For decades, the outsourced IT support industry worked on a very simple business model. When something broke that a business owner or executive couldn’t fix, they would turn to outside professionals to come in and solve the problem. After the job was done, the vendor left, sent the bill, and waited for the next crisis that would necessitate a phone call.
At Fantastic IT, we left this way of serving our clients behind many years ago. Now we work on a managed services basis, meaning our clients pay monthly fees for all the support, monitoring, and advice they need.
Occasionally we come across business owners and executives who are accustomed to the old way of doing things and don’t like the idea of changing. While we typically like to point out all the advantages that come with following a managed services plan, today we want to attack the issue from the other side. Let’s look at three big problems that creep up when you just pay for IT support as you go…
#1 Pay As You Go IT Gets Expensive Fast
In a perfect world every business owner and executive would have access to trained technicians who were on call and could solve every problem or answer every question. So, the only reason you would want to forgo that kind of service and pay for IT support on an hourly basis would be to save money.
The problem with that type of thinking is that hourly IT care is almost always more expensive. That’s true when you’re looking at the bills for individual calls and tasks, but it’s even more of a difference when you look at costs over time. That’s because IT problems rarely creep up on a regular schedule.
#2 Irregular IT Invoices Can Cripple Your Business
You probably can pay less for IT by skipping on a managed services agreement some quarters, particularly if you handle some maintenance, installations, etc. on your own. However, it’s a virtual certainty that being overly frugal will catch up with you and lead to additional bills before long.
The reason is simple: sooner or later there will be a power surge, hard drive failure, network outage, or other calamity that necessitates a call to your IT provider. When that happens, the amount you’ll pay and emergency hourly rates will balloon far past what you would have given your managed services provider who wouldn’t have hit you with an extra expense. Even worse, the monthly IT team might have prevented the problem from affecting your business in the first place.
#3 You Get Worse Service with Hourly IT
Here we get to the real issue with hourly IT service. When you are calling on a vendor to come solve problems they don’t have any ability or incentive to work proactively. But, when you are on a monthly managed services agreement it’s in your provider’s best interest to ensure that all of your tech keeps running smoothly.
To think about this another way, because your managed services provider has less to do when your technology is operating smoothly, it lowers their costs, and yours, if they take care of potential problems before they turn into real stumbling blocks. That means you get better, more forward-thinking tech support at a lower monthly rate… and a lot fewer IT headaches.
Great IT Care Doesn’t Have to Cost a Fortune
Usually, when new clients resist switching their IT plans it’s because they worry they’ll end up paying a huge amount for tech support every month. We like to reassure them that isn’t the case. In fact, getting the help you need probably costs a lot less than you think.
Don’t take our word for it, though. Contact the Fantastic IT team in Los Angeles today to get a free quote for ongoing tech support.