It can be easy to ignore business downtime as you think it is something that might happen once in a blue moon. But when it does hit, even a single hour can snowball into thousands of dollars lost in missed income, wasted time, lost trust and any costs to recover.
Let us go through some of these items:
Missed work and missed opportunities
Downtime doesn’t just pause your current work; it puts a wall between your business and new income. A client may have been ready to place an order or perhaps someone needed urgent help. You not only lose that income but also confidence in your business declines which may also affect future income..
Saying to current or potential clients that your systems are down is not a great look. You may get a sympathetic nod, but if it happens more than once, people start to wonder if they can rely on your business.
Orders Delayed or Missed
If your business takes orders online or even over the phone using a system, downtime cuts off that revenue stream. Whether it is one $5 sale or a $50,000 deal, if someone can’t buy from you in that moment, they might go elsewhere and not come back.
How much is a typical hour of orders worth to your business? That number might sting more than the wage costs.
Overtime to catch up
Here is something that often gets overlooked. You may lose only an hour of active work, but now your team is behind. To catch up, they may need to work after hours, which could mean paying overtime or pushing tomorrow’s work into the following day, creating a domino effect.
Now the $150 in wasted wages turns into $300 or more, depending on how long the recovery takes, how many people are involved and if overtime payments are needed.
Employees, sitting around with nothing to do
Imagine you have five team members who rely on their computers or internet connection to do their work. When systems go down, their productivity drops to zero as they can not send emails, access files, process sales, or help customers.
Let us say each of those employees costs you $30 an hour in wages. That is $150 down the drain in just one hour of downtime. That is only the wage cost; you are still paying for lights, rent and every other overhead while nothing gets done.
Some businesses never fully catch up
In industries such as manufacturing, logistics or services with booked time slots, you may not be able to recover that lost hour. A slot with the manufacturer is missed, a delivery delayed or a meeting didn’t happen to discuss or finalise an order. The ripple effect can spread into days or weeks.
The hidden costs start stacking up. You need to rebook appointments, reschedule tasks and explaining what went wrong, this is not just money lost but also lost momentum.
Bigger businesses, bigger numbers
All of the above assume you have five employees only, but what if you have 20 or even 50 employees? The costs sky rocket!!
Even small businesses can burn through $1000 or more in an hour of downtime. For mid-sized and large companies, that hour can easily blow past five figures, especially if sales channels are affected.
So, what can you do about it?
This is where we step in. As an IT service provider, our job is to keep your business running. We can help prevent downtime by monitoring your systems, fixing issues before they turn into problems and responding fast when something breaks.
With tech being tech, we can’t make it perfect, but we can make sure that when things go wrong, you are not losing sleep and “thousands of dollars” over it.
If that hour or more of downtime makes you realise what the overall costs may be and that is scary, contact us for a quick chat. Contact us today, for a chat about protecting your business before the next outage costs more than it should.