@CCWTech said in Defining "Emergency" For MSP Customers:

@JaredBusch said in Defining "Emergency" For MSP Customers:

This is what we currently do for hourly phone system jobs.

933b95d1-3c95-490a-ae00-02765016e775-image.png

Basically as long as you schedule it, you get the normal rate. Time of day doesn't matter.

Do you charge differently for on site vs. remote support?

No, but as I’ve said many times. We are not really an MSP. Strictly consulting.

Congrats!

@Dashrender said in Consultancies Advertise People; VARs Advertise Products:

@EddieJennings said in Consultancies Advertise People; VARs Advertise Products:

This may seem simplistic, but if I were in this scenario, on which side of the MSP / VAR would I stand?

A person hires me to help spec out a server for their office. I'm paid to help them determine how much RAM, storage, processors, etc. they need.

This part is clear, I'm being paid for advice; thus, MSP.

A point of clarity - advising only this is not being an MSP - you'r not managing anything (managed service provider). ITSP or Consultancy would be better terms for this portion... heck - the whole thing, including recommending a hardware vendor, because again, you're not managing anything.

True. I ought to have used those other terms.

And this one...

https://ntg.co/outsourcing-and-offshoring/

@kelly said in How Can the FTE Model Compete with the MSP Model?:

Maybe not directly for the company, but the MSP has to recoup the costs of time and travel somehow, and that will affect rates if you're going to stay profitable.

That is very true, no denying that. But you can build those costs in. There are certainly costs involved, but there are savings too. You have to look at the whole picture.

In this example, we have housing costs about 20% lower than they do, our fuel is way cheaper ($.25 I bet), and our Internet is a fraction of the cost (about 10% the cost, I kid you not.) Going local to them would require us to raise prices, traveling to them is trivial.

@mike-davis said in How MSPs provide their services:

@scottalanmiller said in How MSPs provide their services:

That's a lot of investment for a system like that. If you have hundreds of customers, it can make sense. But it takes a lot of customers to recoup the lost time into that system. It can work out well for a traditional MSP, but depends on large scale standardization to justify the investment.

I don't know about hundreds of customers. The number of end points might be more relevant. For me at about 10 MSP customers I can justify the investment. When you look at the time it takes to set up something like a zabbix server and maintaining a WSUS server vs not having to that helps make it worth it. Missed revenue because you didn't have a system in place to capture every minute hurts.

It would be a blend, I'm sure. A single customer with a million end points wouldn't make sense because you'd use more traditional tools in a single customer scenario. And a hundred with only one end point each wouldn't do it either. So some combination of enough end points for volume and enough customers for complexity put together.

@eddiejennings Another possible option is to use Jared as a paid resource if he is willing to do that. If we got along better I would hire him for x amount of hours for projects in my lab. That way when I ran into issues I could schedule time with him to go over why something is happening and the correct way to diagnose and solve the problem. This could be a valuable learning experience for you.

Unsure if he would be willing to do that, but I'm sure someone here would. I'd offer it myself but I would not be of much help. If you're going to hire someone, make sure it's someone who knows their stuff.

reason for this, to me, is partially induced by the amount of work/materials required in a company to get the job done.

When you start it is really close to what you do in your house, so you go to the mall and buy a router, a laptop and so... you do not think about planning, it is just another piece of HW you need, like the smartphone. You do not hire a consultant to buy a smartphone.

a SMB with no more then 10 people will need not so much, maybe just an intervention now or then, let say to change a burned router every 3/5 years, or a broken disk in a NAS. This stuff is so rare that the SMB do not hire competent people to manage it - they just buy stuff like in their own house-, therefore, the SMB has a relevant degree of ignorance on a topic.

the commercial guy in front of the SMB is (apparently) a huge source of information for the SMB, they do not need to go deeper on tech details: they can't even totally understand what the commercial is exposing.

Now you will say: hay, consultants are there for this very topic: let SMB not be fooled/deviated by bad commercial practices.

Yes, but this implies that the SMB has - at least - a bare minimum degree of knowledge about its own ignorance.

Unfortunately they have not. Everything starts with something small, let say a small 2-disk NAS. Hey it worked! now what, oh we need a small server. Hey the commercial guy has solved the problem last time, let's call him again, he will solve it!

Then you start buy stuff and stuff, in the end IT is not the core business it is just like other tools you need to make the job done. period. what matterst is if you have margins.

Here is where you start thinking about consultats. when margins are hard. and the bigger you are the harder to keep margins high. therefore you start minding about what you are doing. And consultants start here. But it is not the IT consultant. the IT consultant is at the end of the queue, first you start with company organization, with people and procedures, THEN you ask for consultancy on tools.

Smart switches are cheaper than managed switches, normally by quite a bit. And they are way easier for a small business to manage as they normally just use a web browser or a simple utility instead of making you use expensive and complex central management tools for SNMP.

This really follows along well with this discussion: https://mangolassi.it/topic/11852/why-it-builds-a-house-of-cards

It's far easier to avoid the "house of cards" motivation problems with an MSP than with internal staff.

@John-Nicholson said in The MSP Model fails more often than not.:

@Carnival-Boy said in The MSP Model fails more often than not.:

I'd argue that the more complex it is, the more having good structure and support is important.

I agree and that's where I think internal IT wins. MSPs tend to be very good at IT, but lack the business understanding, because they don't work in the business, they work in IT. Good internal IT staff have both IT and business expertise.

Depends on the MSP If it's one that specializes in a given field (Say Education) they might know how other companies in the same vertical solve a problem.

And value to tackling things from other fields, too. So often you see companies that have the "our industry is special and has special needs" like video processing. But if someone from another field looks at it without that attitude they realize that their needs are very basic, simple and standard.

Yeah, I would totally hate my job without resources like SW and MangoLassi.

I think working in isolated, non-IT companies where there is no peer support at all it might be easy to forget how much training is endemic to any organization's core. If you are a lithography company and have many litho machines, many litho workers (even, say half a dozen of them) there is a natural cross training and sharing of knowledge, an automatic introduction to different equipment, styles and techniques. Even when no effort is put into training and development, which is effectively unheard of for any business in its core operations, there is a natural training effect through knowledge training. This is why cities with a high skill density for a given field have higher end people and pay more than other markets (NY for IT, SV for SE, Detroit for Automotive engineering, etc.)

@Dashrender said in MSP Teams in the SMB:

I will give you that, if the reasoning was sound and their fired the MSP anyhow, the client is probably a bad client and won't keep MSPs for very long because they are unreasonable, but let's not go down that path.

And that's why MSPs fire clients just as often as vice versa. But when you, as an MSP, start with a new client, they always leave out the big about having been fired and act like they did the firing.

@scottalanmiller said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:

@Dashrender said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:

@scottalanmiller said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:

@Dashrender said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:

@scottalanmiller said in Organizing Documentation with MediaWiki:

Yeah, but we can't access that. It's $20 for us. That's just the price, can't get around it.

If you're really planning on dropping all the way to the $4/u/m exchange only plan, then you can probably move to the $5/month plan (you have less than 250 users, right? and get what I have today.

MSP, doesn't work that way. We need our E3 plans. Seriously, we don't have any option for the $5 stuff.

then you're paying $20 already - so what difference does it make?

That we can't get the $5 plan. So we can't have OneNote and SharePoint without paying the $16 premium per user. We are going in circles. I'm back to explaining the original price post.

Also, FFS, quit cluttering up the wrong damned thread.