SALISBURY — As small businesses rely more heavily on Internet opportunities and networked computers, owners and managers face the growing difficulty of getting everything to work without using outside help. Many offices have made a tech-savvy employee the computer person.

At first blush, the decision makes sense.  As important as computers are to a business’s operations, having a full-time IT person on staff is still seen as a luxury, so having a staff member who can add that responsibility to his or her other duties seems like the smart thing to do.

The problem, however, is that this tech-savvy employee may not be able to handle the more involved situations or simply may not have enough time because of other work obligations.

An office accountant, for instance, might keep up with the minutiae of the tax code and know how to do corporate taxes, but taking the time to do it would leave other work undone. Consequently, that job often goes to an accounting firm. It’s quicker and more efficient and can save a company money over the long term.

It was this model that inspired the folks at Vantage Point Solutions Group to construct a plan for businesses that put the incentive on the service provider to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible.

When Beacon Technologies and TechSolutions joined forces three years ago to form Vantage Point Solutions Group, it was the obvious step for two companies that had been on the forefront of the technology services industry since the 1990s. Beacon Technologies was a Web development company and TechSolutions an IT and computer maintenance and repair service. 

On the Web side, they came to understand that if they were going to provide a useful service to businesses, they had to make the sites they built easy to manage. Out-of-date Websites are often the result of a combination of difficulty in updating the information and a labor-intensive maintenance process.

By designing easy-to-use but still visually stunning Web pages, Vantage Point Solutions Group helps owners and their staff to focus on running the company rather than only running the Website. It’s part of a commitment to client company efficiency that informs Vantage Point Solutions’ approach to all of their services.

The most salient example is the company’s approach to its small business IT support services. For a monthly fee, Vantage Point Solutions will monitor a company’s network and repair whatever problems occur with it.

From this standpoint, according to company principle Doug Church, the pressure rests with them to make sure that as little as possible ever goes wrong.

“It’s really about aligning our interests with our clients,’” he said. “Fixed fee IT services encourages us to make sure they don’t have any problems.”

If through monitoring and close contact, they can avoid or prevent problems that will require significant repair, not only are their clients’ interests served, but so are Vantage Point’s. In fact, it is almost more in its interest to keep things from going wrong than it is in their clients’ because the client pays the same fee no matter how much time Vantage Point Solutions Group has to invest to fix it.