When technology isn’t your field you may find yourself asking the question: How can I spot red flags?
Whether you project will involve a short term workload or a strategic plan I recommend you weigh all your options and never hesitate to ask questions. The only way to achieve this is to research. Take a few minutes in the evenings to search the web and learn some basics and fundamentals.
An ideal candidate for your IT needs will not hide from you when explaining tools to you. Spending the time to know the basics can give you the confidence needed to challenge your IT staff or vendor as well as know when something simply isn’t right. You should never have to solely depend on one company or person to help you reach your goal. A professional IT company will leave you an exit strategy if things don’t work out and give you the IT knowledge you need on your systems just in case you need to make a change.
Some frequent occurrences that should throw a red flag are:
- Proposals that you do not understand
- Billing extra hours. (Most are charging in upwards of $125.00 per hour) – Watch and understand your invoices.
- Recommend products based on a commission or markup. – A good practice on a service based business is to charge for services only and let customer make the technology purchase.
- Recommend unlicensed software to just “Get you by”
- Provide branded applications only that only they can provide.
- Hold your IT data hostage
- Vendor careless with facts and often enlarge on them
- Less than 5 years experience – Lack of stability – How long has your vendor been in business?
- Insufficient working capital. Can your vendor expand with your organization.
- The vendor may depend on only few customers or transactions thus inflating prices to each customer.
- The vendor has high debts which may reflect in their pricing.
- Vendor treats you as just another number and not an individual case.
- Vendor advises short cuts
- Vendor doesn’t show you current vs. long term plans.
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