Types of IT Companies

In the IT Industry, we call this the ‘break-fix’ practice.  That’s because this type of company bases the majority of their income on the fact that your technology will break, and you will pay them to fix it.  These companies usually charge per hour for support, or perhaps offer a discount with blocks of prepaid time.  Their technicians come to your office to solve a specific computer issue.  These on-site technicians are expensive, and the company they work for often has expectations for the amount of billable time their employees need to have.  It is a pretty standard practice for the technician to manage their own time to an extent, and they are responsible for producing their own billing and that is reflected in their pay.  In a situation like this, the tech wants to complete the task and move on to the next client to rack up enough billable hours to make their boss happy.  This leaves them in a position where they simply don’t have the time to resolve other issues or run maintenance on systems to minimize downtime and ensure that your entire infrastructure is running smoothly.  There’s no reason to show anyone in your organization how to resolve even a simple problem (rebooting a router for example) because that means one less billable call in the future.  Plus, answering questions and checking into other issues might cut into the other billable visits that tech has that day.  This method works well enough for residential users with computer troubles, but let’s be serious, you are trying to run a business.

In the end, you end up paying for the technician to come out along with the employee(s) who couldn’t work due to the issue.

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Some tech support companies might offer to do regular preventative maintenance when visiting their clients, or they schedule out these visits out regularly on specific dates and times.  This is so the technician can fill up their day with as many on-site client visits as possible.  When the tech visits your office, they usually have a block of time to complete a series of proactive maintenance tasks to keep your IT running well.  This sounds pretty good so far, right?  Unfortunately, the tech usually doesn’t have the flexibility to go over the allotted time, especially without getting approval to bill you.  The real kicker is that if the tech finishes the tasks early, they are often instructed to just find other things to do to fill the block of time, or even worse, just move on to the next client.  You’ll still pay whether you get your hour or if it only takes the tech 15 minutes.

Tech support companies love this model because it gives them guaranteed billable hours and they take no risk because if you need more help, they simply bill you by the hour.

We do things differently.  Stop paying outrageously high hourly rates that can sneak their way into your bill, and get proactive giving everyone in your company the support they need, when they need it, without the huge costs.  We call it Marathon Support, and it’s designed to give you and your entire organization peace of mind when it comes to your IT.  We take the best aspects of hourly support and the best aspects of preventative maintenance, add a live help desk that anyone in your company can call anytime without an extra fee, and bundle it all together into an easy to budget flat rate.  To keep our costs low and our clients happy, we’ve spent a lot of time and money investing in an infrastructure that can automatically monitor your servers and workstations, detecting problems before they cause you downtime.  The flat rate includes security patches, updates for your virus protection, and much more.  And, so you can sleep soundly at night, we offer all of this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  We can even include unlimited on-site support visits!  Get proactive and save time, money, and stress with Marathon Support!