When Break-Fix IT Stops Making Sense
Most of the businesses we work with started out the same way. Something broke, they called someone, it got fixed, and they paid the bill. For a two-person office with a couple of laptops, that's often perfectly reasonable.
The trouble is that it doesn't scale. Somewhere along the way the business adds people, a server or a shared drive, a few more printers, a phone system, maybe a second location. Nobody is looking after all of it, so it only gets attention when it stops working. That's usually when we get the call.
If any of the following sound familiar, it's probably time to rethink how you handle IT.
The same problems keep coming back
The Wi-Fi drops every afternoon. One computer takes ten minutes to boot. The printer in the back office needs to be restarted twice a week. Each issue gets fixed in the moment, but nobody is looking at why it keeps happening. A few hours a month of lost time adds up quickly across a whole office.
You aren't sure your backups would actually work
We ask almost every new client the same question: if your main computer or server died this afternoon, how long would it take to get back up and running? The honest answer is often "I don't know." Backups that haven't been tested are a guess, not a plan.
Updates get postponed indefinitely
Windows and macOS updates are annoying, so they get clicked away. The problem is that many of them patch security holes that are already being exploited. On a break-fix arrangement nobody owns this, so it simply doesn't happen.
Your IT costs are impossible to budget
Nothing for three months, then a failed server and an emergency weekend repair. It's hard to plan around that. A fixed monthly cost is easier to manage, and in our experience it's usually lower over a full year once you count the downtime.
Only one person knows how anything is set up
Sometimes that person is a former employee, a relative who was good with computers, or a contractor who moved on. Passwords live in someone's head and nothing is written down. Every problem takes longer to solve as a result.
What the alternative looks like
With managed IT, someone is responsible for your systems every day, not just when they fail. That means monitoring, regular updates, working backups, security software and a help desk your team can actually reach.
Our Hive plans cover all of that, starting at $25 per device per month, and we respond to support requests within two hours during business hours. If you'd like an honest look at where things stand, we offer a free IT and security checkup. We'll tell you what's working, what isn't and what we'd fix first, whether or not you end up working with us.