Seattle small businesses leverage Managed IT for a better way to scale smarter
Owners of small businesses have too many hats on in Seattle. It is no cliché, it is a working definition. Marketing, Operations, Human Resources, Finance, and somewhere in the list, Technology. The laptop that won’t connect to the network. Backup that is not or not yet working. Programs that continue to crash with no one able to decipher the error codes. Managed IT services Seattle providers are the solution that allows small business owners to remove at least one of those hats from their heads forever — and concentrate on the tasks that can help grow the business.
Growth and technology are interwoven in such a way that it is difficult to tease them apart. If the business cannot scale its IT infrastructure, then it cannot scale its business. So, the one that wastes a week of productivity to recover from a ransomware attack is not only losing data, they are losing client trust, momentum and sometimes the business. Technology is not a matter for the back office of small businesses. This is a limitation or a facilitator of growth depending on its management.
For some small businesses, the term “Managed IT” may be confusing
The word is used casually which is why it’s important to be specific. Managed IT services for small businesses isn’t a help desk you call when something breaks. This is break-fix support and it’s a bottom-up approach.
Managed IT services refers to a service provider’s commitment to a business’s technology environment on an on-going basis. Monitoring systems proactively. Preventing Vulnerabilities from becoming Incidents through patching. Always keeping backups that work when necessary. Continuous management of the security posture instead of reacting to breaches after the fact. Managing new employee access to technology and offboarding of employees. There is a big difference in the way the two are used. Break/fix relationship is where the business pays for the repair and the problem remains theirs until the call out. The provider is the owner of the environment in a managed relationship. It’s not a reactive panic response; it’s a managed stability that has real value that is difficult to express in dollars and cents but easy to experience for a small-business owner with no IT background.
It’s the Growth Connection that most small business owners miss out on.
This part of the story is not talked about enough. Managed IT services are more than just retaining functionality. Part of the ceiling on the growth of a small business is the capacity of the technology infrastructure to support growth. Adding five employees. Relocating to a different place. When a new client whose security needs are greater than the existing configuration comes on board. Expanding to a second site. For each of these growth phases, there is a technology element that either helps a growth phase to progress seamlessly or introduces friction that slows growth.
Well-managed businesses deal with such growth events as business milestones. New staff members are provisioned quickly and correctly to access the appropriate systems. New sites are integrated with the company’s system without causing a month of IT chaos. New client security needs are evaluated and solved before they turn into the grounds for losing the contract. Companies with ad hoc IT setups see growth as a crisis. The time of the failures in a system always seems to be at the top of the pile – why does that happen? – because high-stakes moments add more pressure to the system and reveal vulnerabilities that are not apparent when the stakes are lower.
The time-saving methods of finding the Right Provider
Business owners who have recently suffered a bad experience usually type in the search phrase, “IT managed services near me”. It was either an IT issue that took too long to solve, a security breach that shouldn’t have transpired, or something that was a growth opportunity that revealed how fragile their tech base was.
The bright side of the managed IT marketplace in Seattle is that the quality of providers is really high. Technology talent and business sophistication are located in the region, thus managed IT firms here are able to find skilled people, and are serving high standards clients. The bad news is that there are numerous providers out there and to differentiate you need more than just reading a website.
The criteria that matter when it comes to small businesses: responsiveness standards — how quickly do they respond to critical issues versus routine requests; is it in writing? The percentage of proactiveness vs. reactiveness in their work? Knowledge of industry — are they experts in running businesses in your industry and the technology and compliance issues associated with it? Local presence — can somebody come to your place when it is required and how quickly? It’s important to get references from other businesses similar in size to yours and in the same industry. An excellent service provider for a hundred-person professional services might not be so effective for a fifteen-person retail business. Most providers won’t tell you up front that size and sector are important.
This is the Real Cost Conversation
Managed IT is a shock to small business owners. The monthly charge is a big number until compared with the alternatives fairly and honestly. The first one is break-fix. Count all of the IT costs from the past two years—what it costs to pay consultants for on-the-hour help, what it costs to replace hardware, how many hours were lost when something went down, the overtime one person had to work to get it up and running again when there was a systems problem. Divide by twenty-four. That’s the true cost of break-fix IT, on average, each month. This is a math fact that most business owners are surprised with.
The other option is to hire from within. For a small business, a competent IT person in Seattle makes for a substantial salary before benefits, before the equipment they have to acquire, and before the fact that one person can’t be on call 24/7 and can’t be an expert on every technology that the business uses. But what if that person goes away? Until the business is replaced with someone who is up to speed the business is exposed. Managed services, when compared to these reasonable alternatives, can be significantly more reasonable. When proactive management is decreasing the number of costly incidents, an extra row is needed to calculate the value.
Is technology a Competitive Differentiator for small business?
The small business sector is competitive in Seattle. No matter what your profession, the competition is present and some of them have much better resources. In certain respects, a well-managed small business can actually bridge the capability gap with larger businesses by using technology.
Well-managed cloud infrastructure allows a small team to function as if it were a much larger team, with the same access, collaboration and data management tools. When you run your security properly, it will meet the needs of enterprise clients you might otherwise lose out on. IT reliability isn’t just about avoiding billable time or client trust is lost because of technology failures at the wrong time. All of this does not take place by itself. It takes a conscious investment of management relationship and a provider with capabilities to match the business’s true requirements. But the common theme among the businesses that have invested in that technology is that the technology becomes part of the base of operations and no longer causes stress.
Most ROI discussions for managed services overlook the shift in mental load that’s happening when you change from needing to deal with your own IT situation to having your IT situation being taken care of for you. Owners who have witnessed it say more than any other operational change they have made. Not because, throughout the years, it was always the biggest problem. However, it was a constant, low-level annoyance of attention and energy that adds up over time to be more serious than one might think given its constant low-level incidents. That’s not only liberating time. It allows for more concentrated focus, which is what leads to growth decisions. In a world as competitive as Seattle, that’s something that needs to be protected.
