2020 was filled with challenges and many small and medium-sized businesses have been put through the ringer. With everything still going on, and many things causing obstructions to business-as-usual, getting out in front of the things you can control can pay great dividends for your business. Today, we’ll take a look at how the Managed Service Provider can help you stay on top of everything.
What It Means to Be Proactive
A lot of business is preventing major swaths of downtime. Seriously, the more downtime you have, the less you get done. There are plenty of risks inherent in doing business, so being more proactive allows you to mitigate them more effectively. Think about it, a problem pops up in your business, you immediately stop what you are doing to fix the problem, which takes you away from the productive endeavor you were working on. By being proactive, however, you ensure that no problem exists, making certain that your time is used productively. If the effectiveness of your business comes down to the amount of time you can focus on it, being interrupted with constant problems to fix destroys that focus.
Avoiding Downtime
Your business isn’t some publicly-traded, multi-national company. If the most lucrative businesses faced even an hour of downtime, they are wasting six, sometimes, seven figures worth of capital. That’s why they routinely write proactive measures into their processes.
For your business, the amount of wasted capital will be substantially less, but it might just be a larger percentage of revenue lost or capital spent. This can sink your business; and, it doesn’t just come from having to stop what you are doing. Downtime can be problematic in these ways as well:
- Customer frustration – Your relationships are extremely important. Too much downtime can have a major negative impact on your customer relations. Not only will customers be inconvenienced, they will let you know it. This time spent smoothing everything over can get extremely expensive, especially for the small business that needs their people to be productive, not engaging in costly support roles.
- Staff frustration – As hinted at in the previous paragraph, many small businesses rely on their staff to do more than one job. One of those jobs isn’t always fun. That is a customer service representative. Many employees–especially if they were hired for a specific purpose–tend to get fed up when they have to spend a large chunk of their work life supporting a faulty product.
- Exorbitant cost – Cost will always come with downtime. If you are paying people who should be building your product or service to sit around dealing with downtime, you are wasting valuable capital.
By being proactive you are effectively controlling the amount of downtime your organization has to deal with.
Being Proactive!
At AE Technology Group, a WheelHouse IT company, we offer a couple proactive services that could really make a difference in the profitability and efficiency of your business. They include.
- Remote monitoring – Your hardware and network need to be in tip-top shape for your staff to be as productive as they can be. By remotely monitoring your entire IT infrastructure, our knowledgeable technicians can find even the smallest incongruency. Doing so before downtime has a chance to rear its head and affect your business works to keep downtime to a minimum and productivity high.
- Cloud computing – Moving some of your IT to the cloud is a proactive move as public cloud resources are typically managed by the provider. Having a cloud provider take on the comprehensive management of your IT, while also gaining anytime, anywhere access, is a sound strategy for any-sized business.
- Patch management – Software vulnerabilities can be a major problem for your business if the wrong people find out about them. Our team keeps your software patched and up to date.
Building a proactive business strategy can help you get out in front of some really difficult problems. Call our IT experts today to learn more at (877) 771-2384.
