When Should You Consider Outsourcing Your IT Needs?

As businesses grow, they inevitably reach a point when they need to consider outsourcing IT. Eventually, it no longer works to call up your younger sister, who is really good at computers, or call in yet another favor with your buddy who helped you set up your router.

Or maybe your business has in-house IT, but there are reasons why that’s breaking down.

As businesses scale, outsourcing IT is needed. But outsourcing IT is also an important step in the lifecycle of businesses that have an internal team for IT as well. In this blog, we’re talking about 7 reasons you might want to outsource your IT.

Spending Too Much Time On IT

When you started or purchased your small business, you likely did so because you were skilled at a thing. From the private practice dentist to the boutique owner, you have a skill, trade, service, or good you offer that should be taking up the majority of your time.

Or maybe you manage your team or oversee operations, and that’s where your role is. Excelling at that thing is your main competitive advantage.

Regardless, if a small business owner or key staff are spending time troubleshooting instead of doing their jobs, it’s time for outsourcing IT.

Don’t spend another afternoon wanting to throw your point of sale system across the room as you try to figure out what’s wrong.

Small businesses waste way too much time and revenue trying to resolve problems when an IT tech could solve them in minutes. If you had a good relationship with an IT tech, then you’d have the peace of mind of knowing you could call them, and they’d be able to solve the issue before you missed out on any clients or potential revenue.

Small Business Hardware Costs

Lots of small businesses might start with one person and one laptop. But as you scale and grow, hardware costs can become a real issue.

What happens when your business has to replace 10 desktops all at once?

Or what happens with medium-sized businesses when they have to update 200 computers around the same time?

Hardware Costs as an Operational Cost and Not a Capital Expenditure

Outsourcing IT can actually be a surprising solution to hardware costs. Some IT companies (including ABQ-IT) include replacing hardware in their pricing for managed IT services, so replacing hardware becomes a part of the operational costs instead of capital expenditure.

If hardware costs are feeling overwhelming, ask around to managed IT companies and ask how/if they include hardware costs in their packages. You may be surprised to find managed IT is surprisingly affordable and a much better alternative to taking out a business loan to replace hardware all at once.

Staffing Costs

If you have in-house IT, we understand it’s valuable to be able to provide jobs. But if your business needs to cut costs, IT might be a place to do it.

An in-house IT team member has a high salary, and depending on the size of your business and its needs, they might be getting that high salary just to be on standby in case of emergency. Do an audit of how your IT staff are spending their time. It’s there is a lot of idle time, outsourcing is a great solution.

Outsourcing your IT may allow you to save money while keeping the expertise level high. The right IT company will make you and your team feel cared for on an individual level without having to keep someone on payroll to do it. They’ll build a working relationship with your team, your systems, and your procedures, so they know exactly how to help when problems arise.

Another Note on Staffing Costs and IT

Aside from staffing costs of IT professionals, we know many companies are currently reducing staffing costs with remote work. Allowing staff to work remotely saves on office space costs, helps employees be more productive, and allows businesses to hire in markets with lower wages.

But remote work can also create more tech issues, which is another reason to hire managed IT services. With remote workers, you may end up with more IT tickets that would be overwhelming to your current IT staff.

Specialized Skillsets

There are plenty of in-house IT staff out there that do an excellent job. But, if you’ve ever run into a situation (or multiple situations) when your in-house IT staff was in over their heads, it may be time to consider managed services for IT.

One advantage of hiring managed services is that they come up with solutions for a wide variety of customers every day. Because of this, they are exposed to more problems, and therefore have to come up with more inventive solutions than the average in-house IT staff.

Additionally, when you start outsourcing, you’re likely gaining access to a team of professionals. So even if a problem stumps one person on the team, likely someone else on the team has an easy solution for it.

As Steve Jobs said,

“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”

Cybersecurity Breaches in Small Businesses

If your company has recently experienced a cybersecurity breach, there is no better time for outsourcing providers. There’s nothing like a cybersecurity breach to put things into perspective—the perspective that any savings you’ve had from not prioritizing cybersecurity have not been worth it. And the many benefits of being preventative about cybersecurity are too many to count.

Even if you haven’t yet experienced a cybersecurity breach, consider what your business would do if:

• Your business experienced revenue loss due to ransomware, lost time where employees can’t be doing what they need to do, or POS system or website down resulting in lost sales?
• Your brand suffered because of the breach, and you lost the trust of your customers?
• You lost intellectual property? Small businesses sometimes think they’re immune to this one because they don’t think their intellectual property is as desirable as that of a larger business, but actually, they’re much more vulnerable to cyber attack.
• Your business had to deal with the additional costs of PR, legal fees, and insurance premium hikes?

Avoid all of these unfortunate outcomes of cyberattacks by hiring a managed IT service provider to get ahead of your cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

High Potential of Cost Savings from Reducing Operational Costs

If your business is in the troubling place of needing new hardware and not being able to afford it, you might not be considering the operational costs. Outdated hardware and infrastructure can cost a lot of money daily when your staff can’t do their best work. Slow computers and other hardware create serious inefficiencies.

Still, if you can’t spring for a whole hardware refresh and don’t want to go into debt over it either, the right IT company can include new hardware in the fixed costs of ongoing IT services. As we mentioned above, when you can consider hardware as an operational cost instead of a capital expenditure, it can feel more attainable.

It’s Not a Core Competency

There is no shame in allowing your business to focus on what it does best. If information technology isn’t a core competency, there is no reason to keep it in-house! Outsourcing providers allows your team to focus on what they do best.

And when you have tech issues, your team will know exactly who to call if you have managed services.

Should You Consider Small Business IT Outsourcing?

Are any of these reasons to outsource your IT support jumping off the screen at you? Give ABQ-IT a call! We have a unique take on managed IT, which we shared a lot about in a recent blog.

Unlike other IT companies, ABQ-IT truly includes all your IT needs on one low-cost, per-user monthly payment. We include computer support, hardware, firewall and server protection, cloud services, cybersecurity, and disaster recovery. Stop paying several different companies for these services, and stop doing IT in-house if it’s not a core competency.

Give us a call at ABQ-IT at (505)582-5683 to learn how we can help your business have peace of mind with all things tech-related.