How An IT Consultant Can Help You Scale Your Business
Growing a small business comes with challenges. As your business grows, your technology must grow as well. However, you probably don’t have the internal resources you need or the time to find the best ways to enhance your infrastructure. That’s why many SMBs turn to IT consultants to help them scale their business.
Hiring an IT consultant is becoming a common practice, and this area of consulting is seeing major growth. An IT consultant is an expert on how technology supports business. They can provide recommendations on various areas to scale – including a managed IT services model that will benefit you by assisting with hardware and software procurement.
Let’s look at five ways IT consultants can help you scale your business.
Purchasing help
By engaging an IT consultant, you’ll have the support of a professional that’s helped many small businesses scale. This consultant will be able to identify what hardware and software you need to support growth and to ensure you’re staying within your budget. This is key because the need to upgrade outdated IT infrastructure is the biggest driver of IT budget increases, according to a 2019 State of IT Report.
With someone assisting with procurement, you’ll receive guidance with purchasing decisions so you can keep costs under control. IT consultants also have relationships with the leading brands, which could lead to savings. They know about emerging technologies, so they can offer their feedback on if you should try something.
Access to a team of specialists
If you were to hire one in-house IT person to add to your team, it’s very unlikely they’d have the time or comprehensive experience necessary to upgrade all your tech – so it scales easily. When you work with a consulting firm, they offer you a team of specialists. Depending on your needs, there’s always someone there to help, from ensuring your SMB’s cybersecurity practices are evolving as you grow to help you launch or expand into the cloud.
Enhance productivity
Relying on an IT consulting firm to lead the way with preparing your infrastructure for scaling means that you and your employees can focus on core competencies, instead of dealing with bandwidth issues or a lack of cloud storage. When these major fires get put out, your team can get back to helping your business grow.
Work proactively, not reactively
If your current IT structure has you merely responding to challenges and issues as they happen, you won’t be ready to scale. Working with an IT consultant can change this dynamic. With a strong strategy that outlines how to transform your network into a more reliable one, you’ll be proactively managing your IT infrastructure so you’ll be ahead of possible incidents that could cause failures.
Eliminate bottlenecks and workarounds
One of the biggest inhibitors to scaling is inconsistency in your IT operations. You are probably dealing with bottlenecks somewhere in the ecosystem. Or maybe, you’ve introduced workarounds that were just supposed to be short-term fixes. An IT consultant will assess these areas and advise you on how to correct them permanently.
IT consultants can provide you a great advantage if you are ready to scale your IT. If you’d like to know more about how we help companies scale, contact us today to chat.
