or: Penny Smart, Pound Foolish
There is an age-old problem when it comes to small businesses and technology: small business owners have a hard time finding value in paying for IT services to support their businesses, and they spend a lot of money not addressing the issue. For a wide variety of reasons, small business owners just seem to have a hard time justifying the costs of outsourced and/or managed IT services. Strangely, many business owners end up spend more money and time trying NOT to outsource – they just won’t acknowledge this reality.
Let’s consider that a business has been operating for a few years, and maybe has revenues approaching $1M annually. A million dollars in annual revenues isn’t anything to sneeze at. Now let’s also consider that this small business has a small computer network which supports their operations. This network is likely made up of older machines, legacy desktop software, and a few random little applications or software constructions they’ve acquired over the years. Is this business focused in properly securing the network with firewalls and security software, and is this portion of the network monitored regularly? How about data management and backups? Does the business frequently back up data offsite, and then test those backups to verify that the data can be properly restored? Is the system protected from virus or intrusions? Is it monitored? Is it tested? Is someone actually responsible for all of this stuff? If this business is like most small businesses, the answer to most of these questions is “no” or “not really”.
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Most small business owners are not specialists in every aspect of their business. Or most of skills small business owners gain to run a small business they pick up along the way. So, you’ll find business owners unable and at times, unwilling to grasp the cost-effectiveness of maintaining and updating their data and IT support, particularly if they don’t see the immediate return or savings. There’s more of a disconnect between what is needed and what is needed right now. I think we can agree that our IT solutions are definitely near and dear to our businesses, to support its overall operations. However, is this business’ perspective a start up, again, thinking about what is needed now or is this business growing thinking about what is generally needed?