What do you do if your finances as an IT Operations professional turned entrepreneur are out of control?

Hire a good accountant, consider using personal/ business financial software like Quicken/ Quickbooks to track monthly finances. Create a budget and know how much you spend a month/ need to make a month.

I believe that as a professional IT manager your costs should never get out of control. If you plan and budget all projects correctly to begin with. preparation can save you time and money later. If every possible thing that can go wrong has been looked at this scenario does not happen. Proper project management does not let costs run out of control. Proper project controls will not allow it to happen. If something is affecting the cost of the project that is not accounted for you need to go to the owner and ask for more resources. Plan so this doesn't happen.

1. Recognize you don't know, what you don't know. 2. Be vulnerable and work with someone that has either learned from this before OR is a SME 3. spend time understanding your ledger AND identifying your highest % of costs 4. Work the top 1 or 2 cost centers to reduce those costs 5. if not possible, work with the beneficiaries of those costs (your customers) to either pay more, or halt use. It's too easy to be afraid to work with your customers, but at the end of the day your business is more important than the resell or 'nerdi-ness' of the tool that helps you do your job. It might suck for a while to not have it, but at least you have your business.

Specifically for IT administrators it's important to keep the costs of your software stack under control. You should make sure to have a full overview of all applications that are being used in your organization and which of them are paid for. An easy way to get an overview is by collaborating with your finance team by reviewing credit card statements and therefore discover apps that are currently paid for. As an additional step you might want to review your oauth logs to control for any other apps that are being used within your organization. As a final step review the user lists of your tools and try to understand which user is not using the application actively. These users should be removed to save money on their seats.

In IT operations, there are essential expenses and others that, while useful, can be replaced by more economical services or even eliminated. Often, a reduction in revenue leads to a decrease in service consumption, making it crucial to periodically review infrastructure, service levels, and other aspects that can be adapted to current circumstances. Additionally, it is important to constantly review contracts, regardless of the economic situation, as this helps maintain a lean budget for IT operations and avoids crises during periods of mandatory cuts.

An easy way to remove costs in IT operations is to review all paid applications. Step 1: Identify all paid apps through credit card statements Step 2: Review the user lists and deactivate/remove seats from users that haven't logged in over 30+ days

IT Operations is usually not closely related to revenue. However, IT administrators can support revenue teams such as the sales department to automate their tasks and therefore enable them to work more effectively and generate additional revenues. Low hanging fruits are automations that you can setup between scheduling software (such as calendly), CRMs, call recording software etc. With simple tools such as Zapier you can automate many otherwise manual tasks from revenue teams.

Consider open source tools as an alternative to paid software. This enables you to save money, while not needing to make compromises on features. The biggest downside is added complexity if the open source tool requires self-hosting. However, many providers offer a self-hosted version for free and enable you to switch to a cloud hosted paid version later on if the need for more hands-off management arises.