Our local ambulance service answers about 94% of its calls, and that is exactly the right number. The reason why explains how smart businesses should think about IT.
Outside of IT, I'm the founder of Northern Onondaga Volunteer Ambulance (NOVA), a non-profit emergency medical service based in Liverpool, New York.
NOVA was founded in 1994, growing out of the Moyers Corners Fire Department's early rescue squad. Today it provides primary 911 and pre-hospital emergency care for the Town of Clay and surrounding Onondaga County mutual-aid zones. With a fleet of eight ambulances, multiple advanced life support (ALS) vehicles and a team of paid and volunteer staff, NOVA handles more than 6,000 emergency calls a year.
Three decades of running an ambulance service taught me a lesson that applies directly to how your business should be covered for IT.
The math of the worst day
At any given time, NOVA keeps a handful of ambulances in service. That covers almost every day of the year.
But once in about 30 years, there was a day when ten ambulances were needed at the same moment. So why not keep ten in service at all times, just in case?
If I went back 30 years and said I'm going to guarantee 100% coverage, I'd have to have ten ambulances in service all the time. I'd be out of business in three months.
Staffing for the rarest, worst day doesn't make a service safer. It makes it unsustainable, and then nobody is covered.
Mutual aid: covering the peaks together
Instead, ambulance services rely on mutual aid. When NOVA's ambulances are all out on calls, a neighboring service answers. With more than 20 neighboring ambulance services in the region, they are never all tied up at once.
That's why answering about 94% of calls directly is the right target. You find the peak of the bell curve: diligent about every call that comes in, but within limits that let the service survive.
No single service owns enough ambulances for the worst day. The network does, and every community it serves is covered.
Your business has the same problem
Most days, a small business needs everyday IT help: a laptop that won't connect, a new hire to set up, a printer acting up.
Once in a while, it needs far more. A server fails. A ransomware attack hits. A compliance audit lands. Those days call for a network engineer, a security specialist and a CTO-level strategist, all at once.
You could hire that whole team in-house to be ready for the rare bad day. But for a 25-person law firm or accounting practice, that would cost more than the business could justify. And you're not an IT company. Why would you do that? (We break down what that hire really costs in Do You Really Need Full-Time IT Staff?)
The fractional IT team: mutual aid for your technology
This is what a fractional IT team is for. Gemini Technical Services serves many businesses, so the technicians, network engineers and strategy-level expertise are shared across all of them. Each client gets the depth of a full IT department without carrying its full cost.
Gemini follows the same principle itself. A small IT firm can't staff round-the-clock security monitoring for the one or two major incidents a year that demand it. So we partner with specialists like Huntress and SentinelOne, who focus only on 24/7 threat detection and response for many IT providers at once. (More on that in Why Your IT Company Has Partners.)
The result is a chain of mutual aid, just like the ambulance network:
- 1Your business relies on Gemini instead of building an in-house IT department.
- 2Gemini shares its team's expertise across many clients and stays your single point of contact.
- 3Specialist partners provide 24/7 security coverage at a scale no single IT firm could match.
The customer, us and our partners are all doing exactly the same thing.
Each one lets the next tap into economies of scale, so the business that needs help gets it.
You don't need to own every ambulance
NOVA doesn't keep ten ambulances running for a once-in-30-years day, and your business shouldn't build an IT department for a once-in-a-while emergency. What you need is to be part of the right network, one that answers every call, including the big ones.
That's the kind of coverage I built for the Town of Clay, and it's the kind Gemini Technical Services brings to businesses across Rochester and Syracuse. See how our support tiers cover the everyday and the worst day.