PC MAX Return on Your Investment
If you are a business owner I imagine you know how much each employee costs for every hour of operation, if not, here is a quick calculation for you. Take your total payroll costs including all your payroll taxes, (940 and 941 deposits etc.) and insurance. Divide that total figure by the number of regular employees then divide the answer by 2080, (52 weeks at 8 hours per day),. Based on 8 hour days and paid vacation, that is the dollar amount each employee costs you each work hour, on average. The results may be upsetting if you weren't aware of the true costs of an employee. Now multiply that dollar per hour amount by the average number of employees on duty at any point in time. The result is roughly your total employee cost per hour of operation. There is a point to be made.
Here is another way to look at it. There is a difference between the cost of an employee and the value of the employee. No matter what you may think about the benefit of any individual employee, their true value is your gross revenue divided by the number of employees. (If your gross sales are $400,000 year and you have 2 employees their value is $200,000 per year each). You can't generate the business without the people. A good computer system may not allow you to reduce your staff but if it can allow you to increase your business through improved efficiency without needing to hire additional employees. It has the same effect as reducing your staff.
You know by now that your largest controllable cost of doing business is the human factor. Compared to the cost and benefit per hour for an employee, new computer hardware is cheap. At around 30-50 cents per hour over its average life span you can see that the employees are far more expensive than the computers.
You pay for the computer once, you take a hit on the productivity, or lack of it, every hour the computer is in use.
A few of our more cost conscious clients have determined that the improved productivity of a new, faster computer can pay for the system in less than a year and at most 18 months. A really fast computer is likely to last longer before you wish it was faster. That means that it may actually be more economical to make an investment in a better computer up front since the labor and headaches typically associated with replacing an older system increase the total cost over the life of the system. Faster systems also makes for happier employees which could contribute to reduced turnover. There is no end to the ways you can calculate the benefits of a better system. If performance wasn't a factor there would be more 10 year old '486 systems in use.
When making a decision to invest in a new computer do not do it with your current computing demands in mind. Attempt to determine what you have asked of the system over the last 3 years that made it seem so slow — then forecast that the exact same thing may happen 1-3 years from now. In other words, invest for what you will do with it 3 years from now and you should get satisfactory results for 5 years. If you expect to get $800 in performance from a $500 computer We can tell you it won't work out very well but you could easily get $4,000 in benefits from a $900 investment. That's a good return.
PC MAX selects only the highest quality, industry standard components to use in the systems we build. This provides you more room to grow into, rather than out of the system by starting with a faster, easier to upgrade, easier to service system that will last at least 30% longer then the typical systems businesses purchase.
Don't get me wrong, better systems are available from the major vendors and plenty of businesses purchase them but not at Best Buy, Office Depot, Comp USA, DELL or any other retail operation that sells computers. Rather than spending money on a computer you should look at it as an investment in your business.
The retail, (including Dell), operations only have one thing in mind, do whatever it takes to get a price point on the system that will entice people to buy it. Cheap systems are just that, cheap!
If we ask 30 people who purchased a computer at one of Dell's WEB sites how many systems they configured, 29 will say one. But if you look around you'll find other systems on that same site that have very similar sounding configurations with vastly differing costs. One indication you purchased a consumer class system is by the amount of junk already installed on the system that the manufacturer is trying to sell you. (They make a few dollars every time someone signs up). Business class systems start much cleaner and also faster because all the extra stuff wasn't included.
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