Many businesses think of IT as nothing but an expense, often represented by losses on your budgeting reports. You might dump countless dollars into your IT only for it to eat it all up without providing any discernible return on investment. Here’s the truth about IT: when it’s managed properly, it can represent opportunity and investment rather than expense.

First, you need to reframe your mindset about technology—and it all starts with looking at the original IT management model: break-fix IT.

The Break-Fix Loop (And How to Fix It)

When you categorize your IT as an expense, your goal changes ever so subtly, and you end up limiting your expenses, only ever spending money on technology when it becomes impossible not to. This problem contributes to what we call the “break-fix loop”:

• You buy the cheapest computer to save money.
• You ignore update warnings and slow performance to avoid paying for help.
• One day, that cheap computer crashes (or, worse).
• Your business grinds to a halt. 
• You're dead in the water.

You ultimately spend more money on emergency maintenance than you would if you had just proactively addressed issues as they came up—all because you were under the impression that it would save you money to not address them right away. The end result: a budget that is unpredictable at best, and one that you can’t rely on.

Cheap IT Is Most Expensive of All

Believe it or not, the big emergency repair bill isn’t the biggest problem. The real issue here is the multitude of minor inefficiencies and small hiccups that are costing your business money in the form of downtime. Here’s what downtime is and why it’s such a problem:

The Cost of Downtime

If your server is down for four hours, and you have ten employees, that means you’ve lost a lot more than just four hours of work…

1. You lost 40 hours of paid-for productivity.
2. You lost 4 hours of potential revenue.
3. You lost an unquantifiable amount of customer trust.

Go ahead and calculate how much 40 hours of lost employee productivity costs your business. We find putting this number into a quantifiable format exemplifies just how wasteful and unnecessary downtime is.

The Cost of Friction

Generally speaking, you want to work with the grain rather than against the grain whenever possible. Consider these situations:

• A computer takes five minutes to boot up
• A slow file that takes around 60 seconds to load

These minor inconveniences take their toll on employees. You might be paying hundreds of dollars for your employees to wait around for your technology to work, all the while frustrating them to the point that they might even consider leaving, which creates a whole other slew of problems.

The Cost of Lost Opportunity

If your sales team is using a CRM that doesn’t work for your business, they might miss follow-up calls, messages, and opportunities for your business to bring in revenue. If your team can’t collaborate well, you might miss deadlines that lead prospective clients to question their decision to work with you. These issues are preventable!

We get it; you’ve been groomed to think about IT as an expense, and it’s hard to break that mindset. However, once you frame it as an opportunity, the technological world will be your oyster. Learn more about how you can make the most of your technology by contacting us at (571) 470-5594.

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