Author: Michelle Cavagnaro

The difference between hiring inside developers vs. an external consulting firm.

We get the question a lot from clients on whether they should hire internal web or information technology professionals or hire external or consulting firms (like Switchbox) for their business or project. The struggle is if you look at what you can pay a web developer per year vs paying a consulting firm per week, obviously the consulting firm will be more expensive for the same amount of hours. But is it actually worth hiring someone for internal work vs. external? Let’s take a look at that.

There are benefits to both ways. Obviously in house, or internal, web developers allow you and your company to retain more control. If they are your employee, and work for you 40 hours a week, you can dictate their projects for the week. Whereas with a consulting firm, or external team, they may have other projects and dedications that they have to fulfill first, which means your project may not get attention that week.

If your company is large enough to justify a large IT team and web development, then it would make sense for you to go that route. But for most businesses, there may not be enough work to justify the expense of having an in house web developer all year long.

Redundancy and Longevity

Let’s say that you have hired two in house developers – a web developer and a dev ops or server person. If you lose one of those people – they quit, retire, or become ill – you have essentially lost 50% of the knowledge, process, and work capacity. But if you have hired an outside firm and you are paying for 40 hours a week, you are essentially having two dedicated developers on your project each week, even if one person would be out sick or quit.

Variety of Skill Sets

With your web developer and your dev ops/server person, that is the extent of their skill set for your company, unless you hired a larger team. With an external firm, you are essentially paying for their variety of skill sets with their different team members – whether that be a UI/UX developer, technical business analyst, or senior web developer. Trying to turn your internal team members into those roles and positions, just never end up working out correctly, and you’re more likely to waste more time and money having them learn new skill sets. With the external firm, you can have a senior level UI/UX person spend 2-3 hours on your project and be done with the user interface. This allows you to tap into the variety of skill sets without making a huge commitment to your business.

Misnomer of the Hourly Rate

You’ve hired a senior level developer, and are paying them for 40 hours per week, and you assume that you are getting 40 hours of work. When you hire an external firm, you’re expecting the same 40 hours of work each week, but we’ll explain why that is just not true. Any reputable external consulting firm will not guarantee you 40 hours of work from the developers, and any that are charging you a straight line item of 40 hours is probably just not being truthful.

At Switchbox, we have our staff at any given time of the year, that are getting paid for to get training, and that is something that the client does not pay for. We’re also paying them for internal company meetings, so if we have a 15 minute all staff meeting to talk about health benefits, none of our clients would be footing the bill for this. But if you have hired the internal senior developer at your company, and your HR department has to hold a 1 hour meeting to go over benefits, you are paying them for that hour and not getting any development benefits from it. You are also paying for that water cooler time, and are chit-chatting with their co-workers. While as the external firm, the developer or team member is only logging time when they are being productive and working on your project and task.

Here at Switchbox, we find that the true ratio is that for every one of our developers we’re only charging our clients for about 80% of their time, the remaining 20% is for internal company meetings and activities that are not charged to the client’s projects.

Knowledge Atrophy

If you’ve hired the internal IT staff – they are only working on your project. Their knowledge is limited to only your company’s project, the app, website, or database. They are only ever learning in your own environment, and not able to diversify their knowledge. At Switchbox, we work on a minimum of 70 projects a year, which means a large pool of knowledge is getting passed around through our developers to learn and grow with. A developer is able to work on multiple projects at the same time, and when Client A’s project reaches a road block, they can take the knowledge from Client B’s project to trouble shoot and figure out a solution to their unique situation.

Thinking more about hiring Switchbox as your external consulting firm, Contact us to chat about it!

Why should everyone be taking a strong cybersecurity stance?

With the ever growing technology, people don’t see something physical they tend to forget that it needs to be secured. When you walk into a bank, you can physically see the security that is protecting your assets. With IT, people have a tendency to forget about their server that might be located in a different state, and they do not know who has access to that information, which leads to vulnerabilities for your businesses information to be stolen.

Small to mid-sized firms are the most common for cyber security attacks since they are more vulnerable with easier access to their information.

What Should Small to Mid-Size Businesses Do for their Website?

Figure out who runs your external website, and ask them what security measures have been taken to secure their website, and what they would recommend doing to beef it up. While this isn’t full proof, it always is helpful to hear about what more that you can do to help protect your business.

Online tools are a great way to find a free security online analysis that will give you more of an idea of something simple that you can do to secure your business. 

Call a cyber security firm, who will gladly talk with you about questions about your business, and take some time to offer suggestions, without necessarily charging you for those recommendations yet. Most good, reputable cyber security firms will highlight the top 2-3 issues that you should fix immediately. Beware of companies that will insist that you must fix everything on the list in order to remain secure.

What should you do to protect your business from Cyber Security threats?

You absolutely need to have a firewall that is being updated on a monthly basis, at all of your physical locations so that your printers, computers, etc. are being protected every day. 
If you process any type of credit card, you should absolutely be in talks with a cyber security firm to talk about locking down that data and becoming PCI Compliant (learn more about PCI compliance here).

By identifying where you can secure parts of you business contact Switchbox today to see how we can help. Contact us to chat about it!

How to make your business smarter and more efficient

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.“

Bill Gates

What exactly is business automation?

Business automation is taking tasks within your business that are repetitive, and having someone or something do them automatically. For example, you may send a reminder to your customers after their invoices are more than 30 days late, or you follow up with a customer 5 days after they visited your restaurant and you send them a customer satisfaction survey.

You may even add in a little business intelligence in there as well. For a positive survey that a customer left you you may ask them to leave you a positive Google Review, and for a negative survey response, you would send them a coupon for 20% off their next meal. These are just some small examples of business automation in your company.

What is the first step of business automation?

First, you need to identify some of the areas where you can automate your business, and where it can actually help you make smarter business decisions. We suggest you look at your Always & your Everys.

Find out in your business where you, or someone on your team, says the phrase: “When x happens, I always do y.” A great example of this would be, “whenever a customers invoice is more than 30 days overdue, I always send out a reminder email.” Or, it would be, “whenever a customer’s invoice is 45 days overdue, I always resend the reminder email, with a $100 late fee attached.”

Where can technology help you with the Always & the Everys?

If you already are using accounting software, or your website already collects customer satisfaction surveys – those are already great areas where you can automate your business.

Some areas are less obvious than others though. We had a customer in the utility and rental space, and whenever one of their tenants had a leaky pipe, they wanted to create a warning to flag their maintenance department that there was a problem.

Their question was, how can a computer system figure out that a pipe has physically broken or that a pipe has developed a leak? Those are areas where you are not exactly sure if technology can help out your business. The solution that we found was, as a proxy for determining if a pipe has physically broken, we can determine if their water meter has used a significant amounts more water (whatever the threshold that you set would be) then it will send an email to the customer that their water bill has increase by 20%.

By identifying where you can automate parts of you business, you can in turn have higher productivity, increase performance, and help to reduce your operating costs. Think that you have an area in your business that could be automated, but need some help with the technical side of it? Contact us to chat about it!