[sociallocker]You know how it is, you form a company, do some good business, work from an Excel spreadsheet and everything’s fine. You use this for your prospecting stage, copy and paste over to your accounting system, maybe you have a project management file which a different team in your organisation has access to. A client changes their address, you change it in three different places. As your client base grows you’ll inevitably make errors, there will be more admin intensive tasks required, excess duplicate data, lots of anomalies…you get the picture.
Then you decide to upgrade systems. You begin to look around for and appraise specialist systems that can all be integrated to play their parts in your business processes or you look at an all-in-one solution that does most things adequately. Then you’ll need backups if you don’t already have them and the list goes on. If disaster does happen and you lose data then you’ll be rolling back to previous versions, etc and calling an IT support company to help you out.
For a start, when the worse case scenario does happen and you don’t already have a connection with a good IT company you’re at a disadvantage for a number of reasons, I’ll list them below (in no particular order):
- TIME – You need an IT support company and you need one now. If your systems are down then the chances are that a large part of your operation will grind to an halt. You simply won’t be able to do certain parts of your job. This varies from business to business but, in a nutshell, you’ll need help pretty much straight away.
- MONEY – If you call an IT support company out of the blue, expecting them to come out RIGHT NOW then this will, most likely, be classed as an emergency callout and you’ll pay a premium unless the IT support company isn’t that busy and if they aren’t that busy then the chances are that they will be no good. There’s a reason why any company employs the right number of staff, it’s because they plan ahead and use their time efficiently.
- QUALITY – If you do manage to drop on an IT support company who will come out right now, solve your problem today, be priced as if you’d booked the average IT support company in advance AND be a great IT support company then, trust me, you’ll be very lucky in deed.
The moral of the story
Plan ahead with your business. Plan for the worst case scenario. Sod’s Law states that what can go wrong will go wrong so don’t leave anything to chance with your business. Consider a range of IT support companies well before you need them and choose one who you can trust. If you don’t think you’ll need support on that regular a basis i.e. monthly, then choose an IT support company like JMR who provide a credit system. This means that you buy a set of credits from them and use them as and when you need them. The plan works for you because your credits never expire and you receive good value for money rather than working from a more expensive single fix or occurrence rate and it works for JMR because they can build their business model around a more sustainable system.[/sociallocker]
