Welcome to the first of many informative articles from the, ‘I Wonder’ series of blogs. The idea is to question a few things in life and to come to some kind of conclusion as to whether they are just something that sounds fancy so that salespeople can sell more of what they do; Sell stuff. Or, whether there is something a bit more meaningful on offer that you’d struggle to go without;
The practical stuff first
How do you envisage what your life would be like without something? By planning in reverse, probably, look at all of your managed IT services and slowly but surely, remove them from your workforce, ‘on paper’ of course. Maybe you inherited the business, or purchased it a few years back with most things in place, so you may have never known anything different.
Some business owners will have been in the game for so long that they’ve simply forgotten how hard things used to be. Either way, go back to the drawing board and start to reverse engineer your current solutions.
We’re going to need a bigger boat!
You’re going to need more time for starters, of which can’t be bought so, what are the options? Dial back and scale the business back a bit so that there’s not as many overheads and less tech to worry about? Doesn’t really make much sense, does it if you’re in business to make money? So, your other option is to take some down time on the chin and to go through a long, drawn-out recruitment process by way of hiring in house tech geeks. Nobody needs to tell you how much capital that kind of process chews away at and, you’ll likely be interviewing people who may as well be speaking double Dutch!
Neglect VS. Understanding
One of the biggest areas of concern for any SME is that of compliance and, when it comes to IT/data management, there could be a rather large pile of smelly stuff to fall face first into, if you aren’t on point with current rules, regulations, and requirements of business owners set out by the various governing bodies. Your existing team will have to pick up the slack, so to speak but, there are some real dangers to face by expecting somebody who already does a job to take on another, business critical task and expect both jobs to be done properly.
It just doesn’t stack up
No matter how you try and juggle things around, most businesses these days would simply cease to exist if they had their managed IT services removed. Really and truly the only options are, to buy more time, not going to happen. Dial everything back, which essentially means running your business in the wrong direction, hiring new staff, or delegating the various management procedures amongst existing employees.
The latter would seem like the only ‘real’ move to consider, however, as the saying goes, business is all about the people, the relationships, so you have to be realistic here, are your staff trained in the necessary areas? Do they have the required qualifications, do they want to do 2 jobs, or more importantly, are they capable? You might feel a bit deflated right about now, hoping for a golden nugget somewhere, but unfortunately, there is no magic. You, however, can feel content with the fact that moving forward is the best option.
