As a small business owner, you’re an expert in your chosen field. However, you’re probably not an IT expert. You need to focus on your core business, but hiring an in-house IT team can get expensive, considering the average cost of onboarding a new employee is more than $4,000. You’re dependent on technology to run your operations, so you can’t ignore your IT needs, but you also cannot handle them alone. There’s an easy answer – outsourcing. When you outsource IT services, you have more time to focus on what you do best.
More than a third of small businesses currently outsource at least some of their operations. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 37% use a technology solutions partner for their IT needs.
It’s about efficiency, expertise, and cost control. Outsourcing allows you to get more done while you delegate important tasks and processes to trusted professionals without having to grow your full-time team in a significant way. Here are some great reasons to outsource your IT service and support.
Control Costs
Establishing and maintaining an in-house IT department is well beyond the means of most growing businesses. You can’t achieve the economies of scale that an outsourced IT service can.
Focus
You have a core activity, which is running and growing your business. This requires focus, especially in a start-up situation. You and your staff must fully engage in that activity. Unfortunately, activities like IT services can feel like a distraction, which means they often get neglected.
IT outsourcing lets you bring all of your attention to customer service, increasing sales, improving quality, and innovation. Remember: Survival of your business may depend on your ability to focus on what’s important.
Cyber Security
A 2019 study by Keeper Security and the Ponemon Institute discovered that the number of small and medium-sized businesses that experienced data breaches increased to 63% in 2019 from 58% in 2018.
Maintaining data security as cyberattacks and threats evolve is a significant challenge for any business, big or small. New skills and tools are required to defend from attacks that could shut down your business.
Cybersecurity expertise is challenging to achieve on a small scale, and keeping up-to-date with the latest tools and techniques is difficult. Therefore, outsourced IT services recruit and retain talent and continuously train and support them.
Knowledge Transfer
Keeping up-to-date with technological developments can make you feel like you’re running in circles. You train your people, technology moves on, and you have to do it again.
Using an outsourced IT service means you can take advantage of opportunities for knowledge transfer. Your IT services provider keeps you current and can train your staff when needed.
Handle Unusual Problems
Outsourced IT services providers are likely to have a wide range of experience and call on diverse skills, experience, and knowledge. They develop expertise by working with a range of clients with different challenges and opportunities.
Manage Risks and Disaster Recovery
What if you lose all of your client data? What if your server goes down? What if your phone system fails? The risk to your business could be pretty significant.
Do you even know the IT risks facing your business?
Failure of your e-commerce operation could mean that your sales grind to a halt, and a loss in data security could represent a risk to your reputation or even litigation.
IT risk management can be supplied by an outsourced IT service. Recovering from a catastrophic technology breakdown takes resources and expertise that only an expert can provide.
Human Resources
Creating and maintaining an in-house IT team is a human resource challenge. The recruitment process alone requires technical understanding and internal resources you probably don’t have on staff. IT outsourcing and consulting for small businesses help overcome the HR challenge accompanying IT.
Stay Current
Technology changes quickly, and your competitors are eager to get the latest to win a competitive advantage. Are you competing on level ground?
Outsourcing IT services can give you access to these developments and help you keep up.
Outsource Your IT For Small-Business Success
For your IT investments to drive success and deliver the most value to your business, your IT support provider needs to cover every piece of the Framework for Successful IT and do it well.
We offer complete IT Outsourcing and Managed Services to keep your business productive and secure.
Contact our team to learn more about our approach to successful IT and how the right IT outsourcing solution can drive productivity and value across your business.