Many businesses find themselves allocating their time for IT in a particular way—70 percent to maintenance, with only 30 percent dedicated to innovation and development. For real growth, the opposite is far preferable.
Fortunately, you can embrace better IT by simply reallocating some of your resources. Let’s explore how.
Why is a 70/30 Split a Bad Growth Strategy?
Well, let’s consider what it looks like in practice. Let’s assume that everything you do to innovate can be seen as a step forward, while everything you do to maintain your business is either a step back or staying in the same place… or, in other words, a positive movement, a negative movement, or no movement at all.
Let’s assume that a negative movement has a value of -1, no movement has a value of 0, and a positive movement has a value of +1. In the best-case scenario, you’re looking at 0+0+1… no movement plus no movement plus positive movement, or just +1. More likely, it could just as easily be -1+0+1, or 0, or even -1+(-1)+0, for a net loss.
Mind you, this is also assuming that everything is going optimally… after all, you’re maintaining your business in this scenario. This assumes that nothing major goes wrong.
There are other downsides, too.
- First, you’re likely limiting all the talent and skill of your team (whom you hired for these talents and skills, mind you) by having them simply keep the status quo. Do you really expect to grow when your entire team is focused almost exclusively on what’s right in front of them?
- Second, this strategy is also defined by a more reactive posture. If you aren’t surging forward, you’re effectively falling behind, as you’ll have more ground to cover if you ever try to catch up with your competition.
- Third, you’re effectively painting a target on your business for cyberattacks. Dynamic companies are inherently harder to draw a bead on, as security improvements are commonly a part of their forward efforts. The opposite is true of those who remain complacent.
So, if a 70/30 split isn’t feasible, what is a good balance? You can’t abandon all maintenance activities, after all.
Unless you have someone handling the maintenance on your behalf, that is.
We Help Businesses Switch 70/30 to 30/70
It’s that simple: we provide outsourced IT support and services to ensure businesses have more resources to devote to business growth and momentum. Instead of your spending 70% of your time on maintenance and the remaining 30% on innovation, we flip it, so that only 30% of your time—the time we cover, via our proactive services—is required to keep things running. The remaining 70% is available for you to innovate. We help with that part, too.
How We Make This Possible
First, we address some of the root causes of the need for maintenance and correct them. Some examples of how we do so include…
- Switching to proactive and preventative maintenance, rather than reactive, through automated monitoring tools.
- Taking a lot of the IT burden off you and turning to cloud providers to handle the busy work.
- Adjusting your business network so it is easier to fix any issues that pop up… which happens much less often.
At the same time, we focus on ensuring your business IT is prepared for the future. This usually includes…
- Investing in more strategic and modern cybersecurity, like zero-trust security measures and monitoring for advanced persistent threats
- Automating a lot of your workflow, freeing up more time to innovate and develop your core business ideas
- Setting aside some funds to invest in tools that encourage revenue generation, like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Why Allow IT to Cost You When It Could Be Driving Profits?
As the old saying goes, you have to spend money to make money. We just hope you spend it with us so we can help your business grow as much as it can. Reach out to us at PHONENUMBER to learn more about a partnership with us as your provider.