. I know this world exists, I know small businesses can do real work in it, and I know it is worth a serious look if you are a manufacturer.

Where to Start

You do not have to figure this out alone, and you do not have to pay someone to help you get started. There are free resources built exactly for this:

• Contact your local PTAC (Procurement Technical Assistance Center). They provide free help to small businesses trying to get into government contracting.
• Look up your local Small Business Development Center (SBDC). Same idea, free assistance.
• Try America.gov to find the right agency or office faster.

If you have questions and want to talk through it, reach out to me. I will share what I know and point you in the right direction.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Traverse City & Northern Michigan.

Technology is opening real doors for small businesses right now, and one of the biggest is the ability to scale without adding people. I want to be clear: I’m not saying nobody’s getting hired. I’m saying the hiring is shifting. Administrative, low-value, low-brain-power work is getting automated, and the people you do bring on can go toward sales, marketing, and things that actually move the needle.

I’m living this right now at Advanced Computer Solutions. My whole system is tied together. All the tools, all the reporting, everything talking to each other. It should have been like that decades ago, but now it is, and the difference is real.

What “Scale Without Size” Actually Looks Like

My staff has less to do than they ever did, and that’s not a bad thing. Part of it is using AI tools to their full potential. Part of it is automations running in the background that used to require a person to just click OK. There’s no reason for somebody to click an OK button when the computer can do it just as well, and better.

What I’m calling agentic automation is closing tickets that couldn’t be closed through a standard automation before. The decision the AI is making is inconsequential to liability or uptime, so why not let it make that call? It’s the same thing every time. Let the machine do it.

I can now run a full business review by telling one AI to run the review. It grabs all the information, puts it together, and saves me dozens of hours over the course of a year. I’m estimating around 500 hours of recurring tasks that follow a predictable pattern. That’s a tremendous amount of time freed up.

The Open-Source Shift Is Real, and It’s Saving Money

Here’s what’s changed for me specifically: because AI is now solid enough to manage open-source tools, I’m comfortable moving away from expensive commercial software. I’m already partway through replacing our billing software, our CRM, and our marketing tools with software we built or configured ourselves. I’m moving our endpoint detection to open-source tools and seeing better results than I was getting from the commercial options. Backup tools are next.

The only category I’m holding tight on right now is user monitoring tools, things that watch for impossible logins and flag when an account opens in two places at once. Everything else is on the table.

What does that mean financially? I think the savings on tooling costs alone will be in the tens of thousands of dollars for us over the next year. The AI can maintain these open-source tools in a way that makes them more reliable, more flexible, and easier to manage than what I was paying big bucks for commercially.

What You Can Do With Your Own Tools Right Now

I recently used AI to transform a scanned copy of a seven-year-old paper shipping document into a fully editable Excel file in about a minute. That would have taken an hour to recreate manually. That’s a real win, but honestly, it barely scratches the surface.

I’ve got clients running their whole business on a giant Excel spreadsheet and struggling with it because spreadsheets aren’t databases. You can take that spreadsheet, plug it into an AI, and say create a database for this with all the user interface I need. Now multiple people can edit it at the same time, you get real reporting, you can add data integrity checks, and you can build AI workflows on top of it. That’s a completely different business operation, and it doesn’t require buying enterprise software.

I also just rolled out Rocketbot to my team as our shared AI platform. It connects to Microsoft tools, handles programming tasks, integrates with email and file storage, and doesn’t require you to think about which model you’re running. It’s easy to train, and now my team is building their own tools with it. That’s where I want every small business to get to.

If you want to start moving in this direction, here’s what I’d suggest:

• Ask your team what manual process slows them down the most.
• Look at your existing tools and check whether that process is already automatable. If you’re using newer cloud-based tools, the AI features are probably already in there.
• List out recurring tasks in your business that follow a predictable pattern and research whether a low-cost visual tool or automation platform can handle them.
• If you’re not sure where to start, give me a call. I can tell you a lot about what’s working right now.

Questions about how this affects your setup? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with you.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Chicagoland.

Let’s get into it.

Or watch on YouTube.

Scaling Without Hiring — What That Actually Looks Like

The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council put out a piece this week on using AI to grow without adding staff — scheduling, invoicing, customer follow-ups, workflow management. I want to talk about this one from the inside, because we’re doing it here, not just reading about it.

The shift I’m seeing isn’t that AI replaces people. It’s that AI eliminates the work that never should have been someone’s job in the first place. You know the stuff I mean — clicking the OK button on a ticket that has the same resolution every single time. Pulling a report that follows the exact same steps every month. Making a decision that carries zero real liability but still required a human to sit there and make it. That’s not skilled work. That’s a workflow waiting to be automated.

What we’ve done at ACS is wire everything together — all the tools, all the reporting — so that I can ask one AI to run a business review, and it goes and gets the information, assembles it, and hands it back to me. That used to eat a serious chunk of hours. Now it doesn’t. Multiply that across a year and you’re talking about a meaningful amount of time returned to the business.

The other thing worth saying out loud: my staff isn’t doing less meaningful work. They’re doing more of it. The agentic automations handle the repetitive clicks. The people handle the judgment calls. That’s the right division of labor, and it took AI to finally get there.

If you want a starting point, ask your team one question: what manual process slows you down most? Then look at whatever tool you’re already paying for and find out if it already has an automation or AI feature you haven’t turned on yet. A lot of them do. I was using QuickBooks the other day to clean something up, and the AI inside it paid for itself in about two minutes of actual work. That’s not a sales pitch for QuickBooks — it’s just what happened.

The Llama Box and What Open-Source AI Actually Costs

I built what I’m calling the Llama box here in the office — our own private, internal AI running on local hardware, completely behind our firewall. Open-source models, no data leaving the building, no subscription to a cloud service that may or may not be reading your inputs. The hardware is a machine with an RTX 3090, 24 gigs of VRAM, which is enough to run some decently capable large language models.

Alert readers will notice I said “I spent more on hardware than I’ll ever recover in subscription savings.” That’s true. I’m not going to pretend this is a cost play — it’s a control play. Everything that goes into that box stays in that box. For an IT company handling client data, that matters a lot.

What I didn’t expect is how much it would change my appetite for open-source software across the board. When you have a solid AI in the background that can manage and maintain an open-source tool, the calculus changes. I’m now in the process of replacing our billing software, our CRM, our endpoint detection — moving toward open-source alternatives that the AI can keep running. The only commercial category I’m holding onto for now is the user-monitoring tools, the impossible-login detection, that kind of thing. Everything else is on the table.

I’m also running Rocketbot for the team. I looked at Claude’s Teams tier and the math didn’t work — when you move to Teams, you lose the higher usage tier, and that runs out fast when you’re putting in real hours with it. So I kept my own Claude account at the higher level and pushed the team into Rocketbot instead. It connects to Word, Excel, OneDrive, email — mostly Microsoft ecosystem stuff — and the team is now building their own tools inside it. We’re about to launch the first internally built tool that I didn’t build. That’s a milestone worth noting.

$50 Billion Army Contract — Small Business Teams Only

Washington Technology flagged this one: the Army has opened a $50 billion contract opportunity that’s exclusively set aside for small business teams, companies with 100 employees or fewer.

Small business set-asides aren’t new — they’ve been part of federal contracting for a long time. But $50 billion is a number worth paying attention to, and the teaming angle here is interesting. This isn’t structured as one company winning a giant contract. It’s designed for small businesses to collaborate and package up work together. If you’re a small manufacturer in Michigan or Florida and you’ve always assumed federal contracting was someone else’s game, this is worth a serious look.

My family has a long history working with the Department of Defense — quality work, tight specs, small businesses doing real things for Uncle Sam. I have a lot of respect for that work, and I want my manufacturing clients to know this door is open.

The place to start is your local PTAC — Procurement Technical Assistance Center — or your Small Business Development Center (SBDC). Both provide free help navigating federal contracting. A quick web search for your state’s PTAC will turn up the right office near you. And if you’ve got other small manufacturers in your network, now’s the time to have a conversation about teaming. This one is worth the phone call.

Real AI Wins — And What’s Still Just Scratching the Surface

The US Chamber of Commerce brought small business owners to Capitol Hill this week to share AI success stories. I read through the coverage, and the examples are real — they’re just modest. The one that stuck with me: a team member says “I’d love to have this report,” and two minutes later another team member comes back with it, pulled together using AI on existing documents. The room is apparently stunned.

That’s a genuine win. I’m not dismissing it. But I want to be honest with you — that’s the shallow end of the pool.

The deeper end looks like this: you’ve got a seven-year-old paper shipping document sitting in a filing cabinet. You scan it, hand it to an AI, and get back a fully editable Excel file in about a minute. That same task done manually takes an hour. Or: you’ve got a giant Excel spreadsheet that your whole operation runs on, and it’s buckling because spreadsheets aren’t databases. You hand that spreadsheet to an AI, tell it to build a proper database with a user interface, and now multiple people can edit it simultaneously, you’ve got real reporting, data integrity checks, and room to grow. That’s not a future scenario. That’s something you could do this week.

The Chamber piece is fine for what it is — a signal that small businesses are already in this, not waiting. But if a senator asked me for my AI success story, I’d skip the polished testimony and just show them the before and after on a real workflow. That tends to land better than a fact sheet.

Anyway. The tools are real, the savings are real, and the businesses figuring this out now are going to be running leaner and faster than the ones who wait. That’s not alarm — it’s just arithmetic.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with me. Go build something. — Albert

Questions about anything we covered today? Schedule a free IT consultation and we’ll walk through it with your business in mind.

Wherever your team is based, ACS provides hands-on managed IT support — see how we help businesses in Traverse City & Northern Michigan.