Small Businesses: Top 5 Reasons to Use Outsourced IT as Your Competitive Advantage

According to Forbes, 78% of small business owners indicate they will be prioritizing investing in technology in 2022. But as a small business owner – every dollar is critical – and knowing where to best spend those dollars is difficult. You can’t afford wasted dollars. That’s why outsourcing IT to a trusted provider can be a true competitive advantage for small businesses focused on growth.

What is IT outsourcing?
You wouldn’t do your business taxes by yourself – and you shouldn’t support IT yourself either.    
IT outsourcing, by definition, is having a third-party support all or a portion of your IT needs. They essentially serve as your IT department. Endpoint Utility provides IT support for small businesses, with services including:   

-        Help Desk – one number to call for all your technology questions and issues

-        Cloud Solutions – correctly deploy and utilize the full features of the best Cloud applications (Microsoft 365 – Office, Teams, and more, Google Workspace)

-        Security – keep your systems and your data up to date and secure

So how does outsourcing IT change the economics of your small business? Here are the top 5 reasons.

1.)   Protection for Your and Your Clients’ Data

Every day hackers are getting more sophisticated in targeting small businesses. According to https://cyware.com (a leading tracking site of security information) more and more hackers are now specifically targeting small businesses in an effort to gain access to your data, and more importantly to them, the data about your customers. Averaging the cost from a vast number of research papers on the topic, a full security breach costs the victim company approximately $3.85M.

Outsourcing your IT allows for knowledgeable and experienced experts to deploy the most up to date tools and ensure you’ve taken every step possible to protect yourself and protect the data you hold. It also lessons the chances of being breached and incurring this massive cost to remediate the damage.

2.)   Eliminate Lost Hours and Dollars Spent Fixing IT Issues

The average employee spends at least two hours per week trying to search online to troubleshoot IT issues. For a small business with say 15 employees – that’s 30 hours per week of lost productivity time. Multiply that by a fully loaded $50,000 salary (~$35 per hour) – you’re looking at an average of $1050 per week in lost hard cost of employees trying to solve their IT issues.

Added to this is the lost potential business opportunity. Those hours Googling to solve IT issues could have been spent following up on potential new client leads, building a new local partnership, networking at an event, or expanding products and services within existing clients.

Outsourcing IT support means business owners and their employees have the time to focus on what they do best – and that translates to positive business growth.

3.)   Hire and Retain the Best Employees

Hiring and retaining employees is already hard enough, especially in today’s job market. According to Business News Daily, the average hard cost to onboard a new employee is over $4,000. Once onboarded to your company, new employees expect technology to work easily and consistently – with little to no down time. Today’s workers aren’t always in the office, they work at home, on the road, and anywhere in between. Not being able to deliver them a solid technology experience puts your business at risk of losing that new employee, forcing you to recruit and onboard yet another employee.

Using outsourced IT solutions gives you an ability to deliver to this expectation, putting you in a better position to greatly lower your employee costs by keeping the best employees and letting them do their best work.

4.)   Deliver a Superior Client Experience

Everyone knows it costs more to acquire a new customer versus keeping (and growing) a relationship you already have. According to research done by Markinblog, it is actually 7X more expensive to acquire a new customer. Think how many places you have called and the person on the other end of the line says, “Oh hold on, my computer is running slowly today”.

If your employees are telling this to your customers – your customers don’t want to hear it. A strong IT and IT support strategy means improving the experience for your customers. We at Endpoint Utility take a proactive approach here, keeping your network and devices at peak performance. That means never having to say, “sorry my machine is running slowly”. This in turn will help you keep your best customers happy. Increasing your customer retention just 5% increases profit by at least 25% a year.

5.)   Remove Duplicate Costs of IT Products  

For many small businesses, the onset of the pandemic forced a rush to buy technologies that were required to create a work from home capability, overnight in many cases. Now that we’re all returning to a more hybrid work style (working both in office and remotely) many companies have redundant technology purchases.

An easy example being Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Both are great solutions for video collaboration, and both are focused on the exact same outcome - online meeting spaces. Endpoint Utility works with our customers to determine the right technology, at the right cost. Our customers average $10/employee/month in savings by cleaning up their product library. For this same 15-person company, that translates to $1,800 per year in hard dollar savings.

Conclusion:

Across all 5 of these key areas are opportunities to either reduce cost, grow revenue, or often times both. With real hard dollars at stake, outsourcing your IT for a few hundred dollars a month doesn’t just pay for itself, it creates value by returning both these hard dollars and employee time back to the business.

·       Security Breach - $3.85M (approximate average)

·       Employee Downtime - $4,200/month (15-person small business)

·       Employee Retention - $4,000/employee turnover

·       Client Retention – 7X customer acquisition cost

·       Duplicate IT products - $1,800 per year

If you’re company would benefit from saving on any or all these factors, visit us at https://endpointutilitycorp.com to learn more and sign up today.