This blog originally appeared on the GreatAmerica Financial Services website. Click here to read about more areas of interest in the office technology space.
In my day-to-day at Collabrance, I talk to managed services providers (MSPs) who have decided it may be time to outsource their managed IT. There are dozens of reasons why a business would decide to outsource, but most of the time, the need isn’t recognized until it’s too late. The benefits of outsourcing can be easy to see as an outsider looking in, but it’s not always so straightforward to the provider. Read on to see if outsourcing is the right move for you.
- You’re Struggling to Find IT Technicians
The primary reason any business should choose to outsource is to solve staffing challenges. The hiring process is long and complex and there are no guarantees; after a taxing search process and investment in training a new IT employee, you may find it challenging to retain them. Hiring can feel like a never-ending uphill climb, and the post-pandemic boom isn’t helping.
When you outsource with Collabrance, you gain an instant team of 40+ people working behind the scenes as a seamless extension of your business, without having to worry about the personnel challenges that can come with building an in-house team. Our technicians are customer-focused and ready to provide an exceptional IT service experience to your customers.
- You Don’t Have Time
“Hannah, I just don’t have time.” It’s a refrain I often hear. MSPs and solution providers may be curious about outsourcing but feel they haven’t had time to do the necessary research; they’re too busy resolving their own customer issues all day, or patching and updating workstations. Those are critical tasks, certainly, but getting bogged down in the daily minutia can distract from the big leaps necessary to move the needle on your business growth over time. Notably, the busiest MSPs are also the ones that can benefit the most from Collabrance’s services.
If you’re too busy to spend time finding new customers, evolving your offerings, and other profit-maximizing strategies, or if you intend to look into outsourcing “just as soon as you have time,” consider that time spent now will undoubtedly come back to you as future time saved. It may be time to outsource those smaller tasks so you can focus on growing your business.
- Outsourcing Is Too Expensive
Cost is typically the greatest factor to consider when evaluating the decision to outsource or not. And I get it! It’s easy to quickly rationalize away the option to outsource simply because of the costs involved.
That said, I encourage you to look at the cost of outsourcing not just as a monthly fee, but in comparison to the costs of hiring internally. Take a moment to think through the following hypotheticals.
Let’s say you have 100 workstations and five servers for which you’re providing full support.
How much does it cost to hire a dedicated resource to support that business?
Account for salary and benefits, sure, but also the time and cost of recruiting and training, plus things like salary increases over time. How do these costs compare to Collabrance’s monthly COGS?
Another way to look at this example is to assume an entry-level tech costs you $5,000 per month, all-in. Compare that to the number of endpoints you can support through Collabrance for the same cost – up to 100 users and 20 servers. Could an entry-level tech effectively support those same number of users and servers?
Building an in-house team comes with a number of ancillary burdens, too. Things like talent retention and HR support are all long-term responsibilities that come with hiring your own staff.
A Seamless Extension of Your Team
Providing customers with the best possible support is the central goal for any managed services provider. When you find a master managed service provider with successful standardized processes, you can improve your own customer experience and remote resolution rate. Collabrance boasts a 90-97% remote resolution rate (meaning your team never has to be involved) and we’re 100% U.S.-based. I’m sitting in our office in Cedar Rapids now, listening to our tier-one through tier-three techs work customer issues over the phone, and I’m keeping an eye on our service stats, projected on TV screens throughout the office.
Do the indicators I’ve presented here resonate? I’d love to chat more, if so. And before you think “I don’t have time,” remember – I’d contend you do.
