Is the “break-fix” cycle of IT quietly (or not so quietly) draining your company’s annual profit? Many businesses operate from the perspective that if the computer is running, it’s doing the job and isn’t costing the business anything. This is a fallacy, and one that could be costing your business. In truth, this silent leak could be costing your business thousands in billable hours, emergency repair premiums, and staff frustration.
These “invisible” costs can consume a major portion of your operational budget, but with the right approach, you can implement a proactive managed service model to stabilize your budget and save you money.
A technology failure costs you a lot more than what the repair invoice says it does.
That repair bill doesn’t take into account the cost of your employees sitting idle while you wait for your systems to be restored, and it doesn’t take into account lost sales or opportunities, either. To truly calculate how much downtime costs your business, you have to look at it more holistically. Calculate the hourly cost of every employee who cannot work during an outage, add in the reactive repairs and “rush” labor rates, and garnish it with the opportunity cost of all the projects and clients you can’t work with—all because your systems are down.
That’s the true cost of downtime and why predictability is such an important part of managing your technology.
The traditional model of IT management has an expenditure that looks an awful lot like a heart monitor: you have your baseline, your dips, followed by massive unpredictable spikes when a server dies or a data breach occurs.
This kind of volatility makes it incredibly hard for your business to plan long-term and practically impossible to manage cash flow effectively. When you transition to a managed service model, you consolidate your spend, turning repair costs into a single, predictable monthly payment. Unlike the break-fix technicians who are rewarded whenever your technology breaks down with more work (and more profits), a managed service provider is incentivized to keep your IT functional.
These flat-rate fees generally include preventative and proactive measures such as 24/7/365 monitoring, security patches, and updates, all of which keep small issues from developing into bigger, more costly problems.
Now comes the question of what you do with the money you save with the managed services model.
It’s exciting to imagine what you can do when you are saving significant amounts of money simply by reducing operational friction, but that money doesn’t do you any good if it just sits in a bank. Instead, you can reinvest that money into scaling your business. You might consider modernizing older technology solutions, investing in employee training (helpful for cybersecurity), or create more efficient workflows through software integrations and automation.
And the best way to do that? By working with First Column IT.
By now, you should see that it’s really in your best interest to commit to a proactive managed services model for all of your IT needs. First Column IT can ensure your organization implements proactive solutions that address your company’s biggest money sinks. Learn more today by calling us at (571) 470-5594.
