When you’re in the early days of running your own business, particularly when you’re limited on funds, it can be easy to get into the mindset that you must do everything on your own. It pays to cut costs and wear as many hats as you can, but you must learn when to hand over responsibilities to someone with experience – especially when it comes to infrastructure.
Below, we’ve put together five reasons why you should invest in IT support for your startup.
Save time
Getting your IT just right can take time, and when you’re only just starting out, time is not on your side. It’s important to act fast in business, and have a team behind you who knows their stuff. Rather than spending weeks setting up your IT infrastructure, patching, updating, and maintaining, you should look at IT support companies and find an expert to run things for you. Not only will this free up more of your time, but it means that everything from security, backups, administration, network connectivity, and application management, is covered.
Maximize productivity
The last thing you want when you’re building a team is endless distractions, and outsourcing your IT can help you maximize productivity and keep everyone focused on their own tasks. It is so easy to get carried away or get staff to help out on things they’re not qualified to do, but you’ll quickly see that this eats into their workload. Outsourcing IT increases productivity, as staff can focus on what they’re good at, rather than fixing issues with their computers.
Guarantee expertise
Finding a new member of staff that has experience setting up networks is always a nice to have, but if you’re not at the stage in your business where you need an in-house technician, then outsourcing allows you to access truly experienced and professional support staff, and access their breadth and depth of knowledge on a short-term basis.
Get the foundations right
Whether you’re running a small e-commerce store or you’re planning on opening a fleet of new offices across the country, the chances are that you’ll need IT to get the job done – but without the right infrastructure, that can be tough. Perhaps you have an office in London and an office in Manchester, but they’re both using their own suite of software? With IT support, you’ll be able to build an agile IT environment that allows you to expand your business and IT infrastructure virtually overnight, without going through the upheaval of starting again.
Avoid unnecessary expenses
The average salary for an IT technician in the UK is £27,000, and paying an IT support firm for an emergency callout when things go wrong can also be expensive. Paying for ongoing IT maintenance and support allows you to avoid unnecessary expenses and keep your business ticking over, and the scalability means you can pay for what you need and nothing more. Starting off on a basic IT support retainer from day one means you’ll be able to manage the cost as your business grows, rather than having to fork out thousands of pounds should you need to implement a new piece of software, or add more users to the network.
All businesses, whether big or small, should consider IT support an investment. Whilst it is very easy to dismiss such service when you’re in your infancy, it pays to sign up for a plan as soon as you can for that added reassurance and peace of mind.