Outsourcing: Call 1-800-Rent-a-Geek

When David Born got the news late one fall afternoon that he was to be the only person left in the IS department of Smith Equipment, a 125-employee torch manufacturing company in Watertown, S.D., he had a lot to worry about. His two colleagues were let go the next day. “My immediate needs were in the security area,” explains Born. “When we lost our network admin, that knowledge walked out the door with him.”

Born called the local franchise of Expetec, a provider of onsite IT services that had previously helped the company set up its Unix server. A technician showed up the next morning and began securing the network. Born has called him back many more times for other projects. The only other option in town—a traditional IT consultancy—would cost him twice as much as Expetec’s $50 an hour rate.

IT managers in small to midsize businesses are employing on-call IT service providers such as Expetec (which has 200 locations in 30 states) to do everything from setting up Web services to installing their phones. When the economy slowed, business for such service providers picked up as companies who could no longer afford to keep full-time IT staff in-house sought external, part-time alternatives. In fact, Expetec says some displaced IT workers have become franchise owners. Similar companies, such as Geeks on Call and Computer Troubleshooters, have set up shop across the country to offer occasional and local IT help to a range of businesspeople, from those lacking expertise in a particular area (such as Born) to those with no technology skills at all.

Jennifer M. Settle, a co-regional vice president with HelmsBriscoe, a conference resource company, uses IT talent from ComputerRepair.com to service her three-person office in Coronado, Calif. She says she finds the service even better than when she worked in a large corporation and dealt with an in-house IT department. “They’ve been reliable, fast and knowledgeable.”