Is It Worth Hiring a Tech Guy?

Why a hiring an IT Tech company may be best for your small business

Your company’s computers are critical to your bottom line. Security, maintenance, data, analytics: all are highly specialized fields that every company needs to value in order to stay competitive.

But is it better to hire full time employees or a qualified, tech support company? Here are some reasons why hiring a tech company may be the best bet for your small business!

Finding one fully qualified IT professional 

Tech support is a broad category of tasks that are important to maintaining a functional, profitable small business. Information technology is an even wider category. Beyond this, different company’s may have vastly different needs when it comes to hiring a new IT professional. For example, a tech company will need several full time data security experts when a medium sized florist shop may only required a part time general security expert. Generally speaking, for small to midsize businesses, the bare minimum that is  needed is security, computer maintenance, computer system analysis, and computer network engineering. Rest assured, this requires a very broad array of understanding and skill.

This mean that if you’re looking to hire an IT Professional to tackle all of these essential tasks, you’ll be looking for an industry veteran. These are the people who are more qualified to be Chief Technical Officer for mid-sized tech companies than they are for being a small business’ tech guy. If you’re looking for a full time employee to do general IT roles at your business, your salary would probably have to be pretty high to get a truly qualified individual even listening.

Hiring an IT team

When it comes to hiring a full time team of tech professionals, you can still run into the same problem as with hiring just one just okay employee; prohibitive cost.

A team of skilled IT professionals working full time is going to cut deep into your bottom line. Furthermore, smaller/family owned business may not have enough work. A lot of IT work is front ended and sporadic. Hours of work go into implementing a tailored made security system for example, but major security threats don’t appear on any sort of routine. Hackers and scammers certainly aren’t going to be working the standard 9-5, 5 days a week work schedule. This is true for broader IT too. Many of the jobs require a lot of work upfront to implement, however additional work — whether that be general maintenance, fixing a failed network, or optimization — will be more regular but equipment doesn’t exactly break on a fixed schedule.

If you higher full-time IT employees, chances are some of their pay is going to be wasted in the hours in between when problems arise where they simply don’t have all too much to do. Meaning that when it comes to IT, it is perfectly suited for hiring an outside company. 

Either way, it’s expensive

To get a fully qualified individual or team, you’re going to have to cough up some hefty checks for jobs that might not always have something to do. Only for them to then suddenly have way too much to do when a system crashes or a hacking scare pops up. Company’s IT needs can often go from zero to full throttled in the matter of minutes. IT work requires variability.

You need a highly capable team, who can quickly jump in and get your company’s essential tech back up and running as soon as an issue arises without also wasting thousands on untapped working hours. An outside contractor provides exactly that. A great contractor provides you with access to around the clock support from competent experts for any issue, without you having to outbid a startup out of their CTO, or waste money on paying a team of full time employees to do tasks that pop up sporadically.

The Bottom Line (and good news)

The bottom line is is that a good IT services company can only survive by focusing relentlessly on their client’s best interest. When you hire an employee to do the same job, you don’t get that same assurance.

It’s likely that an individual IT employee might have to just sit around and not do much until all of the sudden at 6:30 on a Tuesday, your entire system crashes. Why would you hire a full-time building inspector when your company only needs somebody to come in every now and then to make sure everything is structurally sound?

Put another way, why would you hire a builder who is only qualified in flooring to make sure your plumbing system is in check? Or would you be inclined to track down and pay a six-figure salary to some construction guru who knows everything but just ends up sitting around for most of the time? Of course not.

Doesn’t it make more sense to hire a construction company who has a widely skilled team that comes in and ensures everything is up to code and fixes things when problems arise?  

For these reasons, hiring an IT services company is probably the way to go for most small businesses. As for quality IT Tech support, there is no better company than Tech Masters. For over a decade, they have been handling all of the It Tech needs of small business just like yours. For fantastic work, at a fair price, contact Tech Masters.