You Need an Experienced IT Professional

When your business grows to a certain size, the need for IT help becomes apparent. You spend too much time fixing computers and updating software and too little time working to grow your business. It is simply not economical for your business, and, frankly, you simply don’t like to do it.

Once you hit this point, you have a few options to find IT help. Many business owners have the thought of hiring a full-time experienced IT professional to take care of it. The problem lies in the fact that hiring an experienced IT professional is expensive. Their solution: hire an IT guy out of college, or someone new to the industry, as they are much cheaper.

Hiring novice IT help is a big mistake for any business.

There are many different reasons this will come back to haunt your business, from incorrectly “cleaning” the wiring closet to improperly backing up data. There are, however, three primary issues that will come along with hiring novice IT help.

Expertise from an Experienced IT Professional

The biggest problem with hiring cheap IT help is that the person you hire will have little to no experience. Each problem that your business has, whether that is a mouse breaking or a server crashing, is completely new. Without the background experience, this causes many novice IT professionals to make mistakes – mistakes that can cost your business thousands.

Even if you manage to hire a very-competent-but-still-cheap IT professional (good luck), they are still only one person. Even if they have been in the industry for decades, it’s only possible for them to have had experience with so many technologies. They may, for example, be very capable helping with Macs, but if your business needs to move to Windows then you are out of luck. To get around this, it is best to hire Managed IT Companies. This way, you have a large group of experienced IT professionals with diverse experiences backing up your systems.

Trust but Verify

One of the biggest (and hardest to learn) lessons in the IT world is to trust but verify. This is a lesson learned only be getting burned time and time again. Trust but verify means, when you have to wipe a computer, taking the time to ask the owner if they backed it up. Too often, many new IT professionals will assume the “trust” part of the equation without the verification to confirm it. Trust without verification results in a blank stare when they ask the computer owner for the backup.

It’s not about having a lack in trust in everyone, it is more so having the understanding that things happen. There are a dozen different things that could have happened during a backup that may have caused it not to work. Lessons like this can be very costly to learn, but they’re invaluable once learned.

Taking on too much

Starting out as an ambitious young tech, you tend to put too much on your plate. Instead of breaking down a single project into multiple steps, a new tech will take on 3 projects and do them simultaneously. Often they will underestimate the investment and expertise required to do projects – and that’s when they’ll get overwhelmed.

An overwhelmed IT professional means mistakes, and mistakes cost money.

Doing too much simultaneously can also create more problems. In IT everything is interconnected, so a minor change to the server could render a piece of software completely useless. When doing one project in a calculated and organized manner, this is okay, because it is easier to identify what changes caused the issue. If multiple projects are going on at the same time, however, it is very difficult to identify what caused what. You may end up with more problems than when you started.

An experienced IT professional or IT team, on the other hand, has the experience to realistically estimate the time requirement of projects and can, therefore, forecast more effectively.

Clearly, hiring cheap IT help is not the solution to your IT problem. An experienced full-time hire is probably not the answer either. They are expensive and they will quickly become an overwhelmed bottleneck.

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The best approach? A managed IT service. You get a dedicated engineer backed by a team of engineers all with a breadth of experiences and expertise. Find a company with years of experience, and you will be able to remove the headache of daily IT problems.