Editorial
budgetary process, you can work with an IT professional
to help you.
It is also very important to consider costs for
hardware, software, and support. There is
always going to be a cheaper way of
implementing your technology, but
the most important question
business owners need to ask
is, “What value can I get by
hiring a trusted IT
professional?” Aside from
hiring a professional IT
company, business owners
have several options, including
hiring someone full-time to
handle technology. Typically,
hiring someone full-time can be
costly, and you have to weigh that cost against outsourcing or hiring a professional IT company.
As a business owner, you may think that hiring a professional IT company is too expensive. To help you fully
appreciate the costs of your network going down, you can use this example for your own company to determine
the cost of lost productivity and calculate the benefit of hiring an IT professional to help you with your
technology costs.
Let's say you run a small law firm with 50 employees who have an average salary of $50,000. Your network is
down and you cannot access your email, applications, or data files. Since you don't have an IT professional, you
call a few companies to come onsite and fix the issues. If your employees are down for two hours, and generally
full-time employees work 2,000 hours a year, the average hourly rate for each employee is $25
($50,000 / 2,000 hours). If you multiply two hours of downtime at $25 an hour by 50 employees, you paid your
employees $2,500 for the time they were unable to perform their job duties. Additionally, the cost of an IT
company coming to perform its work would result in additional expense.
Also, there is a cost associated with the attorneys and staff not being able to work on billable client hours, which
would result in additional hours of lost revenue. For example, if the billable rate in the law firm is $250 an hour,
and 10 of the 50 employees were working on clients that were billable hours, you would have a loss of revenue
of two hours X $250 X 10 employees, which equals $5,000 of lost revenue.
You can see how a $7,500 loss of productivity and revenue can easily affect your business bottom line. Working
with an IT professional can help budget and mitigate the costs associated with downtime and support.
Hiring a professional IT company can provide you with many major advantages. Some IT companies have the
ability to get better pricing on hardware and software and also provide support solution package that helps
reduce downtime. Additionally, having a trusted advisor means someone can answer all of your questions about
certain technologies like cloud services, new applications, or new hardware.
As a business owner, it is important to remember that hiring a professional IT company can help your business
get the highest return on your technology investment. Doing it yourself or hiring someone that is only available
at night or on weekends is not going to help you in an emergency. It is important to consider the costs of
hardware and software and how you would potentially be affected by downtime before making this important
decision.
For any comments or suggestions: David Merkin is the owner of CMIT Solutions of Southwest Nassau located in Hewlett, NY. David
operates a computer services business helping small and medium-sized businesses with their technology. David can be reached at
[email protected] or 516-374-1598
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