The true cost of your local IT man

Your local IT man: cheap, reliable and excellent value for money. Right? Wrong. Your local IT man might be friendly and reliable but he's not cheap.

As a small business, the thought of an IT support contract might seem like a daunting prospect especially if you have only a handful of computers and laptops. So, the option of a local IT man who comes and fixes your problems as and when required seems like a sensible idea. Until you add up the cost.

We see this scenario time and time again. Small businesses with only a handful of computers use their local IT man to come and fix their problems on an ad-hoc basis. More often than not, signing up to an IT support contract never even crosses their mind. This is usually because on the surface an IT support contract doesn't seem to be financially viable when we're only talking about five computers or so.

Based on five workstations it would cost about £50 per month to support them with Cultrix IT support. We often find that when we visit organisations of varying sizes that their local IT man has left them a pile of invoices from incidents and call outs. But they don't know that 99% of those issues could have been solved remotely. Therefore with Cultrix support there's no incident fee for issues that can be solved remotely.

The average local IT man charges around £65 an hour, which means you only need on average one issue per month to make a saving with an IT support contract. However, we often find that small businesses are calling their local IT man about once or twice a week. Based on one issue a week, over the period of 12 months, comes to over £3000 just from calling in your local IT man for an issue that can most likely be solved remotely. Whereas an IT support contract from Cultrix for five machines over the period of year would cost around £600 annually.

All these incident fees begin to add up and turn out to cost more than an IT support contract. Even on the rare occasion we will have to come out to site, it's still very difficult to amount to a cost that comes close to what using your local IT man would cost. Beyond just the monetary cost, there's also the time cost.

At Cultrix our average ticket resolution time is 90 minutes. Now how often can you say your local IT guy can fix a problem within 90 minutes? Even at times we have to go out to site, we aim to be there within four hours. Unlike your local IT man which may take days to schedule in a visit.

With Cultrix we also provide you with a lot more than your local IT guy can. Including unlimited remote and telephone support, 24 hour system monitoring, support for all devices connected to your PC, printers, tablets etc. As well as virus removal, and backup management. Other services included with our support contract are an annual system audit and security audit.

Any help and support you need with your IT systems and equipment is covered. We’re there for the day-to-day care whenever you need us, but we’ll also check on your medium to long-term IT health without you even asking us to. We will monitor your system remotely, 24 hours a day and once a year we will diarise an IT health check to ensure that your system is still operating to maximum efficiency. Still unsure of the real cost your ad-hoc IT guy? Go to your invoices and start to add them up. We think you'll be surprised at how much you're really spending on your IT.

Please note, all the figures mentioned are ESTIMATES, and are not to be considered a final cost. The actual cost will vary depending on the equipment you have and the offers we might have at the time of enquiry. For a quote please contact Dawn on 01226 736673 or email dawn@cultrix.co.uk. Or if you'd prefer to, contact us via our call back form.

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