In the last fifteen years, I’ve nearly lost track of the number of business owners that we’ve worked with in and around the Metro Detroit area on all of their technology needs. Over that time, I’ve come to realize that there are really two types of entrepreneurs out there:

The first is the one who wants to know EVERYTHING about what is going on with their IT. They call me all the time and they send emails just as frequently. We don’t do anything without fielding a barrage of questions about “why this? Why now? What does it get me? What about X or Y or Z?”

The second is the kind who quickly says to me “eh, you know what you’re doing. I’ll let you handle it from here.”

Now, you may think that as someone with this much experience as a managed services provider, I’d vastly prefer the latter to the former.

That’s why it may surprise you to learn that you’re wrong.

The Trouble With Blind Faith

If you truly want to be seen as a business leader, in my humble opinion that means you need to lead – in this case, that involves knowing EXACTLY what is going on with the IT in your business at any given moment. How can you be expected to make the best and most informed decisions possible – which is a large part of what a leader does – if you lack those critical pieces of information about something so important?

Think about it this way: whether you’re a “technology business” or not, IT is at the heart of everything you’re doing. It represents the tools you’re giving your employees to allow them to do excellent work every day. It’s what they rely on to communicate and collaborate with one another. It’s one of the core components that you use to foster relationships with your own clients.

Why would you not want to know everything you possibly could about such an essential element?

In my opinion you should never, under any circumstances, put blind faith in your IT provider. Doing so not only makes it harder to make those business decisions you need, but it also leaves you vulnerable to receiving poor support from an MSP of lesser integrity, too.

At InsideOut Networking, for example, we aren’t looking for blind faith to begin with. I believe the same is true for every other high quality MSP out there. Whenever I encounter a client like that second example I mentioned above, I always try to (politely) get them to see the value of being more involved. That’s because we want to be collaborators in every sense of the term.

Nobody knows IT like we do, but nobody knows your business better than you do. Both of those areas of expertise need to come together to form something more efficient than either one could be on its own.

When you put blind faith in your IT provider, one of two things happens pretty quickly:

1. They essentially start taking orders from you, which is not how a true collaboration happens. Or worse…
2. … you start taking orders from them.

If your IT company uses technical jargon that you don’t understand, you deserve to have your IT situation explained in a way that makes sense to a regular human being. If your IT company insists on selling services but can’t explain the value, you’re setting yourself up to buy into resources that aren’t actually getting you anything in return. If your IT company isn’t actually interested in your point of view, they’re not working for you.

They’re working in service of their own bottom line.

You would never put blind faith in a mechanic you’ve never heard of to fix your car just because they’re an “expert,” or a general contractor to put that new addition on your house just because “they’ve been doing this for years and are still around, so they must be good.”

You would ask questions. You would have concerns. You would want updates and information and would insist on being kept in the loop.

The same thing should absolutely be true of your business’ technology and any provider who tells you otherwise isn’t one deserving of your faith OR your respect.