The Audacity Of Capacity: 3 Ways A Managed Service Provider Can Bulk Up Your Staff And Accelerate Your Business

One is the loneliest number. Just ask your in-house IT staff person—especially if they’ve been managing all of your enterprise’s IT functions as, essentially, a department of one.

“One person isn’t going to know everything,” says Jamie Wolbeck, Vice President of Operations at SUCCESS. “Even if you a found a great individual, there’s no way they could stay on top of all your organization’s technology needs.”

So, what’s a small-to-medium-sized business owner to do? It’s a question SUCCESS is well-equipped to address, with roughly a fifth of its current client roster comprised of businesses who have at least one IT person already on staff.

Oftentimes, Wolbeck says, he works with businesses who have internal IT staff but are frustrated with their productivity, or businesses at a tipping point in terms of their IT users and considering adding some IT staff to address their day-to-day tech needs. The issue, though, is that no one single employee is going to have the skill set or bandwidth to address every potential need.

This is where co-managed IT with a managed service provider like SUCCESS can be a game-changer, not only alleviating bottlenecks in your organization’s workflow, but positioning you for accelerated growth.

Whether supplementing your existing IT staff with MSP services, hiring an internal IT person for the first time, or simply exploring the option of co-managed IT, there are several ways using SUCCESS to increase your staff and capacity can put you in a position to accelerate growth.

Start with an assessment

The first thing SUCCESS will do is get the lay of the land, a state-of-the-state as far as your organization’s IT systems, staffing, and processes are concerned. This initial stock-taking is often truly eye-opening.

An in-depth assessment can reveal pain points in processes—maybe your existing IT staff is so tied up with handling help-desk style questions that they don’t have the time to put new procedures in place to streamline workflow, or focus on big-picture projects. Maybe it will show that your infrastructure is outdated, and changes need to be made before you can consider hiring someone to support it.

Whatever the case may be, the assessment will lay the foundation for illustrating how an MSP or a co-managed IT solution can beneficially supplement your existing staff to set up your organization for accelerated growth and success.

Stack your staff

Seeing SUCCESS conduct this initial assessment should not be a cause for alarm, even if you already have internal IT on site.

“We’re not there to displace internal resources; we’re there to help them accelerate,” Wolbeck explains. “That can mean instead of them doing all the help-desk work, they now get an opportunity to work on higher-level things, or internal business initiatives.”

The challenge for any organization is that it’s impossible to staff the whole stack of skills needed to keep your tech running smoothly, for security, infrastructure, networking, Microsoft 365 services, cloud services…you name it. That would take four or five people just to support every request that might show up, and that’s where partnering with SUCCESS and giving yourself the leverage of staff capacity can really add value.

When it comes to those in-depth skills, “We have it all,” Wolbeck says. “And then we give it an economy of scale, because we have enough people to manage that across all of our diverse client types.”

Take care of process, so you can focus on projects

Getting in the weeds with day-to-day processes can really trip up your IT staff by keeping them from initiating or completing projects that could really amplify your business’s overall productivity.

Think of it this way: process work is like doing the laundry or mowing the lawn—home maintenance that needs to reoccur to keep a household running smoothly. Project work is a one-off project like installing a home security system or building a deck: something that might not be necessary for operations, but which adds a great deal of overall value.

When IT staff is constantly pulled between processes and projects, it really disrupts their workflow and drastically affects overall productivity.

“When you’re always dealing with problems, you’re never getting to the point where you’re accelerating the business,” Wolbeck says. “So first and foremost, take care of the ‘below the line stuff’ so your IT staff can focus on the above-the-line objectives.”

One way Wolbeck has seen this play out time and again is in organizations’ use of the Microsoft Office 365 suite—it’s software the company already owns, and could be leveraged to accelerate a business through collaboration and streamlined workflows. But most small businesses don’t even get to use those tools, because their IT staff doesn’t have the time to implement those applications.

That is where SUCCESS can step in—let us take care of the day-to-day tasks like help desk and hardware upgrades, drawing on the breadth and depth of our own team’s expertise and tenure. This way, you can free up your IT staff to focus on the higher-level projects that really have the potential to move the needle on your business’s growth.