Your IT guy won’t beat an MSP
Does your company work with a Managed Services Provider (MSP) like TimbukTech or are you relying on a “tech guy” in-house? We’re willing to bet that you’re relying heavily on a “tech guy” and hoping you don’t run into any difficulties. There are some drawbacks to that logic. Let’s take a look.
IT is the secondary role of your employee
Often, we find that your employee was not hired to be the IT guy, but in fact he’s the receptionist first and IT guy second. His core duties are scheduling, taking and making phone calls, routing email, directing visitors around, and much more. On top of these primary duties, your whole company is calling on this employee to fix their tech issues. At this point, he’s doing two jobs. It’s highly likely that this employee is not doing either job to his fullest ability as he can’t focus on one at a time.
Employee burnout
When one person is handling two jobs at the same time, the effort can really bog them down. He was asked to be a tech person because he knows a few things about computers and now that everyone’s aware of that, they’ll be calling upon him frequently. Anyone who has taken on extra duties beyond their core role knows that it is easy to get burnt out fairly quickly.
So now we ask, what if that employee quits? What happens when things turn ugly late at night? Is it up to this overworked employee to get up and come in to handle the situation? If he can’t come in until the next day, what does this mean for the company? Downtime can be costly.
Employee limitations
“The tech guy” can come with many limitations. Out of 40 hours in the workweek, how many are to be spent on their primary occupation and how many are to be spent on tech?
Another limitation might be training. It’s likely that this person has never read a page of a Network+ book, taken the MCSE test, or had any other IT training. Yet your company has him poking around in the network. What happens when he makes a mistake that brings the network down? Now you’re hiring a 3rd party anyway to come in and fix what’s broken. That can be expensive … often over $120 an hour, plus loss of business!
MSPs can help
When we come across a client that uses a “tech guy” in-house, we ask the following questions to assess lost revenue.
- When was the last time your server was down?
- How long did it take to bring it back up?
- Were you able to conduct business without the server?
- Did your tech person know how to fix the IT issue?
- Did you need to call in a 3rd party to fix the IT issue?
- How many times has the server or network gone down? Is this a fairly common occurrence?
The underlying cost of downtime could equate to a lot more than a monthly agreement with TimbukTech as your MSP. We’re here to help you understand the implications of not having a solid IT solution. Let’s explore your business’ options. Give us a call at 309-444-7263 and we’ll go through your specific needs and weigh your options.
