Upgrading Technology: You Can’t Have IT Both Ways

It’s one thing to stretch the budget by implementing money-saving IT solutions, it’s quite another to limit your staff by not providing the technology they need to effectively do their job. In situations like this, a business owner would be better off spending extra for quality equipment.

Despite this commonsense approach to technology, many business owners hesitate to drop extra money on quality equipment. Here are three reasons why.

Sticker Shock
Fact: New technology is expensive. We totally understand this pain point. After all, we’ve been working with technology for all of these years and we still wince at major tech purchases. Pro tip: The way to overcome sticker shock is to think long-term. Once the seemingly-high price is compared to how much money you’ll save in the long run, the initial shock will wear off and you’ll have no problem swiping that card.

Trying to Squeeze as Much Out of Their Old Tech as Possible
Some business owners might treat their technology like an old-yet-reliable car. For a high-mileage vehicle, it makes fiscal sense to pony up and pay for a repair every once in a while, instead of leasing a new car and making monthly payments. While this is solid logic for a car (after all, an expensive car and an ugly car both get you from point A to point B), approaching business technology in this manner will fail to generate savings. In fact, by using old and outdated equipment, productivity will actually be hindered and money will be lost.

Not Enough in the Budget to Purchase New Technology
In all honesty, you might be in a place with your budget where you just can’t afford to purchase new technology. This is a tough place to be in, but you shouldn’t let shortcomings in your budget prevent your staff from accessing the technology they need to do their job. After all, if you continue to allow your company to stay in this rut, your workers will never be equipped to perform to their fullest potential, which is what it takes to get you out of said rut.

When funds are tight, you can actually free up resources with some creative budgeting. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you can actually make the right technology purchases in order to free up funds so you can make the technology purchases your employees need. This is commonly done by taking computer equipment that’s normally paid for using capital expenditures, and replacing it with IT services (like cloud computing). The newly acquired IT service can now be categorized as an operating expense, which frees up money in the capital column that can now be used to replace that busted workstation your staff is always griping about.

Bottom line, reliable technology is worth the extra expense. Providing your staff with inferior equipment won’t save you any money. In fact, it actually ends up costing you more than you would think. Consider the following:

• If your team has to tolerate outdated equipment, they will miss out on the latest solutions designed to improve efficiency. To make matters worse, a competitor using the latest technologies will have an advantage over you.
• Downtime adds up faster than you realize. Older equipment is prone to freezing, taking extra long to load programs, and slow performance in general. A worker that loses a few minutes here and there due to sluggish technology will end up losing a total of many work days at the end of the year.
• Maintaining a sane work environment is difficult to do when dealing with unreliable technology. Nothing frustrates and demoralizes a productive worker quite like their computer freezing up while making progress on an important project.

At the end of the day, you just can’t have IT both ways. To have a conversation about what it takes to equip your business with the latest technology, give Argentum IT a call at (502) 473-6407.