Boston IT support consultant, Craig Raubenheimer, talks about how having a tech support team in your business can make your productivity increase large amounts. Without worrying about your computer losing all of your work and easily communicating with other co-workers, your business will have the time to grow and take in more money. Talk a look at what he advises.
That’s a great question. Typically when we first engage with a new business that hasn’t had any sort of formal IT support or professional service company behind them, there’s a culture that’s been bred and that culture’s typically – the business owner’s saying “don’t call Mr. IT until you have to. Figure it out.” Who knows the amount of time and productivity that every employee has been absorbing. It would be quite fascinating to mark out and see what those numbers were but people can spend an awful lot of time just trying to figure out and update on a machine, or why they can’t print, or why they can’t access a piece of software, etc. It’s usually when we engage with those early state clients that we find out that there’s this culture of – I’m afraid to raise my hand and then what you usually find is that there’s an instant floodgate of support requests. Then we have to sort of communicate back to the business owner that this is typically what’s going to happen to you. You’re going to get an influx of calls and we will help you to manage that. Obviously people are working on budgets and we are aware of that. We will work with a new client to help them understand what can happen and manage expectations from the employees and what our service can provide and how we can support them.
What usually happens is there’s a culture that’s inbred into the company when it’s small so that proliferates through as it starts to grow. Even the business owner might say “we don’t need IT to keep us running because I’ve done so from when we were two or three employees to when we were ten or fifteen or twenty.” The reality is that you have to look at how much time each person is spending fixing or trying to resolve issues. Having people rely on themselves to update their spyware or antivirus as an example. That culture is there and again I think it usually works around where there’s a tipping point and that usually is when something happens, there’s a change or a realization that we can’t be as a company maintaining our infrastructure. We need to be focusing on our core business. It’s usually when there’s a challenge or something happens and that triggers the mindset to change where they need to seek outside help.
By not having an IT team working with you, losing information is at huge risks. Check out this article titled, Optimizing IT Services: Eliminate downtime costs for your business! It talks about how IT services can help you make more money without technology issues.