I have a question to ask you that is incredibly important that you can answer, despite its relation to a particularly sensitive business topic: how prepared and able are you to fire your vendors, especially the one currently handling your IT?
There are situations where you could find yourself having to make this call, but can’t without severely impacting your business’ operations. Let’s talk a little bit about these situations, and why it’s crucial to have an IT provider whom you know you could fire if necessary.
First and foremost, you need to understand that many vendors will—intentionally or not—make it tough to leave. This is because they create a dependency on them, their records, and their systems exclusively. As a result, it becomes so much of a hassle to extricate them from your business, many business owners will simply force themselves to tolerate more.
Just remember: if your vendors are adding friction to your business instead of meeting the expectations that have been set, you owe it to yourself and your team to follow through and find another option.
This is especially important if your vendor has meant to do all this. Here’s how you can determine if one of those you rely on is trying to pull the wool over your eyes or is succumbing to lazy processes.
If you pay your fees to your vendor but have no visibility into the systems and processes that get their resources into your hands—blindly accepting that they are delivering what you have subscribed to—you’re in a tough spot. You need to know what you’re paying for and how it works.
If you need to reach out to your vendor to gain access to your resources, you aren’t in control. This isn’t good. Your passwords should be yours and yours alone. The same goes for your software. You should have control, hard stop.
Let’s say you want to compile a list of what your business currently purchases, so you request that your vendors each provide you with a summary of what they deliver. Or, perhaps you want to ensure security across your supply chain, so you ask for a description of your vendors’ protocols and safeguards. If any of these requests are met with silence, resistance, or procrastination, that’s your sign to make your exit.
If a vendor insists that you utilize some custom or widely unknown software to accomplish your goals, pay attention. They are effectively telling you they want you to be reliant on them, whether or not that’s your preference. These kinds of software choices mean that, should you leave a vendor, it’s going to hurt for a while… both financially and in opportunity costs.
This is all unacceptable, and that’s coming from someone who both works with vendors on our clients’ behalf and, in a way, acts as a vendor ourselves. While this isn’t always avoidable with every type of technology, it should always be considered and carefully mitigated. We do so with a different approach.
Simple: we’ve actively created workplace processes and procedures designed to make our services ideal for the needs of our prospects and clients.
Instead of coming up with our own tools and practices and using them to take advantage of our clients, we openly follow industry standards and use proven technology solutions that are well accepted in the mainstream. We do our best to keep things as simple as possible, so it is easier for anyone who works with it to secure and manage it appropriately.
You have total control over your data and credentials; we just help you do everything you can to optimize your secure use of them.
We’re obsessive about taking notes, covering everything from your network’s makeup to your hardware inventory… including all your software licenses, admin credentials, and standard operating procedures.
Everything we manage belongs to you, too… it all pertains to your business, after all. You have anytime access to it, and every license is registered to you and your business. We’re just here to help you keep it organized, serving at your pleasure.
If you ever want to leave our service, we’ll make sure you have all the information you (and whoever takes over for us) will need. Instead of trying to make you afraid of leaving, we just do our best to make you not want to.
Our strategy is to earn your business with every interaction by delivering consistently great services, advice, and support, all to maximize the value to you. We form a partnership, meaning we’re invested in your success too.
Interested in having this kind of experience with your business’ IT provider? Reach out to us to learn more about what we have to offer. Give First Column IT a call at (571) 470-5594.
