Stimulus Tech Talk: Why Successful Business Outsource Their IT
There are a variety of reasons why a business would want to outsource their IT services and it's an important decision for any business owner. Managed IT services encompass a wide range of tasks, from managing software and hardware to ensuring network security and addressing technical issues. Managed IT services can offer a huge benefit to small to medium businesses who may not have the resources to handle all IT issues internally.
Advantages to Outsourcing IT Services
One of the key advantages of outsourcing IT services is access to a team of experts with diverse skill sets. Unlike hiring a single in-house IT person, an outsourced IT provider like Stimulus Technologies offers a range of professionals who can handle various aspects of your technology infrastructure. This means that you benefit from specialized expertise without the burden of managing and overseeing individual employees.
Vendor Management:
Managed IT services will also help with vendor management. Many businesses use a variety of technology vendors, from Microsoft for software to other specialized vendors for industry-specific applications. A managed services company like Stimulus Technologies acts as a central point of contact, liaising with these vendors and ensuring that your technology ecosystem functions seamlessly.
Choosing the Right Time to Outsource IT Support
Determining the right time out source IT will largely depend on the specific needs of the company. Once a company reaches five to ten employees it is likely a good time to assess IT needs. While smaller businesses may manage with occasional IT support, as a company grows, its technology needs become more complex, making the expertise of an IT service provider invaluable.
Are Technical Needs Addressed Faster With Outsourced IT Support?
Another significant benefit of outsourcing IT services is the speed at which technical issues can be addressed. Unlike relying on a single in-house IT person who may have limitations, an outsourced IT team like Stimulus Technologies can resolve problems promptly, with most issues being resolved on the same business day. This rapid response time ensures minimal downtime and maximum productivity for your business.
Tailored IT Solutions
Outsourced IT providers can offered solutions that are tailored to fit the unique needs of each client. Whether you require occasional IT support or comprehensive management of your entire technology infrastructure, an IT service provider can adapt its services to align with your business goals and budget. Outsourcing IT services is a strategic move that can greatly benefit businesses of all sizes. By partnering with a specialized IT provider, you gain access to a team of experts, ensure rapid issue resolution, and free up valuable time and resources to focus on your core business activities. If you're considering outsourcing your IT needs, it's essential to ask the right questions and seek a provider who understands your specific requirements.
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Stimulus Tech Talk: Why Successful Business Outsource Their IT transcript
Stimulus Tech Talk: Why Successful Businesses Outsource Their IT
Wed, Sep 20, 2023 7:45AM • 21:59
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
company, technology, clients, software, working, stimulus, manage, ensure, service, business, issues, employees, vendors, expertise, small business, contact, talking, team, outsource, handle
SPEAKERS
Intro, Sherry Lipp, Nathan Whittacre
Intro 00:00
You're listening to Stimulus Tech Talk. A conversation based podcast created by stimulus technologies covers a range of topics related to business and technology.
Sherry Lipp 00:14
Welcome to Stimulus Tech Talk, I am Sherry Lipp, marketing manager here at Stimulus Technologies. And I'm here today with our CEO, Nathan Whittacre. And we're going to be talking a little bit kind of about what we do at Stimulus Technologies and how managed services can help increase productivity. Welcome, Nathan.
Nathan Whittacre 00:34
Thanks. It's always great to be here.
Sherry Lipp 00:39
To get started on this, let's talk a little bit about what type, what are, what are managed IT services? And what does that mean? What are we offering?
Nathan Whittacre 00:51
You know, I was just talking to the manager over that department of our company. And you know, it's an industry term that we often use, and some people are like, what is managed services, I don't understand what that means. And you know, that's the tough part of these industry terms is not everybody understands other than if you're in the industry. But basically, what it is, is you're outsourcing your technology services to a company that specializes in it. So Stimulus Technologies, we specialize in helping companies run their technology infrastructure. Everything from making sure that their desktops and laptops and everything work well for the employees. So managing the software, helping them with any issues that they're having with the software and applications that they use. Also making sure that the infrastructure is working correctly. So that handles the networking portion of it so that the devices, whether they're wired or wireless, can communicate with each other. And with the outside world, we also manage and monitor servers to make sure that they're performing well, that there's no hardware issues, so the software is running and working correctly. And then all the way up to the firewall to ensure that you know, there's protection on the on the outside of the network and can communicate with the internet too. There's additional services that we do that we monitor and you know, make sure that you know, the Windows and Mac software and the applications that are associated are up to date. And working correctly. So unpatched orunupdated software is a big security problem. So our software ensures that those things are happening that software is getting up to date, we also do regular maintenance on the machines. If you remember back in the day, you had to manually defrag your drive or clean up temporary files and things like that. Our software automates that entire process, so that it's, you don't have to do it manually anymore. And then, you know, obviously, if there's any issues, we get alerts, and it goes into our ticketing system, and we we take care of those automatically, or if clients call us up, we can help them with any of the issues that they're having. And it goes a little bit beyond that, too. We work with other vendors and, you know, manage the software licensing and work with other vendors that are associated with the technology inside your company. So basically, we're we are an outsourced IT or technology department for small to midsize businesses.
Sherry Lipp 03:33
And that kind of leads into my next question. So your managed provider, us, would work, what kinds of technology vendors do we help manage?
Nathan Whittacre 03:49
So a lot of companies that we work with have Microsoft Office 365. So we are a partner with Microsoft and help manage those licenses, and manage that software. Also, you look at like if you have anything else connected to your technology. So if you have, for example, a surveillance system or telephone system, or you know, copiers and printers that are managed by other companies, we work with those vendors we coordinate, we'd like to be the central point of contact between all the vendors. And then for a lot of businesses, they have some type of line of business application. So if you're dental office, you might be using something like Dentrix If you're a law firm, there's special software that you use, a construction company, there's special software you use. And so we become familiar with those pieces of software. But more importantly we try to be the advocate for the client with the company and ensure that everything is working properly for them. So if they have issues, we come in, and then contact the vendor And so we can explain and talk on tech terms rather than, you know, having your software vendor, your hardware vendor that you're working with, talk in their acronyms, we can translate for you and make sure that we implement what works inside your company. So we try to be that central point of contact for all those vendors. And outside companies.
Sherry Lipp 05:22
And going along with that, so we would handle licensing too for software?
Nathan Whittacre 05:30
So, so in the world of Microsoft, we handle that software, there's certain software that they want to, you know, manage with a company directly. So, for example, a line of business application, we could keep track of the software, but it is up to the company themselves to make sure that they're, you know, the vendor relationship is going well, but we help manage that interface between the two. So that's, that's where we come in is kind of the partner with the with our client, to ensure that their licenses are up to date, they, you know, maintain that good relationship with their vendors.
Sherry Lipp 06:08
So you had said, small to medium businesses before? What what point do you think a small business owner really needs to think about managed service, as opposed to doing everything themselves?
Nathan Whittacre 06:22
So that's definitely over the years, because as technology has gotten better, especially for smaller businesses, you know, there's a lot of products out there that allow a small business to really act like a big business. And so we generally start when companies grow from to about five to 10 employees is a good time to contact us, you know, business with just one or two people working out of their house. Although we'd love to help them, a lot of times, they can do a lot of the things for themselves. And there's a lot of online companies that can assist you with, you know, small technical things, or just going directly to the companies themselves for that help. So our general starting point is about five employees, and, and up to larger organizations. So we have some mid sized small businesses that are hundreds of employees, maybe up to about five to 700 employees is generally where we, where we go to and then after that, there's a strong need for internal IT to take over. And then we can partner with internal it at that point to to offer some specialization.
Sherry Lipp 07:41
And so you want somebody this kind of really thinking about this, what what do you think are the biggest benefits to a business? When we're talking about productivity and keeping the business going? What do you think are the biggest benefits of going with an outsourced it?
Nathan Whittacre 07:58
So there's, I guess, there's two ways to answer that question. If you're comparing against having an inside IT person, and you're a small business, let's say, you know, your company about 25-30 employees at least, and you know, maybe previously your office manager or yourself or somebody inside your company was handling the IT work, you know, certainly there's two ways to go, you could hire somebody that's inside, that is your IT guy, your internal IT guy, or you could outsource it to a company. So just kind of going down the path of you hire somebody inside, then you have to manage them. So you have to find somebody inside your company that you think knows what they're doing. And you might not have the expertise to hire somebody good. And then you have to manage them have to know if they're doing a good job or not. And for a lot of the business owners that I talked to, they struggle with managing their IT person, because you know, the common thing I hear is, I don't know what they do all day. I mean, they just come in and do stuff, and then they leave and I don't know what they do. And the second part of that is, especially in a small business, call it you know, in that 20 to 50 person range, you're not hiring a top line IT person here, because a lot of the things that they're doing is, you know, installing computers, maybe, you know, putting toner in the printer. They're doing a lot of things that are basic. We call them in our industry like level one tasks. And for somebody that has a lot of expertise that maybe has some degrees and certifications and a lot of experience. They might not want to do you know, crawl under desks or you know, open up printers to put toner in there. You know, things like that. So it's hard to find somebody who's willing to do it all. So that's why a lot of small businesses go to an outside IT firm. Because inside our company, we have different levels of technicians. Some that are just, you know, basic helpdesk technicians that are installing software, you know, installing computers or doing the basic networking, they're learning and growing themselves. And we have teams of people, multiple tiers up that assist them when the, the things need to get escalated. So you don't want the same person that's, you know, installing toner in your printer. Also, you know, managing the security on your server, it's a very different technique. And so, as our company has grown, we have, you know, wide variety of expertise inside the business. So that's the biggest advantage of going with and outside IT firms, especially for that smaller business is you you, you get the expertise, you get the entire team that comes in, and we manage them. So you know, we inside our company have been in technology for a long time, over 28 years for myself, a lot of people on my team are well over 20 years in technology. And so we know what's right, what does, right, and we have a lot of policies and procedures in place for our clients to ensure that their technology is working for them. If you just have one IT guy, one person inside your company, or, you know, you have your friend's son that comes over and does stuff every once a while you're not getting that threat and depth of expertise as you would with a company like ours, once you get up to a certain size, so you know, call it a few 100 employees, you might have the budget. And we need to have multiple people inside the company that have that expertise, you might have a level one person that's handling those hardware issues, and you might have a system administrator that's handling the higher level issues. And then you might just outsource, let's say the security side of things or the networking, you know, the expertise that they don't have. So that's where these larger companies partner with us, in certain aspects to bring in that expertise.
Sherry Lipp 12:00
So can is are the services tailored, for particular for business, you know, an individual business or business type, you know, like industry?
Nathan Whittacre 12:15
Certainly, we have different levels of products for different tiers of companies. So for example, a very small business might need to call us every once in a while, but they want our tools on their computers, to ensure that those updates are happening, that there's any alerts, if there's any issues, and that they have somebody to call when they do have issues. So we have, you know, tier service for a company that doesn't need us often. But what's that, you know, card in their pocket of somebody to call if there's something that's going on, all the way up to our full service clients that, you know, we're handling all aspects of their technology, we, we have a seat in their management team, that we're discussing their their plans for the company and making sure that the technology fits in with them. So and then we you know, we do everything on site off site and handle all their technology needs. So there's a range of products and we tailor our services around what the company needs. And a lot of it deals with how much they're using technology in their company, and also the company size. You generally as companies have more complex environments, or they grow in size, they have more need for us to be interfacing with them more often.
Sherry Lipp 13:36
And, you know, does having this type of service reduce the amount of time someone, like a CEO or an operations manager might have to spend with it? Or is it? You know, there's some companies that want to be hands on, and some that are like, they don't even want to think about it?
Nathan Whittacre 13:53
Yeah, there's certainly it's an interesting thing. So we have all varieties, right. So I've probably, if I was my own client, I would want to be heavily involved, I like knowing what's going on in all parts of my business. And we have plenty of clients that are like that they're really like being intimately involved and making those decisions. And we love those clients because they're trying to learn and grow themselves and share the technologies that integral part of their business. Some of our clients, the owner or CEO of the company, might not be technical, and they just want to ensure that it's taken care of. And so we build that trust with the owner. And they allow us to help them make the right decisions and for their company and ensure that technology is never a problem for them. And oftentimes in those situations, we're working with an operations manager or maybe an office manager, you know, medical director or something like that inside the office that's, you know, our primary point person of contact. So it is a variety. But in the end, as I say to most of our clients, you know, you didn't go into the IT business, you'd be one of our competitors. Obviously, if you did, you went into business as a, as a dentist or a lawyer or, you know, car dealer, whatever it may be, your primary focus is being the best inside your business, and IT should serve you. And so that's what we're there for is to help our clients make the best use of IT. And, and really, it should be seamless inside their company, technology should help their company grow, help solve their problems, and, you know, ensure that they're very competitive, and, you know, hopefully save some money. I mean, a lot of this. Our goal in our company is to increase productivity. If we think about the way that computers were, or our work was done 50-60 years ago, it was manual labor, I think I shared this story in my book that you got to envision, like when they were designing rockets to go to the moon, you know, it was a bunch of people with white shirts and ties sitting behind large desks with hand drawing plans of doing hand engineering and how different it is to walk into an office today, you know, everybody's sitting behind the computer and being so much more productive when their technologies working. And so our goal as a company is ensuring that the technology is working as seamlessly and and effectively as possible so your employees can be productive, not frustrated with with their technology, and can serve you the best. That's That's what our primary goal is.
Sherry Lipp 16:34
And I think one of the the biggest question, especially somebody who's at a point where they're deciding between an in house person or outsourced is how quickly will a problem be taken care of, you know, if they're, if they're outsourcing it, is it just as fast as if they had somebody internal?
Nathan Whittacre 16:52
So that's a, I guess, a two part question again. So the first part is, is you know, people that want an internal IT person, you know, want to have, Hey, John, come over to my desk and fix it right now. And, and sometimes that's, that's great, you know, that if, if John is sitting in his desk, he's not doing something else, you know, you're getting that immediate attention. But with John's on vacation, which, or you know, wants to sleep or wants to go home, you know, it might not be available. And so, we've run into issues, when there's just one IT person, one technology person in the company, or you outsource to a company that just has one person that's operating, the service might be great, most of the time, but when it's not, it's hard, you know, they want to take a vacation, it might be a week before they can get back to you. I've met so many IT people that are really frustrated, because they feel like they can never sleep and never take a vacation. They're always getting interrupted when they're just a one man show. And it's not a great quality of life. And they often burn out and, you know, change careers or do something different or jump jump position. So, you know, with our company, or any company that has a larger staff is, you know, when when there's an issue, we have a team that takes care of it. And something that's a little bit different about Stimulus is we assign a team to our customers. And so you're generally dealing with the same people every time you contact us. And so they become familiar with your business. But we also have a lot of processes in place and documentation and information. So if somebody else has to handle it, let's say your team is on vacation, there's enough documentation information that it can be taken care of the same way, you just might be dealing with a different individual. So we strive inside our company to take care of issues very quickly, most of our tickets are closed out within the same business day, over 50% of them are closed on the same business day. Because, you know, we understand if you if you you or your employees can't work, that's a loss of productivity. And we want to make sure that you know, your team is getting back to work if there's an issue as quickly as possible. So we you know, we have people that are working on these tickets, trying to resolve them quickly as possible. And that's something that we monitor very closely as our response time our response rate we have service level internal service level monitoring, to ensure that we're hitting those those targets so we discuss that when you come on board with Stimulus is what those targets are and if they're missed, and then when we do our business reviews with our clients, we look at those numbers and say if we're failing or if we're succeeding in those and and I look at him as the CEO, that's something that's really important to me to ensure that we're being very responsive. Again, that's our job is to solve things as quickly as possible.
Sherry Lipp 19:54
All right, and I can say we have an IT Buyers Guide them that I'll put a link for it has 21 questions that you might be thinking about or should be thinking about for IT services. And Nathan, what do you suggest for the next steps, if somebody's interested in talking about this with us, or if they're outside of our area, maybe what they can do?
Nathan Whittacre 20:15
So So you know for us, the common thing would be is to contact our team, we do a an assessment, just like when you go into visit a doctor, you don't want to walk into the doctor's office, and then him hand you, you know, a bottle of pills and say, take this without even talking to them. And so, you know, when you when you talk to us, we're going to do an assessment of your systems, and make sure that we understand what your needs are, and then tailor our proposal around the client's needs. And there's some times that we're not the right fit for a company. So we periodically say, you know, you might want to contact this provider or you're doing a great job on your own, and it should stay that way. Most of the time, we can help. But we need to make that assessment to ensure that we're doing the right thing. So if you're ever you know, if you're out of one of our service areas, we can't help you. That's one thing that I would suggest you doing is you know, whoever you contact should assess your situation and give you recommendations on how you can improve your network your security, your operations, and you know, ensure that there's a good fit between the two of you so that IT Buyer Guide is the Sherry mentioned is a great thing, just if you're shopping around whether you contact us or somebody else. It's the it's the right questions to ask to make those choices.
Sherry Lipp 21:46
All right. Well, thanks so much, Nathan, and thank you everybody for listening.
