Consultancies: DON’T Hire IT Staff Until You Read This!

18 Dec. 2024 - Ben O'Neill

Effective IT management is essential for consultancies to remain competitive in today’s fast-paced, competitive business environment. The ability to ensure that your staff have the right tools and technologies at their fingertips to deliver for clients, and that your business has the IT capability to manage customer relations, invoicing and countless other critical functions can easily be the difference between a profitably consultancy business and a struggling one. 

 

In their IT journey, consultancies are inevitably faced with a dilemma – should we maintain an in-house IT team, or outsource IT to a Managed Service Provider (MSP)? 

 

The decision isn’t an easy one, but we’re here to outline some of the main factors that might affect your decision. 

Pros of outsourcing

Cost Savings 

 

When done right, outsourcing can reduce costs significantly. The costs of an in-house team can be significant, including salaries, hiring costs, benefits, and training costs. In-house IT may also require additional costs to procure and operate your own IT infrastructure, purchase licenses for IT management tools, and more. 

 

The costs of maintaining an in-house IT team can also be unpredictable and largely uncorrelated with your firm’s demands. 

 

By outsourcing, you can leverage an MSP’s existing infrastructure, tooling and expertise, which the MSP shares across all their customers, resulting in overall lower and much more predictable subscription costs, simplifying your budgeting and avoiding those unexpected expenses! 

 

Reduced Risk 

 

Maintaining an IT team carries with it a substantial amount of risk. How can you be sure your new IT staff have the right skills, and meet your operational needs? How do you handle out-of-hours incidents, and what happens when critical IT staff go on a much-deserved holiday?  

 

With well-defined contractual SLAs, and often guaranteed year-round 24/7 service, you can be sure your MSP will deliver as and when you need them, and you have a legally binding contract to back it up!  

 

Scalability 

 

One major advantage of MSPs is their ability to surge resourcing on-demand, drawing on their broader pool of employees to meet your evolving needs. If you need to rapidly hire new employees and contractors for a major upcoming client project, go through a rapid growth phase, or embark on a digital overhaul, the last thing you want to worry about is scaling your IT team to cope with the changing demand! 

 

Equally, if your demand tends to ebb and flow seasonally, or at the behest of your biggest clients, the ability of an MSP to scale services and pricing accordingly is a very attractive proposition. 

 

Range of Expertise 

 

MSPs employ a range of specialists in different domains to be able to provide you with the skills you need, when you need them. They can build your website, run your infrastructure, service requests, provide cybersecurity, architecture and strategy support, and keep up-to-date with industry practices and technologies. This is only possible because those specialists are spread across many clients. 

 

Most consultancies would struggle to build and retain an in-house IT team with all those skillsets at a manageable cost, especially when many skills are only occasionally required! 

 

Ready-to-go service offerings 

 

With many customers often facing very similar challenges, MSPs often have ready-to-go service offerings and tooling that they are already providing to other customers, that they can make available to you based on your needs. That gives you the benefits almost immediately, and at minimal or no up-front cost! 

 

Focus on what you do best 

The likelihood is that you’re in business because you’re passionate about delivering great services to clients, not managing IT teams. By hiring an MSP, you to delegate IT to specialists, freeing you up to spend more of your time doing what you’re great at! ] 

Cons of outsourcing IT

Loss of direct control 

 

Depending on your provider, by handing over the keys to your IT infrastructure, you won’t have as much direct control. Your MSP may not necessarily customize your IT to your business needs as well as an in-house IT team might, perhaps preferring to follow consistent approaches across all their customers. 

 

As the MSP runs your infrastructure, you may see a decline in internal IT skills and awareness of your own systems, and oversight over your IT decision-making process. With this, you might also experience feeling ‘locked in’ to your provider for fear that switching would be extremely costly and disruptive. 

 

This isn’t inevitable. Shieldwall respects our customers’ need for sovereignty over their IT infrastructure. We maintain detailed technical documentation and involve our customers in decision-making. As much as we would love our customers to remain with us, and do our best to delight them, we respect our customers’ need for autonomy, and all our service packages include a handover guarantee that we will allocate resources to ensure an orderly handover to avoid disruption to your critical IT operations. 

 

Security Risks 

 

Outsourcing your IT to a service provider can present significant security risks, if their security practices aren’t up to scratch. This could put you at higher risk of security incidents, with huge potential ramifications for you and your clients. To learn more, check out our article about MSP security.

 

If you decide to use an MSP, we strongly recommend finding one that places a strong emphasis on security, with appropriate guarantees. For example, Shieldwall offers our Shieldwall Secure package for free to all our technical support customers as our guarantee that their security is our priority.  

 

Hidden Costs 

 

Not all MSPs are always upfront about costs, often charging extra fees for services outside the contract scope. Often this pricing is detailed in the service contract but still comes as a surprise to the customer.  

 

This can be a good way for MSPs to generate more revenue, but Shieldwall does not agree with this pricing strategy as a matter of principle. We give customers a monthly complementary time budget for work done outside contract scope, and if we exceed it, we will clear any additional costs with customers in advance of incurring them. 

 

Risks to service quality 

 

MSPs differ greatly in the price, quality, and nature of services they offer. Many MSPs may offer very appealing prices, only made possible by cutting costs in service delivery at every opportunity. Outsourcing operations overseas, hiring low-skill staff, closing service requests prematurely, cutting corners on security, and more. Very often, any savings you make hiring a cheap MSP are more than offset by lost productivity, poor impressions left on your clients, and other unforeseen costs. For these reasons, it’s important to ensure that your MSP is a good fit for your business, offering high-quality services at an acceptable price. 

 

Shieldwall are proud to say our staff are 100% UK-based, highly skilled, and are committed to delivering exceptional customer service. 

 

Conclusions 

 

As we’ve outlined, there are plenty of factors to consider when deciding whether to outsource your IT to an MSP, and if so, which MSP is a good fit for your business. Choosing the right partner in your IT journey is one of the most significant decisions your business can make, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.  

 

At Shieldwall we do our best to eliminate these downsides and make the decision a no-brainer for our customers, but only you can decide which path is best for your business. 

Shieldwall IT Services specialise in serving small to medium consultancy firms. If you represent a consultancy firm with 100 employees or fewer and would like to discuss how we can help you realise all the benefits of outsourcing your IT to free you up to deliver great services to your clients, book your free consultation with our experts today!