When a Newport restaurant, hotel, or marina asks me whether they can shrink their IT spend once the season ends, the honest answer is: partly. The costs that track headcount should track headcount. The foundation underneath should not move at all. And the off-season is worth more to you than the savings, because it is the only stretch of the year when you can actually get real work done to the building.
Newport doesn't run on a calendar year, and most IT plans do
A seasonal business has a different rhythm than a year-round one, and the IT plan should reflect that. The biggest mistake I see is treating May and January exactly the same. Staffing, devices, software usage, support volume, and bandwidth needs all change dramatically between those two months. Running one flat setup across both means you are either overpaying for eight months or underbuilt for four.
Where it really breaks down is the ramp-up. Nobody plans for it, and then the business tries to turn everything back on at once right before the busy season opens. New hires need accounts. Devices that sat in a closet all winter need updates. Somebody wants Wi-Fi to reach a part of the property it never reached before. That is a project, and projects need lead time. Compressed into the last two weeks before opening, it becomes a scramble, and the scramble is what people remember as their IT being bad. It usually was not bad. It was late.
This is a real difference in how we work with Newport businesses compared with a year-round office in Providence. The calendar drives the plan, not the other way around.
What can genuinely shrink in the off-season
Anything driven by the number of people working should follow the number of people working:
- User licenses for seasonal staff
- Temporary devices - tablets, POS terminals, laptops brought in for the season
- Certain application subscriptions that only the seasonal crew touches
- Extra support capacity, if your plan is structured to allow it
One thing worth checking before you build a budget around this: if your Microsoft 365 subscriptions are on an annual commitment, your seat count is locked for the year regardless of who is actually working. Seat counts only flex if the term is monthly, which normally costs a bit more per seat. If your headcount doubles or triples for the season, that trade is often worth it. But find out which term you are on now, in the quiet part of the year, rather than in October when you are trying to shed twenty seats and discover you cannot.
What you should not cut, even in February
The core environment still has to stay protected when the doors are closed. I would not turn off any of this just because business is slower:
- Security tooling and monitoring
- Backups, and verification that they restore
- Firewall management and patching
- Network monitoring
- Documentation
- Core Microsoft 365 administration
Two reasons. First, nothing about the off-season makes you a smaller target - if anything, a compromised account in a mostly empty building is worse, because there is nobody around to notice something strange for weeks. Second, the off-season is exactly when those systems should be maintained and cleaned up, so you are not discovering problems in June. Winter is when you have time to test whether the backup actually restores instead of assuming it does.
Cutting the foundation to save money for a few months almost always creates more work and more risk when the season starts again. The savings are small and they show up as a much larger bill in the form of downtime during the weeks you make your money.
Seasonal staff: everyone is better at creating accounts than removing them
This is the single most common problem I see with seasonal operators, and it is not a technology problem. Seasonal employees get email, POS access, Wi-Fi credentials, shared folders, and application logins on day one because they need them. Then the season ends, people scatter, and some of those accounts stay active long after the person is gone. Nobody made a decision to leave them on. Nobody made a decision at all - that is the issue.
The fix is a repeatable onboarding and offboarding process, so access does not depend on someone remembering months later. Every access a seasonal employee gets should have three things attached to it:
- A start date - when it turns on
- An owner - the manager who requested it and is accountable for it
- An end date - when it turns off by default, extended only on purpose
Set the end date at hire, not at departure. If somebody comes back next season, turning access back on is a two-minute job. Leaving it on all winter for a person who is not coming back is the kind of thing that gets asked about on a cyber insurance application, and it is a hard question to answer well when you have four winters of dormant accounts sitting in your tenant.
If I could do one thing in February instead of July
Network and infrastructure work, without hesitation. Replace the old switches. Improve the Wi-Fi where it was weak. Clean up the cabling. Test the backups. Update the firewalls. Fix whatever caused problems last season.
The reason is scheduling, not technology. In February you can take a floor offline, pull a rack apart, and re-run cable without disrupting anyone. In July, a small outage becomes a major business problem in about ninety seconds. You cannot tell a full dining room that card processing will be back shortly, and you cannot tell a hotel at capacity that the front desk system is down while somebody drives out with a replacement switch. The same work costs the same money in either month. What changes is the cost of it going sideways.
One practical habit that makes this easier: keep a running list during the season of everything that broke, was slow, or annoyed your staff. Do not try to fix it in July. Write it down. That list becomes your February work order, and it will be more accurate than anything you can reconstruct from memory six months later.
The short version: let the seat counts and temporary devices breathe with your staffing, keep the security and backup foundation steady all twelve months, put an end date on seasonal access the day you grant it, and spend the quiet months doing the physical work you cannot do in season. If you run a seasonal operation in Newport or Middletown and want a second opinion on which of your costs should actually flex, get in touch - the useful time to have that conversation is now, not in May.
