One of the biggest mistakes that small business owners make is trying to save on expenses by doing all administrative tasks themselves, especially when it comes to troubleshooting their computers.  In theory this sounds like a good idea.  After all, maintaining a full-time IT staff member is usually not financially feasible.  So it's easy for a small business owner to convince himself that he's saving money by doing the troubleshooting himself.  But all too often, a small business owner will begin what he thought was a 30-minute computer maintenance project, only to find himself still struggling to get the system running properly 24 hours later.

While it appears on the surface that it would be cost-efficient to "do-it-yourself", the true cost of managerial time has not been factored in.  For small business owners, the most profitable use of time is producing products or performing services.  The next most profitable use (a very close second) is marketing those products or services.  The least profitable use is spending time on administrative tasks.  Small business owners are literally losing money at least two ways by doing IT maintenance themselves.

First, if a small business owner is held captive at the computer keyboard in the office trying to get the computer system back online, he is not bringing in revenue or creating new revenue sources.  In fact, he has just hired a person with limited skills and experience (himself) to be the "IT expert".  But there is no experienced supervisor available to shorten the learning curve for the new "IT expert", or to steer him away from creating more serious problems.

Instead, the small business owner is "opening a can of worms", which is the risk people take whenever they hire an amateur to do a professional's job in order to save a few dollars.  If the problem deviates even slightly from the amateur's limited knowledge, there is a very real risk of creating an even more costly problem to repair.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this frustrating scenario. While there may be no room in the budget to keep an IT professional on staff, hiring an IT consulting firm can be an affordable option.  And it can provide a much broader range of services than a single employee could offer.  An IT consulting firm can draw from the expertise of numerous professionals to quickly and efficiently get your computer system up and running.

IT professionals keep up to date on the latest viruses, hacks, patches and upgrades. Also, IT professionals know where the system conflicts occur and how to resolve them.  They usually have enough depth of experience to know how to solve problems with older versions of software and hardware as well as the newest developments. ìIt would not be unusual at all for an experienced IT professional to be able to solve a problem in mere minutes that the business owner struggled with for days.

AccuTech Internationalís team of IT experts has the knowledge and experience to apply that kind of problem solving to your business needs.  Now consider that scenario when calculating the true cost of doing-it-yourself compared with hiring an IT pro.