For every call you make to your IT support provider for a printer that doesn’t work, an email that won’t send, or a server outage….what is the flow on effect to the productivity of your business? Have you ever sat down and done the maths on what each disruption costs your business?
A lot of businesses we speak to only look at the hourly cost their IT provider invoices them for every month….but what if for each hour you have paid your IT provider to fix something, it has cost you the productivity of just one of your staff (and more often than not, we know it’s not just one staff member that’s affected).
Let’s use a 10 person business as an example with the following assumptions
1. The average cost per staff plus the administration costs that go with managing those employees is $30/hour
2. You are paying an IT provider $140/hour.
If every person in your business had 1 x IT problem a month that took 1 hour to resolve, your business has just incurred an expense of $1,700 for that month.
What happens if you have a server outage that stops all your staff from being able to work? An “IT Process Institute” research paper estimated the average outage period to be 200 minutes. If that was to occur every quarter, that’s an additional expense to your business of $1,566 every 3 months.
On the above scenario, would you have budgeted $2,222/month to just work on remediation of your businesses IT issues and lost productivity of staff? What if we were to tell you that those costs are only the beginning…. What of the cost for new IT hardware/software to make your business more competitive or replace aging equipment? What about lost revenue and negative brand feelings all because you couldn’t send an email due to being blacklisted on a Spam database or that you couldn’t get that quote out in time?
These are the reason why you shouldn’t put up with a bad IT provider or an IT provider that doesn’t meet the needs of your business. They are not just costing you the price of their monthly invoice….they are also costing you in the lost productivity of your staff, lost revenue and affecting your brand awareness.
We don’t raise these issues to scare people or justify our expenses….we want to raise people’s awareness of all the costs….let’s bring them out into the open and work towards a more productive IT ecosystem that helps you be competitive and drive business growth. IT should never be a drain on your business!
