Don’t Spend Money Where You Don’t Have To

If you are a company with less than 100 employees you’re probably struggling with the IT infrastructure. It doesn’t do what you want it to do, but you can’t justify hiring more people to make it work the way you want.

Why are you wrestling with this problem? It’s not your area of expertise or interest, but you know that your company couldn’t survive without it. So OUTSOURCE it! Let somebody who likes the challenge and is good at it take those headaches away.

I just had a conversation with a CEO of a small company with an in-house, managed technology infrastructure. He was complaining he can’t get his IT guy to do the little things that need to be taken care of like giving a new PC to a new employee. There’s a double whammy: a new employee that’s not productive and an IT guy that you’re paying to help get employees productive.

I asked him what he was paying for the IT in his company and he didn’t know, but he knew that he was paying his IT guy about $60K. I looked at him and said, “Why are you spending your money that way?” He has less than 50 people that use PC’s and can outsource the entire infrastructure support including PCs and servers for less than $100/month/user.

That comes out to less than what he’s paying for one guy who’s not doing the job and he gets a whole company that is dedicated, trained and has incentive to provide him with the level of support he wants and expects.

The SMB Challenge

The challenge that most small companies have is they built their infrastructure over several years and have never looked at where they’re at today versus where they’ve come from. The rest of the company is typically focused on building product and value where IT is just the foundation on which all that building and value rests. This organic growth of companies leaves them little time to sit back and reflect on the foundations of the growth.

One day when the server crashes and it takes a week to get back online, they realize they have a problem, but the IT guy is working is tail off to get things back to normal, when normal is not where they want to be. They need a solid, stable, secure foundation on which to grow the company to the next level. Most companies don’t understand how much they rely on the technology to get through each day. It’s become ubiquitous and they don’t take notice of it until it’s not there.

Step back and look at what you’re doing. By now you’ve outsourced your payroll so people get paid the right amount on time. You’ve maybe outsourced your sales process management to somebody like SalesForce.com or Microsoft. Why aren’t you outsourcing the other pieces of business process like IT support to somebody who knows what they’re doing across a wide range of company sizes?

Outsourcers have the experienced staff to solve problems quickly. They can help you put together a disaster recovery plan. They can help you protect your valuable information assets from theft and hackers. Your single IT guy can’t do that no matter how smart or hard working he or she is. Get them some help.

If the IT person has the right stuff, they’ll welcome the help and work on getting the right kind of partner in place. They can off load all those daily crisis projects on somebody else and focus on getting the truly business-value enhancing projects done. If they fear this kind of change, perhaps it’s because they fear loss of control. Tell them it’s not about loss of control, but gaining more control over more resources and lots more influence in the company’s future.