Is your IT provider costing your business more than you think?

Lancashire's SMEs are losing thousands of pounds a year to IT underperformance  and most don't realise it until it's too late.

Lancashire's business community is resilient, resourceful, and growing. From the manufacturing corridors of Burnley and Blackburn to the professional services firms of Preston and the creative businesses emerging across Pendle and Rossendale, the North West economy is powered by SMEs who get things done.

But there's a quiet drain on productivity that many business owners are reluctant to talk about and it's sitting in the IT support contract they're paying for every month.

Industry data shows that small and medium-sized businesses lose an average of 545 hours of staff productivity per year to IT downtime. For a Lancashire business with 20 employees, that's the equivalent of losing more than three full-time working weeks every single year.

"We know our IT isn't right, but we don't know how to fix it."

The hidden cost of 'good enough' IT

The problem isn't always dramatic. It rarely announces itself with a catastrophic system failure. Instead, it's the slow accumulation of friction: the helpdesk ticket that takes two days to resolve, the software update that nobody managed, the cybersecurity review that keeps being pushed back.

For Lancashire's manufacturing sector, which employs tens of thousands across the county, unreliable IT can halt production lines, delay orders, and damage client relationships built over years. For professional services firms in Preston, or healthcare organisations across East Lancashire, IT failure is a compliance and reputational risk, not just an operational one.

Slow response times: businesses report waiting hours, sometimes days, for acknowledgement of support requests, let alone resolution.

Poor communication: technical jargon and vague updates leave business owners feeling uninformed about their own infrastructure.

Reactive rather than proactive: cybersecurity threats targeting UK SMEs have increased over 30 per cent in two years. Providers who only respond to problems leave clients exposed.

Opaque pricing: poorly defined contracts lead to unexpected charges, difficult conversations, and eroded trust.

Staff continuity issues: high IT sector turnover means institutional knowledge about your business regularly walks out the door.

What the North West deserves

A genuine Managed Service Provider monitors your systems continuously, applies security patches proactively, and gives you a named team who get to know your business over time. Costs are fixed, predictable, and transparent. Response times are contractually guaranteed.

The fear of disruption puts many businesses off switching providers. In practice, a well-managed transition is smooth, fast, and almost always immediately worthwhile. The businesses who make the change consistently say the same thing: they wish they'd done it sooner.

About the contributor

J700 Group is an award-winning Managed IT Service Provider based in Haslingden & Bury. We support SMEs across Lancashire and the wider North West with managed IT, cybersecurity, cloud, hardware, and Microsoft 365. 

A Free IT Health Check can tell you where your strengths are, and where there might be room for improvement. Visit j700group.co.uk or call 0333 7721 700 to book yours.