“IT Support is not in my job description”

“There’s a queue of IT problems at my door each day”

Whilst speaking with SME business owners, Finance Directors and other IT decision-makers at initial prospect meetings, I am increasingly hearing statements like these.

What is particularly interesting is that the people who say these things are usually outsourcing their IT to a third-party support business or Managed Service Provider – that’s why they are wanting to speak with me.

Why do they say and experience these things when they are paying good money to someone else to take care of them?

At this point, I’m slightly reminded of my Dad.

Whenever he hires someone to do any work around the house like decorating, for example, he can’t help but get involved in the job. Most people may want to clear the room of furniture before a painter arrives but helping lay down dust-sheets and offering to do some cutting-in is not what most people have in mind when they get someone in to give their walls a fresh lick of paint. But my Dad always gets involved. It’s likely to be for one of the following reasons;

Perhaps he wants to be helpful, maybe he feels embarrassed he can’t do the whole job himself. It could even be that he doesn’t fully trust the person he’s employed to do the job. Of course, he could also just be a bit daft as he repeatedly does it.

The difference between my Dad and the people I speak to in prospect meetings is that they’re certainly not daft. They’re usually experts in their field who simply want to get on with what they do best. Dad chooses to contribute to the work he is paying someone else to do whereas potential customers usually don’t - they get sucked into it or have become conditioned to accept that their current IT provider just isn’t going to do things properly. Like anything in life, it’s amazing what one can normalise over time.

That queue of problems at the door, chasing support tickets that never seem to get resolved…I’ve even heard of senior people doing their own Google searches, looking up how to fix things for themselves because “it’s quicker”. All the while, the monthly bill for IT support gets paid and, usually, with a diminishing service. The truth is, if it’s too cheap, the service simply cannot be delivered.

That leads to the question – What’s the true cost of IT support? Scratch the surface and it is way beyond that monthly bill that looked much cheaper than the other quotes gathered when choosing an IT provider.

Usually at this point, people in my industry start talking about downtime and how much that costs a business. Well, you likely already have the down-time and have got used to it. Look at it another way – how much time are YOU spending on IT problems? Give yourself an hourly rate and it likely dwarfs the amount of money you pay a low-service IT provider.

If any of the scenarios above resonate with you, apart from, maybe, helping with the decorating, you’re clearly not alone.

It doesn’t have to be like that, though.

Grant McGregor never claims to be the cheapest provider of IT Support – nor the most expensive. Customers are usually drawn to us because they value their time and have reached a breaking point of trust with their current IT provider. They stay with us because we deliver a step up to a real IT Partner who delivers what they promised at that initial meeting. Remember that meeting with your current provider? What’s different between then and now?

At the start of this article I referenced just two of the things that I hear frequently. Both came from the Finance Director of a recently on-boarded support partner for us at Grant McGregor. She had a lot of the frustrations detailed in this article but if you asked her now, she’d say that she’d enjoying being a Finance Director again.

If you’d like to get back to your real work, give us a call on 0808 164 4142 or drop a short line to info@grantmcgregor.co.uk and we can have a very informal chat about how your working day could and should be looking with proper IT support.

Alternatively, if you’d like to speak to one of our existing customers who are back to doing what they do best, we can arrange that for you, too.