Small businesses are the backbone of the economy and the community, and many small business owners feel like they have to do it all. It’s easy to understand this with employees’ livelihoods on your shoulders and balancing a budget, but never forget how valuable your time is, too, both intrinsically and in terms of labor hours! That’s why IT outsourcing for small businesses just makes sense.
Internal Department or Outsourcing?
Multimillion and billion-dollar corporations can afford to staff departments for every conceivable need, from cleaning and security to IT. But when you have a small office and a small staff, people tend to wear more than one hat. However, every head has its limits, and every day has a limited number of hours.
As a business owner, you need to notice your and your employees’ strengths and recognize what tasks get you the best return on investment. That means outsourcing some tasks will make your business more profitable. But how do you decide what makes the most sense to outsource?
Skills + Hours
Some of the most important questions to ask before deciding what to outsource revolve around ability and time. If you have an employee who is great at landscaping and has the time to do it, it may make sense not to hire a landscaper. On the other hand, if you have a large property and landscaping will take that employee more than an hour or two, hiring a landscaper is likely the wiser choice.
Likewise, with IT outsourcing, if you have an employee who is good at IT work and you only have a few employees, that employee may be able to be in your IT department, provided that employee has a lot of time on their hands.
What Do You Love?
Another reason to do something internally is if you love to do it. Continuing with the landscaping example, I know a millionaire who mows his own lawn. It takes hours, but he loves to do it!
With your business, you likely can’t spend hours on a project like weekly, but if you love beautifying your property, and it’s part of the appeal of owning a business, you may want to be hands-on with the landscape design. Regarding IT outsourcing, I frankly don’t know anyone who isn’t in IT who loves spending time fixing tech problems!
Price
It’s worth noting that even though those billion-dollar corporations we mentioned earlier can staff their own departments, it doesn’t mean they do. Smart business people understand the equation. And many of those corporations outsource everything from cleaning and security to (sadly) firing people.
They make the same decisions smaller businesses do.
Reasons for IT Outsourcing
With all the general factors to consider when choosing whether to outsource a particular service or department out of the way, let’s get to the point. Is IT outsourcing right for you? Though we may be slightly biased, we think that outsourcing IT to RCI is, in more cases than not, the right decision for your business.
Outsourcing IT Gets It Done Right
RCI has been in the IT business for longer than it was called IT! We’ve been providing IT solutions for Roanoke, Lynchburg, and the rest of Virginia for almost 50 years.
With all the experience comes expertise. Computers, surveillance, and telephone systems are complex, and while you can get YouTube to teach you how to do anything these days, it’s not going to cover everything, and it’s not the most efficient way to learn!
When you hire the IT experts at RCI, we’ll solve your problem right the first time.
Outsourcing IT Saves You Time
Since we know what we’re doing, IT Outsourcing also means we save you a lot of time. You don’t need to micromanage RCI technicians. Once you point us to a problem or tell us about something new that you need, we are already on the way to fulfilling your needs.
IT Ourcing Saves You Money
Perhaps the most surprising benefit of outsourcing IT (or anything else) is that it saves you money. Any time you spend away from your business’s specialty is time you can’t bill or time you’re not spending selling. We often think we save money by doing something ourselves, but let’s examine that.
Workers waste an average of 3 hours per week dealing with IT issues. How much time would it save if everything worked?
Worse, what if you have a real stumper? Let’s say you can’t make outgoing calls. An employee needs to find the manual (or look it up online), troubleshoot the issue, try multiple solutions, and if you’re lucky, they may figure it out in 4 hours. If that’s an hourly employee who makes $20/hour, that’s $80 wasted.
But it’s worse than that. It’s also time that employee wasn’t making your company money. And the problem may not even be solved! That means you could also be missing additional business from customer phone calls! If you have a smaller company and you did yourself, how much time and money do you waste?
Call the Experts
If your company is large enough to have a full time IT department, than having them handle all of your IT needs makes sense, though they may still need specialized help for some equipment and services such telephones and surveillance.
But if you are like most companies, outsourcing IT to a company like RCI will save you time and money and ensure your critical infrastructure is in good working condition.
