Don't need an IT guy?

Don't need an IT guy?

MANAGEMENT by Francis X. Gilpin | Associate Editor

What if the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce held a seminar on information technology for small business owners and nobody came – except IT consultants?

It almost happened last month. One lonely small business owner showed up, along with a swarm of IT professionals.

The event's sponsor, local IT consultant Terry P. Hedden Jr., quickly sized up the crowd and ditched the idea of giving a sales pitch to his competitors.

Instead, Hedden made a plea for more cooperation. Hedden and other speakers say small businesses need to be educated about how to find competent help with their data processing and telecommunications systems.

"The real competitor in this market is ignorance," says Hedden. "It's companies who don't understand the difference between Billy Bob Wilbur who slams his trunk and comes to work, no insurance, no experience, no certification. He's actually going to hold that company back in the end."

Rey Oliver, who formed his own IT company in 2003 after 26 years at Verizon Communications Inc., says he wasn't surprised at the low turnout by small business owners, who make up most of his customers.

"A lot of them don't think they have a problem, at the executive level, until they have a problem," says Oliver. "A lot of the small businesses with five to 10 employees, they don't realize they have a problem until they call someone for a break/fix. You show up and their systems are shot."

Oliver says IT functions don't get the attention they deserve at the smallest of small businesses. "You talk to them about who's keeping the computers," says Oliver, and the answers aren't encouraging. "The brother-in-law, the guy who went off to college."

ReyO Enterprises LLC, Oliver's Valrico company, usually works with clients that have fewer than 30 employees and annual revenue of less than $1 million. Typically, owners of companies that size don't think they can afford a full-time and permanent IT staffer.

Oliver agrees with them. He says a computer desktop support staffer with three years of network experience, who is familiar with common office productivity applications and can trouble-shoot connection and printer problems, commands $40,000 a year, including benefits. A network administrator expects to be paid considerably more.

But Oliver says small business owners also don't think they can afford to hire a company such as ReyO Enterprises. Oliver says they're wrong there. Small business owners seldom quantify their losses when computer and other systems go on the blink, he says.

To approximate the impact, Oliver cites a hypothetical company with $1 million of gross annual revenue. If the company's systems go down for just 1% of annual work time, about 21 hours, Oliver calculates that the enterprise will lose around $10,000 in revenue over the course of the year.

Patricia Dominguez, founder of Triage Partners LLC, plows a different field in IT consulting. Her 3-year-old Tampa company focuses mostly on large companies, supplying employees to work on specific IT projects for a limited time.

"I'm on the people side," says Dominguez, who previously brokered funding from private equity firms and venture capitalists to startup companies.

Dominguez, too, emphasized the importance of minimizing downtime at work. She likes to find ways to get employees at her client corporations to buy into new technologies.

"There's no such thing as a software upgrade anymore," she says. "Everything is a service disruption."

Through preparation and training, Triage Partners attempts to avoid lost productivity when computer programs are changed out. Her goal is to prevent employees from spending their first two hours on the morning after a software installation figuring out where their email and documents went.

Dominguez says she can usually find the right temporary IT worker from her proprietary database faster than clients using online employment bulletin boards.

"I have had customers tell me they've gone out on boards. They've decided they're going to do their own search. They're doing Monster. They're doing whatever they need to do," Dominguez says. "They came up with 100 resumes. By the time they went through the 100 resumes, they were actually down to maybe five."

After interviewing the five face to face, she says, "they were back to the resumes."

The sticking point is frequently a tech whiz whose appearance or attitude isn't suitable for a particular job site, according to Dominguez.

"There is nothing worse than having the skill set, but the culture doesn't fit," she says. "Selecting a former flower child for somebody who's been in the Marines is not going to work."

Dominguez did her part to discourage small business owners from bringing on permanent IT staff, ticking off a few reasons why project-oriented temps are better. Among the pluses, the employer doesn't have to fire anybody who doesn't work out.

But she has steered clients to managed-services consultants such as Oliver, when the company needs continued help after project implementation. "We'll recommend it," she says.

HOUSECALL?

Deciding when

to get tech help

Information technology consultant Rey Oliver offers some advice for small business owners thinking of hiring somebody like him:

•Hold on to operations that define your core mission and consider outsourcing only those that aren't strategic;

•If you hire a consultant, move slowly and commit little by little;

•Ask yourself: Is outsourcing the right move? Have you considered all the costs? Can you bridge differences between your company and the outsourcer?