There is a cost that most business owners don’t consider: the cost of bad advice when an inexperienced or unethical consultant recommends a product, service or project that is unnecessary or incorrect for your specific situation.

Sometimes bad advice is due to sheer ignorance and inexperience. Sometimes it’s because the IT company is knowingly trying to keep the price down (so you’ll say yes and buy from them), recommending a substandard product or solution just to get the sale. Sometimes they’re selling you top-of-the-line solutions but installing cheap products and shortcuts to pad their bottom line.

It’s gotten so bad that Network World recently noted, “Increasingly, IT customers are crying malpractice and railing against slipped implementation schedules, compounded consulting fees, and disappointing product performance.”

Here’s 4 other ways bad IT advice can cost you:

  • You can end up paying for unnecessary services, software, hardware and consulting fees and STILL not get the solution or results you wanted.
  • You can pay for IT maintenance but still be left wide open to a ransomware attack, with no means for getting your data back except by paying the ransom and hoping you get your data back.
  • The above will also cost you THOUSANDS in emergency data restoration services. You cannot just “unlock” your data. Someone has to comb through your files and devices to ensure the hackers haven’t planted another virus to ransom your network again in the future (after all, you’ve demonstrated you’re a paying customer). You might need to rebuild your network from a backup, which can take weeks. Don’t underestimate the devastating costs and losses from one attack!
  • Handling the public relations nightmare of your clients’ data being exposed via a breach and having to notify your clients that you exposed their personal data, medical files, credit cards, e-mail, etc., to hackers.

The trouble is, it’s hard to know when you’re paying for bad advice until you are already neck-deep in the problems and it’s too late. By the time you suspect that you’ve hired the wrong person, you’ve already invested a considerable amount of time and money, making it difficult, if not impossible, to end the project and look for someone else.

Worse yet, IF you do get breached, you’ll be scrambling to find someone else to help you put all the pieces back together again, forced to make another quick decision on who to trust under pressure and having to throw more money at someone, hoping they’ll do the right thing.

I cover multiple other ways bad advice can cost you time and money in my book and how to avoid getting “ripped off”.  Grab your copy here: https://www.creativeresources.net/up_in_smoke/