Outsourcing – A case study on – The Keller Group!
I am no different from any other business owner - I have a lot of competing priorities for my time, my thoughts and especially my cash! I personally fell into the saving money trap with our firm IT.
I know how to do it
I am far from an IT professional, but I felt like I had enough knowledge of computers to just get help occasionally with problems that I could not resolve. Anytime an issue came up, I was there to resolve it – and many times I could get things back up and running. I didn’t always know why things got fixed as I was a master of “try turning it off and on again” in an attempt to resolve the issues.
As our firm grew and we needed to be able to work from home, things started not working so well. The issues we faced were more complex than my weak understanding of IT. IT issues might often eat up hours of my time – but I was saving money!
Then came the office move and I wanted to get this right from the beginning. I got a recommendation from a colleague and contacted a proper IT firm. I asked them for help, and they came out to our office, looked at our setup and was not surprised that it was not optimal. I know that – I just need to know how much to fix it and move on.
We don’t do “break-fix”
That was the answer I got in response to the price question. When something breaks, you call someone to fix it, right? That is what I was doing. He indicated their firm would manage it for us but they don’t like just fixing broken things. That is when I realized he was selling exactly what we do. I agreed to let them manage it and they got to work.
Benefits of outsourcing that we discovered
True - I have a new expense every month that I didn’t have before. However, I don’t have to spend my time trying to resolve issues that are NOT my area of expertise. These are the benefits we found:
I (or my staff) don’t spend time fixing computers; we call their helpdesk.
I don’t spend time worrying about the things I don’t know how to fix.
There is a cost, but it is far less than the opportunity cost of my time to work on my business.
Everything is properly maintained – minimizing downtime and improving our security.
This is not intended to promote IT outsourcing rather to show how outsourcing certain things brings a level of professionalism and expertise to a business without the full staff cost.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Have you ever spent a lot of time or money resolving accounting issues you don’t completely understand?
Have you ever worried about when you could get a decent set of financial statements to your bank?
Is your tax preparer slow to get the taxes done because of a lot of clean-up work?
Does the idea of proactive help and keeping everything properly maintained sound good?
If the answer to any of those questions is a yes, outsourced accounting just might work for you.