To Many Cooks in the Kitchen

Yesterday a friend and long time partner referred us to a client who was in a bit of situation. I use them as an example here as their situation is a far to often occurrence. Long story short: for their relatively small two-site company the owner had a handful of IT firms, tech guys and random sub-contractors working on their IT. To many cooks in the kitchen creates a mess!

Cost is the first usual suspect for these type of situations. Firms with lower skilled staff or freelancers without overhead of a larger company can offer lower hourly costs which can be attractive to an uninformed client. They’ll have a freelancer or moonlighter come to work on their systems on evenings and weekends. Also we’ll tend to see the tween age relative of someone who works there. However with these lower skilled workers usually comes a lower breadth of skills, requiring them to have others (attempt to) fill in the blanks to complete the job.

Stemming from cost, competency (or lack there of) is the 2nd most common reason we see. For one of our niche markets, we find this most often in IT Service firms that don’t really support Mac’s, but they have someone they refer clients to, or subcontracts that out to another firm. This is usually where the afore-mentioned tween runs into trouble too. Working with firms that don’t meet your core needs will cost you more money due to the need to constantly bring in others to complete the job they don’t have on staff.

All that being said, there is nothing wrong with having multiple IT firms work for your business; just as long as they focus in different arenas. An analogy I often refer to is to the medial profession. You have a GP that is very well-trained in core medicine, but is not an expert in any one speciality, but knows enough to know when need to see someone with more focus. Then there are specialists that you work with on an as needed, case by case basis. When looking for an IT firm, find one that is a great GP, one you trust and is trusted by those you trust. They must look after the core technology of your business (servers, desktops, laptops, networks, printers, connectivity, communication, etc). Have them refer you to work with specialist they trust: Web-designers, SEO specialists, database developers, etc.. Have your GP set the strategy for your company and execute that with them and their partners. With to many GP’s in the exam room all they’re doing is stepping on each others toes and racking up your bill.