For many people December is the most favorable month of all.  It is the month of celebration and a time to enjoy family, friends, giving gifts, and bringing in a new year.  For the small business owner, December can also be a painful time of the year.  Money, money, money...too much going out and not enough coming in.  Businesses in the Low Country have tightened down on their spending, cut cost, cut payroll, screen invoices, and have cut out marketing or have found new creative ideas to market with little to no cost. Many businesses have completely cut out their IT spending.
Let’s look at the Computer and Network spending. Information Technology is not to be a burden, but to make your job and the jobs of your employees easier. The idea is to use technology as an advantage that allows your company to accomplish more and produce it more effectively.
Think about it, if one computer fails, how much will it really cost you? An invoice from your IT company? Typically that is not half of the issue.  The employee spends 30 minutes trying to figure out what happened to the PC. Then she asks her coworker who spends another 30 minutes trying to help.  Then they call in the office manager or someone else that know more about computers and networks.  This takes up even more time. Finally, they get approval (another 30 minutes) to call their IT company. They accept the call, however all of their technicians are on-site or with other clients, so there is a 45 minute delay before they can respond, due to escalation procedures. The technician finishes his appointment and tries to access the computer remotely (30 minutes), and he is denied. He then leaves to travel to your office. (30 minutes) He arrives on site, investigates the situation and tries to boot up the computer several ways. (30 minutes) He narrows the problem to the hard drive. He then has to drive back to the computer company’s warehouse to pick up a new hard drive. (Another 30 minutes) He brings the crashed computer with him to install the hard drive at their office. He then spends 3 hours installing Windows on the new hard drive. By now, it is after 5:00, so he goes home for the night and the next morning, he drives back to your office (30 minutes) and spends another 3 hours installing the programs and personal settings onto the new hard drive. Assuming everything went without a problem, this is at least 10 ½ hours. What was your employee doing during that time? (You paid her for the full day and a half) What did she not accomplish that could have been billed to your clients?
Be glad this was just one computer, if it had been your server, it would have affected your entire staff and your business was probably closed for at least two days. (Hard drives on servers take MUCH longer to replace.)
This scenario could have been avoided, along with many others. This was what we refer to as a “break-fix” example. This client also pays their IT company by the hour to fix their computers when they break. However, we offer an “all you can eat” preventative program. If the client had been on this program, we would have monitored the hard drives of all the computers, and realized three weeks ago that this hard drive was going to crash, and would have had it replaced with an hour’s work. (We could have copied all the programs from the old hard drive before it crashed.) This client also pays us a flat monthly fee to monitor and fix their computers, so their bill for the month would be less than the previous clients.
This “all you can eat” program also allows us to replace and update your computers and servers as needed to prevent crashes and maximize uptime and profitability.
If you want a way to reduce your IT costs, give us a call and let us know you want the “All You Can Eat”.