3 Strategies to Help Stretch Your Technology Budget

When you run a business you have so many variables to balance and so little time to do so that technology inevitably becomes an essential cog in your ability to manage everything. Unfortunately, technology isn’t cheap and the technology that you think you need may not be a viable purchase this year. Today, we thought it would be good to identify three strategies that can help you save money, while also getting the benefits that technology brings. 

Identify Inefficiencies

When you need to make every dollar count, it’s hard to pull the trigger on big-ticket technology purchases. The best way to stretch that money is to identify the places within your business that could benefit the most from some technology spending and target the solutions to those problems. The best way to do this is to take some type of baseline measurements of your business’ operations. The more moving parts your business has—and they all have plenty—the more work identifying these inefficiencies will be. Once you find what ails your business, however, it won’t take long to find the technology that can help reduce those inefficiencies. 

For example, if your business has ten employees and two of them have two displays on their workstation,  and they are getting 50 percent or more done than the rest of the crew, it tells you it probably isn’t the worker's fault with one display that they aren’t pulling their weight. By investing your money in eight new monitors, you can expect a certain amount of increased productivity, and therefore returns that will satisfy that investment. There are situations all over your business that can be made more efficient by some type of technology, you just have to find where to slot it in.

Invest in Training

If your business has a shortage of resources available to purchase new technology, investing your money in training your employees on using the technology you do have can go a long way toward making your business the well-oiled machine you need it to be. Of course, training itself is a costly endeavor, but if your business is looking for ways to stretch your capital, focusing on efficiency and security training is a great way to redeploy funds. 

The better trained your workforce is, the better they will be at their jobs; or at least that’s the sentiment. You know something? It’s not far-fetched. Think about all the inefficient situations that a worker could get into. Think about how they interact with the technology that is in place in your business. Think about how many times work has been ground to a halt because an employee wasn’t as prepared as you want them to be. By investing in their training they can only improve. In fact, according to a study conducted by the Association of Talent Development, companies that invest in comprehensive training programs see 218 percent higher income than those that don’t. 

Additionally, with today’s threat landscape the way it is, it’s essential that your whole staff has knowledge about how to identify and confront phishing attacks and other exploits coming in from outside your business. As far as security goes, investing in training isn’t just about boosting your revenue metrics, it’s about keeping threats from decimating productivity through negative situations that happen when your business gets hacked; not to mention the ding in customer relationships that can happen when your business is exploited.

Outsource 

In 2022, outsourcing is a great way to mitigate financial exposure brought on by demand. In fact, partnerships are quickly becoming standard operating procedure for many companies that are looking to get more from less and control costs. When it comes to technology, outsourcing typically means partnering with a managed service provider such as i-medIT and utilizing cloud services rather than purchasing and managing all of your IT infrastructure yourself. 

There is some debate whether utilizing a cloud-based platform helps your ROI, but what isn’t up for debate is that using hosted services will allow your business to gain access to computing that wouldn’t be possible on a shoestring budget. Since the cloud platform typically charges per user or per GB used, you can actively control your technology expenses and get the computing you need as an operational expense.

Partnering with a company like ours allows you to do the same, but also provides your organization with several services that are aimed to increase the value of the offering. Some of these include:

• Comprehensive backup and disaster recovery
• Remote monitoring and proactive management of all IT
• Best in Chicagoland technology procurement
• Dynamic cybersecurity tools
• Patch and licensing management
• Vendor management

And more. 

Your business doesn’t have to have a massive IT budget to be innovative. Give us a call to learn more about how we can help you transform your business’ technology and training platforms at 630-549-6199 today.