You have two quotes and they look nothing alike
Both are for the same fourteen people in the same building, and they are nowhere near each other. What actually drives the cost of looking after a small firm’s technology, and the questions that make two quotes comparable.
You asked three firms what it would cost to look after your office. Two of them wrote back. The quotes are sitting side by side on your desk on a Thursday morning, they are nowhere near each other, and neither one uses the same words as the other.
The gap is almost never about how good either firm is. What you are buying comes down to four plain things: how many people and how many places, how alike your equipment is, whether anybody is watching while the building is dark, and who owns the problem at four o’clock on a Friday. Each quote quietly answered those differently.
What the number is actually counting
Start with people and places. Fourteen people in one building is one job. The same fourteen split between a main office and a satellite, plus two who work from a kitchen table on Wednesdays, is a different job. The difference is not the extra desks. It is that somebody has to drive, and that two of everything now has to match.
Then look at how alike your equipment is, which matters more than its age. A firm whose machines were bought together and fall due in the same year is cheap to look after. A firm with eleven machines bought over nine years, each set up by whoever was nearest, is the expensive kind of small — and the more common kind.
Where your work actually sits moves the number too. A firm that keeps everything in a cabinet in the back room pays somebody to look after that cabinet. A firm that keeps it all somewhere else pays somebody to look after the accounts and the connection. Neither is the right answer, and your two quotes may not assume the same one.
The two lines that move it most
The first is whether anybody is watching while nobody is there. It is the quietest difference between two quotes and usually the largest. Ask what watching means, because the word covers two arrangements: somebody finds out on Monday that a copy stopped running on Saturday, or somebody is woken at two and has it fixed before you arrive.
The second is who owns the problem at four o’clock on a Friday. Not who answers; somebody always answers. Ask who is still on it at seven, who calls your client, and what happens when the trouble turns out to belong to one of your suppliers. A firm that will chase your suppliers is doing work no line ever shows.
Send them both the same questions
Do not go back and ask anybody to sharpen their pencil. Send both firms the same short list, ask for the answers in writing, and read the two side by side. Most of the gap closes by itself once everybody is answering the same question.
- How many people and how many places does this cover, and what happens in the month we hire two more?
- Which of my machines are you counting, and what do you intend to do about the three nobody has touched in years?
- Is somebody watching outside office hours — and does that mean finding out, or finding out and acting?
- When something breaks at four on a Friday, who picks it up, and who is still on it at seven?
- What falls outside this number: an after-hours visit, a new person’s first day, a move, a project?
- Whose accounts and whose equipment are these, and what do I walk away with on the day I leave?
When the answers land, the lower quote is usually missing one of two things and the higher one counts something you do not have — a second building you closed, a machine in a cupboard, somebody awake at three in the morning when nobody in your firm works past six. Neither is dishonest. Both are somebody guessing at your office from the outside.
And you may not need to move at all. If the person who has fixed your printers for six years still answers the phone, and you can say what would happen on a bad Friday, you are in better shape than most of the firms we walk into.
The reason to collect quotes is not that you are unhappy. It is to find out how much of this you have quietly been carrying yourself, and what it would take for somebody else to carry it.
If you would rather have the four answers in hand before you read either quote again — how many people and places, how alike the equipment is, who is watching at night, who owns Friday afternoon — that is what a review is for. Ninety minutes on site, and the written report is yours either way.