Why Break/Fix Gives Business Owners Nightmares

Why Break/Fix Gives Business Owners Nightmares

Like cars and industrial equipment, computers are complex machines.

To function properly they will need to be maintained, and sometimes fixed. Components inevitably fail, users very often make mistakes, and sometimes other people deliberately break things out of a litany of emotions.

If your computer has seen better days, and you’ve done all you can, seeing if you can get it repaired will involve unhooking it and bringing to your local computer guy.

For the small business, that has to go through this routinely, it can be an absolute nightmare; and, that’s even before we talk about cost. The cost of getting your computer fixed can be all over the map. It can be a simple fix (that will likely annoy the break/fix technician), or it can be a smile and a shrug that implies you are going to have to buy another computer.

If it is fixable, the cost to get computers fixed is typically substantial, but it’s not the largest cost associated with broken technology; that would be downtime.

Downtime can sometimes cause irrevocable damage. In fact, in one survey that asked small business owners how much they lost as a result of downtime found that the AVERAGE small business should expect to lose around $100,000 in downtime and downtime-related costs per year.

If your business can’t afford to lose $100, let alone $100,000, avoiding downtime should be at the very top of your list of priorities. But what about your broken computer?

The fact that you will have to remove it or pay someone to come to your place to fix it should do enough to be open to the other option: Managed IT Services.

Managed IT services can help you get more out of your IT, while also significantly reducing the amount of IT-related downtime your organization has to tolerate. It does this by having certified technicians proactively monitoring and managing your hardware so if there are failing components, your hardware support costs are much less than they would be.

At WheelHouse IT, our priority is always keeping your business’ IT running effectivily, so your business can be as efficient as possible.

With our proactive maintenance, and our certified technicians’ commitment to getting you the technology your staff needs to help improve your business, you’d expect our service to be expensive, but for an affordable monthly payment, you can get a professional IT staff who is dedicated to helping your organization to be the best business it can be.

For more information call us today at (877) 771-2384.

A Case in Support of Managed Services

A Case in Support of Managed Services

Thanks to what’s become known as the “as a service” business model, organizations of all sizes can take advantage of great services that once may not have been as accessible.

Even better is that they are often provided at an even more affordable rate than ever before.

We’ll walk you through the specifics of what you can expect to receive from a using an “as a service” model.

Considering Managed Services

To get right to the point, managed services can be considered anything that’s outsourced by your business where you pay as you go. This could include making monthly payments for someone else managing your business’ computing infrastructure–specifically a third-party managed service provider operated by technology professionals.

Investing in such an outsourced solution is a great way to minimize the responsibility that your business has for maintaining critical infrastructure, while also reducing costs. While it might not look like an immediate benefit, we assure you that the peace of mind created by managed services is something to be considered for any small business with a limited budget.

We’re confident that you can save both time and resources by working with a managed service provider to maintain and manage your technology. A couple great example of this are software patching and update implementation. Let’s say that your organization spends an hour every week applying patches and security updates for each device on your infrastructure.

For a single device, the amount of time spent might not seem considerable, but when it’s all added up, you are spending much more than you might realize on this task alone. With all of this extra time in the day, what else could your technicians be doing? The answer is a lot, but they might simply be too busy to do otherwise.

Outsourcing effectively eliminates many of the responsibilities that could potentially be holding your technicians back from being more productive and efficient with their time. Imagine if they were able to completely put aside most of the IT maintenance portion of their responsibilities in favor of implementing new solutions designed to help your business work more effectively.

This could save your business a lot of money in its own right. You can also think of outsourced managed services as a second branch of your IT maintenance, supplementing your business’ IT in ways that might not have seemed possible in the past.

Of course, if your business doesn’t have an IT department at all, then it’s even easier to see how this type of service benefits your organization. All businesses need help with technology to at least some extent. It’s just the matter of how much. Hiring multiple technicians can put a damper on your budget, meaning that you might instead choose to have your employees manage technology when their real talents lie elsewhere.

Outsourced managed services mean that there is no excuse for this any longer, as it’s much more affordable to hire professional technicians as part of a managed service provider than it is to hire a full team of on-site workers.

This also decreases the likelihood that your organization will suffer from downtime due to specific parts of your IT maintenance not being performed properly.

Managed services can help your business make up for its shortcomings and come out on top.

To learn more, reach out to us at (877) 771-2384.

What’s the True Cost of Downtime for Small Businesses?

What's the True Cost of Downtime for Small Businesses?

Downtime is expensive. Whether your business is online or offline, even an hour without internet access can hurt your business’s bottom line.

In 2016, small businesses with 50 million or less in annual revenue put the price tag of an hour-long outage at $8,600. Different businesses have different metrics, but it’s almost always going to be bigger than you think.

Why is Downtime So Expensive?

First, you face several direct losses in revenue. An hour without an online store is an hour without sales. A lot of outages are caused by too much traffic that your site and servers weren’t ready for. That means you’re not just losing an hour of regular business; you’re losing an hour of peak, jam packed business.

Not only is there lost revenue, but you incur expenses, too. Getting your website back online with the help of a traditional IT support technician, who has an hourly rate, will rack up quickly. The total cost will go up if you need new equipment, your network goes out, or you pay extra for a faster response time.

There are also several indirect costs. New leads have a low tolerance for 404 errors. If you attract a new visitor’s interest (which is harder and harder to do) but your site doesn’t work, they are unlikely to come back later. You lose sales, lead conversion, and potential return business.

All of these elements combined lead to that total price of $8,600 for even a single hour of downtime. Avoid outages in the first place with a managed IT support subscription that monitors your network for problems before they start.