It’s incredibly common for a business to become increasingly reliant on IT as it grows more and more. In fact, it’s believed that the majority of new businesses would simply not be able to operate without using IT services. The issue here is that IT upkeep can be expensive, so as your need for IT services grow, staffing costs can definitely start to add up.
Smaller businesses and startups are frantically scrambling to find an IT solution that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, and for many of them, that solution comes in the form of MSPs – Managed Service Providers. Here’s a look at the function of MPSs, and how they could be the answer to your problems:
MPSs Explained
Although an MSP can be thought of as an on-demand IT team, this isn’t entirely accurate, as an MSP isn’t located in your office or included on your payroll. However – an MSP and an IT team both cover the basic IT needs of most companies.
The main difference between the two is the amazing ease of outsourcing whatever your IT requirements may be, to your chosen MSP. It’s quite possible that if you were to decide you needed to make use of an MSP right now, within a week you could have them working with you, fully supporting all your systems.
People who work for MSPs are usually dynamic as well as very experienced. MSPs tend to be used to providing their services to many businesses at one time, meaning they won’t have a problem fitting you in with speed and efficiency.
MSPs usually operate by providing a business with a maintenance and support package, with a monthly fee. No one would blame you for thinking that the kind of experience and dynamic adaptability MSPs offer would greatly increase costs – and to be fair, this could well be the case if you were to employ them directly. Their way around this cost is the large number of companies they work for – due to working for so many different businesses they can spread out their (often rather large) staffing costs, meaning they are able to offer their service at a very reasonable price.
But what does this really all mean for a small business, and how can utilising the help of an MSP for IT support help a business grow?
Keeping costs down
Anyone who’s ever been responsible for managing a business’s finances will be all too aware that costs tend to add up at a lightning pace. These costs will add up at an even speedier rate when a recruitment drive is involved.
Shockingly, it’s believed that it costs around a painful £3,000 to fill a single IT role – this cost is divided between fees, lost resources, onboarding, staffing, and more. If you’re preparing to take on a small team of just 3 people, that would be an enormous sum of around £9,000, and that’s before you’ve even enrolled them in a training program – or paid any of their wages.
Working with an external team for your IT needs means that a huge chunk of change is mostly saved, as there are no on-boarding fees, and amazingly, often an MSP will shoulder a lot of work to fit into your business in a more frictionless way. Also Read – Tips to Save Time While Launching Your First Online Business
So when it comes to growing a business, what does this all mean? Think of it this way – do you want to fork out £9,000-£10,000 sum on hiring an in-house IT team, or would you rather outsource your IT requirements and instead spend that money on things which will directly push your business forward, such as marketing, marketplace research, developing products, or sales recruitment?
For many businesses, the answer is obvious – working with an MSP really is the best of both worlds.
But what if your growth is driven by IT?
A concern many have before opting to outsource their IT work to an MSP is that what they might get is a team of workers who can accomplish a task but aren’t seriously invested in the business as a whole, and if that’s the case, maybe it would be worth spending the money on an in-house team who is invested?
In all honesty, it’s possible this could happen. But if you do your research, you can ensure it doesn’t.
There are many, many MSPs in the world, and a few of these may not care all that much about your business. But it’s worth remembering that these companies have most likely seen a huge number of other businesses grow with their help, and as such will have a brilliant understanding of what technology will be the best for your particular business. They will know whether you’ll benefit from using MPLS to aid your use of cloud-based applications. They will know whether the managers of your accounts benefit from using a hosted telephone solution. They will know whether the time is right for you to make use of SD-WAN across your locations of business. They will know what’s right for your business. Also Read – 4 Must-Have Virtual Services for Business
For someone who isn’t an IT whiz this may all sound like jargon, but MSPs know that things like this that others may not be able to parse can trigger extensive growth in a business. The only way any of these could be brought to your attention could be, for example, by having a meeting with someone who has expert knowledge of business IT network growth – and an MSP can offer this as well. This particular type of consultancy might not be part of an MSP’s standard package, but in all likelihood, it won’t add much to the cost and can provide access to substantial knowledge which is hard to find anywhere else.
Inspiring growth with an MSP
It’s always useful to think about what in particular your business needs to encourage growth. A lot of the time it’s one (and often both) of two things – money, and know-how. MSPs thrive on lending their extensive IT know-how to lots of businesses – and you’ll get to keep a lot of your money as well. It’s really a win-win.
However – you’re not going to get the results you really want by searching the web for an MSP and picking one at random. No – you really need to know whether a particular MSP is going to provide exactly what your business needs. To this end, it’s important to research whether any MSP you’re interested in has worked with similar businesses, and also whether the MSP has similar growth plans to yours – as your business successfully grows, you want your chosen MSP to be able to keep pace.
At the end of the day, whichever MSP you go for needs to have an understanding of you and your business, and your current goals. Finding the correct MSP for your business can really make all the difference.
