Hourly and managed IT are two different things

You can’t really compare hourly IT and managed IT on price. It’s apples to oranges. One isn’t just a cheaper or pricier version of the other.

With hourly IT, you’re paying for a fix. Something breaks, you call, someone fixes it, and you pay for the time it took. That’s easy for the IT company to price, and hard for you to control. The only real lever you have is not calling, and not calling means going without support you shouldn’t have to go without.

With managed IT, you’re paying for ownership. For a monthly price, your provider takes on the job of keeping your technology healthy and telling you how healthy it is. Over time, they make sure your technology lines up with where your business is headed.

You can see the difference in who makes the decisions. With hourly, nobody owns your technology decisions; they only get made when something breaks. With managed, the relationship doesn’t end. At Gawa, we build an ongoing relationship with the people who make the IT decisions, so things keep getting better instead of staying the same and waiting for the next thing to break.

Hourly has costs you don’t see

When most owners hear “managed IT,” they think about cost. Signing up for another monthly bill is close to an automatic no. That’s the cost you can see. Most technology debt, wasted spend and IT that doesn’t fit your business stays hidden, and it often costs more than the bill you’re trying to avoid.

Waste nobody’s looking at

• Internet service nobody has reviewed in years. These are usually bad deals nobody went back and questioned.

• Services whose cost slowly creeps up without anyone noticing. One client had a fax platform their previous IT provider set up. It dropped faxes and had delivery problems, so we replaced it to fix that. Their fax bill went from $800 a month to $225.

We weren’t looking for savings in that case. We check vendors for cost, performance and reliability as part of owning someone’s IT. An hourly IT company has no reason to.

Paying a stranger to learn your business

We hear “We don’t have a lot of IT issues, so hourly is fine” a lot. Sometimes that’s true. More often, nobody’s looking.

When something does break, you’re paying a stranger to come to your business, learn how everything works and then fix it. You pay for that learning time, so the repair can cost far more than the problem itself. Many MSPs won’t work on your business at all without an agreement in place.

What we find when we finally get a look inside

After years of hourly support, here’s what we’ve walked into:

• Dead servers with no backups

• No documentation at all

• Missing passwords, or passwords taped to screens

• A business domain name lost along with the previous IT vendor

• A phone system locked so nobody could make changes

The last two have nothing to do with repairs. They’re about who owns the accounts your business runs on.

Here’s one example. A business had its domain name registered under its previous IT company’s account. They rebranded but kept using the old domain in the background for finance, accounting and other internal work. When the domain expired, they lost those email accounts, and every account that used one of those addresses for password resets went with them.

It took more than 100 hours of our time to rebuild their systems, portals and accounts. That doesn’t count the hours their own staff lost across every department.

Hourly still works for some businesses

Is hourly right for you? Ask yourself two questions:

1. Can most of the work that earns you money be done without technology?

2. Is even a basic managed plan out of reach for your business right now?

If you answered yes to both, hourly might be the safer choice. Honestly, a business that can’t afford even a basic managed plan is the only kind we’d tell to stick with hourly. Even then, get your backups and vendors checked. Those two do the most damage when nobody’s watching them.

Know what you’re signing up for

Many IT consulting firms and managed service providers have stopped taking hourly work. It’s expensive to manage and hard to schedule fairly, and a provider owes its existing clients first. If you’re calling for hourly help, something broke, it’s stopping your work, and you’re waiting in line for your turn.

That’s also why emergency work costs more. An emergency means we have to move commitments we’ve made to other clients, no matter what time of day it is. We do our best to avoid emergencies by adjusting schedules, but if it really is an emergency, it’s priced like one.

If you go hourly, expect these four things from your provider:

1. They answer the phone.

2. A real person picks up. You should be able to explain your problem to a human being, not a robot or an automated system.

3. You get a clear ETA.

4. Once they find the problem, they tell you clearly what the repair will cost.

If you’re facing a big hourly repair and thinking about switching to managed services, just ask. We’ve applied large hourly invoices toward a client’s onboarding before. We handle that case by case, and we’re always open to talking about it.

A middle ground

You don’t have to go all the way down the hourly or managed road. Gawa has Essentials. It’s for businesses that are a little less complex, don’t have strict compliance requirements, or are working with a tighter budget. We’ll be upfront with you: we’d love every client on a managed plan eventually, and Essentials is how a lot of them get there.

When your industry makes the call

If you’re in healthcare or another regulated industry, or you fill out a cyber insurance questionnaire every year, things are different. Hourly IT can still work if you can prove you meet every requirement on that questionnaire. But someone has to produce that proof and keep it current all year long.

If you’re in one of these industries, it’s not your IT provider pushing you toward managed. It’s your industry.

If you go managed, know what to expect

“Managed” means different things to different providers. The real test is whether you trust them to understand your people and your business. Here’s what that looks like at Gawa.

Scope in plain English

• Remote help desk support during business hours, included in your plan. On-site visits when a problem needs hands on the device, scheduled with you.

• Projects get a fixed quote. No open-ended, hourly projects.

• Scope you can actually read. Scope is a real challenge for both of us: insurance, contract obligations and general liability hold us to a high standard, so it has to be spelled out. We write it in plain English, with no jargon.

• Small things don’t always turn into invoices. Sometimes we’ll cover a small out-of-scope job as a “mini-project.”

Regular check-ins, and proof the work is getting done

Every plan includes a monthly alignment check-in. It’s a quick two-way conversation, usually 30 minutes or less. We cover:

• How every critical service Gawa provides is doing

• Scope creep

• Upcoming projects

• Changes in your business

We test-restore your backups every month and give you a simple status instead of a pile of emailed reports. We also review your vendors regularly for cost, performance and reliability.

An agreement you can walk away from

• Onboarding is real work. It comes with a commitment, because it takes time to bring every client up to the Gawa standard, and we’re fully transparent about how it’s going.

• You choose the terms: month to month or yearly. We’ll figure it out with you.

• You can always opt out with 30 days’ notice, or 60 days for businesses with multiple sites.

• We build the documentation together, and it’s yours to keep, even if you leave.

Gawa takes on real responsibility inside your business. Our agreements protect us, you and your customers. At the end of the day, there are people behind the technology.

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