When you start up a business, you have to do a lot of general admin work behind the scenes to make sure that the enterprise gets off to a decent start. For many entrepreneurial women, things like marketing on social media and getting the right insurance make up the bulk of the day.
Some admin tasks, however, such as IT, are on-running. They require the attention of seasoned professionals with technical skills to keep networks connected and systems running.
In the early phases of a business, your personal IT equipment may suffice, but as soon as you need to scale, you’ll run into problems. Your PC and network connections probably don’t have the bandwidth or the resilience to keep pace with business demands. It would help if you had a better solution.
Most women, therefore, go down the route of hiring IT staff to manage their emerging networks. They need people with the skills and experience to keep them up and running, provide security and manage new updates. Unfortunately, hiring these people in-house is costly. You often have no choice but to pay a full salary, which could run into tens of thousands of dollars per month, depending on the size of the team you need.
The good news is that innovators in the IT space have been working hard to provide start-ups with a way around this problem as a means to preserve their capital. Instead of hiring people to work on their business networks exclusively, smart entrepreneurs are now turning to third-party agencies who serve multiple clients throughout the day as a means for keeping costs down. Here’s how.
External device management
Managing lots of different devices wanting to connect to your IT infrastructure is a significant technical challenge. Even seasoned IT professionals can sometimes struggle to deal with network configuration problems, leading to downtime and outages.
The main problem is connecting all the many different devices your colleague use through a central system. Compatibility is a big issue. Mobile device management, however, has come on leaps and bound in recent years. Thanks to the cloud, you can now outsource much of the legwork to third parties who administer your business systems through the internet. Usually, all you need to do is sign up for a monthly service, and in return, you’ll get seamless device integration, including permissions and security.
Relationship management
A second group of agencies deals with another task that often falls to in-house IT professionals: relationship management. Keeping track of how you’re performing across multiple social media platforms and responding to customer issues is a full-time gig. Plus, if you don’t have the most professional team in the world, you sometimes experience blunders that harm your brand.
Again, this is something that you can pass over to alternative agencies and let them deal with the problem for you. These services often use AI to look out for patterns in comments that might indicate that you have a PR issue on your hands and then intervene on your behalf. Again, these services are often priced cheaper than the cost of a single salaried IT professional.
