Financial Advantages of Managed Services for Small Businesses

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Financial Advantages of Managed IT Services for Small BusinessesWe’ve released our latest Report, “The Financial Advantages of Managed IT Services for Small Businesses”, detailing how Managed IT Services from a locally owned and operated Managed IT Service like FlexITechs can save your small business money and increase uptime, productivity and security at the same time.

We’ve examined the wages and benefits for different levels of IT employees on Delmarva and Benefits nationally and compared the cost of internal IT staff or having employees do their own troubleshooting with assistance from external computer repair companies to the cost of having a Managed IT Service handle the typical Delmarva small business’s IT support.

You can obtain your copy of the report here.

As always, you can contact me personally at ericm@flexitechs.com or the company by phone at 302-537-4198 or by filling out our Contact form.

 

How Managed IT Services Reduce Unexpected Downtime Costs

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We hear it over and over. “This is NOT a good time to be having computer problems!”

Truth be told, there never is a good time to have computer problems.

A Managed IT Services Provider (MSP) such as FlexITechs can alleviate unexpected computer problems with remote monitoring and maintenance that first, prevents common problems and detects minor issues before they become major headaches resulting in downtime, and second, can do much of that work remotely and after hours so you don’t lose time working.

In short, we take the inconvenience out of computer problems.

We can see when your Internet goes down, see when software is installed or uninstalled that might cause a problem, restrict all of those Windows updates and their time-consuming restarts to after hours, detect that your hard drive is filling up and free up space, and a host of other issues and maintenance tasks to reduce the disruption of unexpected downtime.

Often, we will know you have a problem and take care of it before you know yourself.

We all know downtime can be costly, both with tangible and intangible costs.

In a 2020 survey of small and medium business owners, Infrascale, a cloud-based data protection company, reported that:

  • 37 percent of SMBs said they lost customers to downtime
  • 17 percent said they lost revenue to it
  • Almost 25 percent said their network has gone offline in the past year.
  • More than a third don’t know what the cost of one hour of downtime would be for their business
  • 27 percent said downtime would cost less than $10,000 an hour, 26 percent said it would be between $10,000 and $20,000, and the rest said above $20,000 per hour
  • 29 percent cited business disruption and 21 percent lost employee productivity as the biggest downtime risks for their company

With downtime creating so much risk, turning the nuts and bolts of the network over to an experienced MSP makes even more sense, particularly when the cost of doing so would be significantly less than in-house IT staff and probably less than handing IT tasks over to an employee with other responsibilities.

We will learn your IT setup so we can rectify any problems in short order, be available to answer employee tech questions, and most importantly, respond quickly when an issue does arise, with a 1-hour response time guarantee.

We will also take the time to understand your business, your goals, and how technology can help you achieve them.

On the financial side, you’ll have a budgetable flat monthly rate to pay instead of costs that match the unpredictability of downtime in unmanaged networks.

There’s no reason to wait until disaster strikes to start looking for help. Learn more by calling us at 302-537-4198, emailing me personally at ericm@flexitechs.com, or submitting our Contact form.

An IT service whose financial interests are aligned with yours

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I can still remember the first few years of our computer repair business in the early 2000s. We’d wake up in the morning and like our clients, have our schedule planned out for the day.

Then, boom! A frantic call for help would not only blow up our schedule, but the schedule of the client on the other end, too.

But, hey, at least we were getting paid, right? I mean, if things didn’t break, we didn’t make money.

It sure didn’t seem right, though, that FlexITechs could profit while the client suffered waiting for me to arrive with my big bag full of parts, pieces and tools to spend the better part of the day getting nothing else done while I toiled in front of the client’s broken computer.

Then in 2008, the terms “Managed Services Provider” and “MSP” first popped up in my computer repair forums.

It took awhile to figure out what those terms meant and how to become an MSP, but it took no time at all for me to recognize one of the primary benefits of Managed IT Services to our clients …

It aligned our financial interests with theirs.

You see, no matter how well-intentioned, we could not escape the simple fact of the Break / Fix IT services model that we only profited when our clients’ computer systems broke.

That all began to change when we added Managed IT Services to our portfolio.

Now, we charge a flat monthly fee with a guaranteed response time that aligns our financial interests with our clients’ financial interests by:

  • Costing us money if we don’t respond promptly to calls for help
  • Costing us money if we have to interrupt our day to respond to calls for help
  • Making us money when our clients’ computer systems run smoothly, just like our clients make money when their systems runs smoothly

If you want a higher level of IT service that proactively maintains your network and computer systems from an IT company whose financial interests are aligned with yours, we should talk about the FlexIT Managed IT Services program.

To chat, call us now at 302-437-4198.

Regularly Test Your Backups

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If you have a Managed IT Services Provider like FlexITechs, chances are good your backups are not only being monitored for failures but also being tested on a regular basis to ensure that files restore successfully when needed.

There would be nothing worse than finding out after a natural disaster, a fire, or a Ransomware attack that has encrypted all of your files that your backups either were failing or that they won’t restore properly.

If testing your backups was not discussed when you signed up for an automated backup plan or you simply don’t know if they are being tested, ask your backup provider or backup software company if they are being tested and if not, how to do this.

In general, to test your backups, perform the following procedures:

  • At least once a month, pick a random backup date and restore a handful of files to see if they restore successfully (be careful not to restore over the current version of those files)
  • At least once a quarter, perform a deeper restore operation of numerous files from different backup dates, again being careful not to overwrite the current versions of your files
  • At least once a quarter, check all files in the most recent backup to be sure that you are backing up all files that you would need to restore
  • On a daily basis monitor your backups for failures. Any good backup software will let you know whether the backup succeeded or failed with an email or within the software itself
  • If you see errors at any stage of the backup or restore processes, resolve those issues or have your IT or backup service resolve them for you.

Keep in mind that if your data is critical to the operation of your business, you should perform the steps above more frequently to minimize the risk of partial or complete data loss when you need to restore from your backups.

For help implementing a backup testing program or an automated backup program if you don’t have one, call 302-537-4198 or email me personally at ericm@flexitechs.com.