Signs You've Outgrown Your IT Support Provider

How does an IT support relationship go bad? It could be that you’ve outgrown your provider. It’s hard to know for sure if that’s the cause of your problems because the signs can be subtle. What’s more, the situation didn’t happen overnight but crept up on you slowly. Everything was great when you first started working together, but now you feel like you’re on a plateau, or maybe even going backwards. And that’s not just IT, but your whole business.

When you outgrow your IT provider, it means that your needs are more than they can handle. It could be that they don’t have enough staff, or the staff they have don’t have the level of expertise that you require. It could be that they aren’t equipped to assist in IT planning so every time you need to make an improvement, you’re scrambling.

It could also be that their business model doesn’t work for you anymore. When your organization was smaller, it might have been okay to just call for help when you need it and have someone internally who was good with technology do everything else.

Now that you’re a bigger company and you understand the role that technology plays in running your business, you need more than someone who will just fix something when it breaks. You need full blown IT and cybersecurity management.

Validate Your Feelings with Your Observations

Making a change can be hard even when you know it’s the right thing to do. It might be easier to take a step forward if your feelings are validated by any of these signs that you’ve outgrown your IT support provider.

Everything takes longer than you think it should.
IT keeps fixing the same things over and over again.
You have to bring new ideas to them.
IT improvements don’t generate the outcome you expect.
Your hardware and software are out of date.
Employees complain about unpredictable technology.
Employees complain about slow IT response.
You’re still relying on email instead of collaboration apps like Teams or Slack.
Departments and data aren’t integrated.
Documents get shared via email instead of through a cloud server.
Your backups have failed.
You can’t qualify for cybersecurity insurance.
You’ve had a cyber-attack.
Employees don’t trust that IT can help so they turn to each other to create workarounds for problems they’re not equipped to solve.

What to Do When You See the Signs

If your IT support company doesn’t have the capabilities and bandwidth that you need, it’s not likely that they’re going to change, so you need to find a different provider. What you need is an IT company that has the staff and the expertise to handle your needs and take you up to a level that you’ve never been to before and scale with you as you grow.

Here’s what to look for:

IT Strategy – Sophisticated IT planning and ideas for technology innovation.

Responsive Support – Quick response from people who know what to do.

IT Management – Proactive management and best practices for predictable IT.

Cybersecurity Management – Creation and implementation of a security strategy that matches up with your risk profile and tolerance.

The Outcome of a Right-Sized IT Provider = Productivity

When you start working with an IT company that can bring you all of the capabilities you need, you should expect the signs that we listed above to gradually disappear. There’s one more outcome that might surprise you and that’s increased productivity.

When you’ve been stuck in a bad IT support situation, you don’t realize how unproductive your “normal” has become. As your situation improves, your people will be enabled by technology instead of stumbling over it, and that will make a difference in how they serve your customers. That’s the kind of difference that can impact your bottom line.

Scale Your Business with Bellwether Managed Services

At Bellwether, our clients come to us because they need a guide to show them how they can use technology to grow and innovate. Get in touch and explore what this might look like for your company.

Schedule a free IT assessment.