Sean Wallbridge
If there’s one thing small business owners like, it’s doing things for themselves. After all, not only did they start their own companies, but many have learned that working as your own bookkeeper, salesperson, or even janitor can be a great way to save on billable hours.
Can the same thing work for IT or when implementing SharePoint? Can you save money by being your own IT Technology provider?
In the short term, maybe. But over weeks and months, you’re going to be saving a little bit of money up front and costing yourself a whole lot more later. That’s because you’ll inevitably have problems that you might not know how to handle or plan for correctly. If you don’t address them properly, or at all, that’s going to lead to a lot of bigger problems – ones that will end up costing you a whole lot more than a little bit of quality IT help would have.
Here are just a few examples of what we mean:
A piece of hardware or software isn’t installed the way it should be
As a result, you have paid for a new piece of technology that isn’t functioning the way it’s supposed to, or doesn’t work with other technology you have in place. Either way, the result is a loss for you and your business, both in terms of the wasted investment and the lost opportunity to increase your productivity or profitability.
You have an equipment failure that takes hours to resolve
This is a common situation, and one that frustrates business owners to no end. Whether it’s digging through manuals or calling an overseas support line, taking several hours of your time to resolve a technology issue harms the rest of your business, since you aren’t able to work on more critical tasks.
You have no backup and recovery plan, or one that’s insufficient
Backup and disaster recovery are boring topics, unless you find yourself needing them, at which point they become fascinating. Most smaller companies and self-employed professionals don’t have anything close to the system they would actually need to restore their business in the event of an emergency. It’s just one more example of saving a little money now, by not hiring an IT provider, and having it come back to bite you later.
Your communications systems fail, and you miss new orders and customers
In a way, even though they generally have less hardware and software than larger companies do, smaller enterprises have the most to lose with technology failures. That’s because they can least afford to miss out on sales and customers while their communications systems are down. Don’t let the desire to pass on a small IT invoice persuade you to miss out on future orders.
And don’t even get me started on how bad a SharePoint implementation can be, by the uninitiated…