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Transitioning From Small Shop IT To Enterprise?
Imaginary Friendly asks: "I'm the 3rd guy in a three-person IT firm. We're good and we're expanding. Our clients range from three computers to 30, with our largest client having six servers. We can handle the work but, thanks to my efforts and love (or just luck), I may be signing up two new clients who have 200 networked computers each. We're spread thin as it is, and hiring competent IT staff has been difficult. We're now doing 60-hour work weeks, so re-education has remained passive. How do we transition from manual rebuilds and CD deployments, to full scale (proper) IT administration?"
Ditto.
By your own admission, you are stretched thin and can't handle your current load. Now you want to take on new clients, but not just any new clients, new clients with large needs that you don't know how to address.
Do you really think that you are going to be able handle your current load (which you say that you can't already), the load from these 2 new big clients (whom are each about 7 times bigger than your current largest client), and be able to figure out how to change the way that you do things to meet the demands of these new clients (when do you plan to have time for this)? No, no, and no, on all counts.
Fix your staffing problems.
Serve your existing clients without killing yourself, then expand.
You are risking your current client base in order to add more business that you admittedly can't handle. You will likely ruin your existing reputation and relationships, just to pick up some clients that you can't serve. It's hard to say "no" to new business, but sometimes you have to. If you grow to fast, it will get out of control.
Was "worst advice ever" meant to be a warning about the rest of the post?
The "you can work 80hr weeks instead" attitude is not a way to succeed. If you're demanding more from your people and they get nothing in return, some of them are going to leave. Hourly people who do get paid more for working more aren't all going to be interested in giving up all their free time to benefit the company. If people leave, that substantially increases the workload - not only do you have to take up the slack, but you also have to spend more time looking for a training a replacement. There are very few companies where you won't spend a significant portion of a new hire's time in training or getting up to speed for the first 3-6 months. This means that the person doesn't help relieve the workload for that period of time. In the worst case, the new person ends up taking more of other employees' time since they need to learn.
Hiring students to install software cheap is a reasonable interim measure, but it's hardly a long term plan. Setting up an automated software deployment infrastructure is important. Any software task that can be done by unskilled labor with minimal training can be automated. Automation improves scalability and accuracy. Accuracy is important since students may not realize when they skipped a step in the instructions they were given. Also, very few people are likely to bring it to someone's attention if they've messed up everything they've been doing this week because. Automation means consistency, which means if a mistake is made, it's been made everywhere, which means the solution can also be applied everywhere.