257: Interview With Lucas Acosta, CEO of Foojee Consultants in Atlanta, Georgia

Topics:

Lucas Acosta, Founder & CEO of Foojee Consultants in Atlanta, GA joins us this week for an interview

Five Things You Should Know About Foojee

1. Foojee was born out of a calling to serve. We combined that calling with our enthusiasm of Apple products and created a company.

2. We're in it to win it. We don't outsource our talent. All of our team members are W-2 employees with benefits, and each one adds their own spice to the Foojee brand.

3. Why the name Foojee? Welp, the Fuji apple is our founder's favorite type of apple. Simple as that.

4. Since we opened shop, we've grown on referrals alone.

5. We create monthly Apple®-centric videos filled with tips, news, advice, and the occasional joke. It's how we like to keep in touch with our clients.

-Foojee is an outsourced IT shop for businesses using Apple products

-The majority is managed services for small businesses as well as MDM projects

-Video started out as a side hobby that turned into a revenue stream for Foojee. It all started when they started doing it for themselves. Lucas encourages those listening to try it yourself first

-Foojee uses a traditional email campaign with hosted YouTube videos to send to their subscribers

-Video also creates a way to keep that close relationship with your clients

-"Apple products at work" is the theme of their latest videos, focusing on using Apple products in business

-Get started using an iPhone as your microphone, using the Voice Memos app

-One thing videos do not do is generate leads.  But it helps when potential clients are comparing you to your competitors

-Visit Foojee's YouTube channel

-Lucas discusses the raw, single take vs scripted video and the pros and cons of each

-As the CEO, Lucas is still 50-60% engineer and 20-30% business development

-Lucas started Foojee in 2008 and he discusses the ebbs & flows of running a business

-He was initially under the impression that he needed to be big in order for clients to hire them

-In the same vein, Joe talks about his focus on the residential market

The main reason Lucas is part of the ACN, besides the leads, is that he wants to be aligned with Apple

Foojee's original company name was On-Site Technical Consulting!

Thank you to our Patron sponsors!

254: What's up, Dock?

Topics:

-This week's show is brought to you by FLEXdesk - your help desk support that grows with your company.  Go to rootedconsulting.org/flexdesk to find out more.

-Jerry takes over Joe's Peeves Corner as he gripes about Apple Remote Desktop and its annoying habit of jumping to different computers when it is populating a list

-It brings up the topic of Addigy and their remote access client and its speedy and reliable access.  Also Addigy's SSH/command line capabilities to perhaps kickstart Apple Remote Desktop.

-Joe talks about users enabling Printer Sharing.  If users turn it on and people connect through it, changing the host computer's name in System Preferences>Sharing will cause shared users to no longer be able to use it.

-Continuing failed updates with High Sierra and the now infamous "missing or damaged" error

-It reminds Joe of a story where a client had a firmware password on a Mac that was acquired from a previous user.  In a similar situation where the Apple Store could not/would not unlock it.  They extracted the hard drive, installed it in another system and wiped/updated it.  They then placed it back in the original iMac and it successfully booted.

-Jerry floats a conspiracy theory as to why these installer issues have been so rampant

"Joe's Tech Clinic" - After an upgrade to High Sierra, the Dock and Finder were slow to respond after booting each time.  Subsequent downloads would cause the Dock to then be unresponsive, once complete.  Joe attempted many fixes: resetting launch services, removing /var/folders contents (except zz), safe boot, resetting NVRAM, SMC, nada.  Also tried trashing Dock preferences and rebuilt manually.  A key was that the Downloads folder was not in the Dock.  Unbelievably, adding it to the Dock corrected the issue!

-A nice addition to the show is additional audio from our interview with Justin Maxwell of smith.ai and Keypad.  Justin talks about his time working for Apple.

-The rumor about being caught in an elevator with Steve Jobs turns out to be true!

-Justin and his wife were at Apple during the famous "I'm a Mac" commercials.  He talks about the underdog mentality that made for a very exciting time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfv6Ah_MVJU

-He was on the team that created and released Aperture

-Joe remembers the time of the release of the Intel processor.  At that time, Justin was part of the team building the iLife website (in Flash!).  At that time, Adobe decided not to release Flash for the intel processors.  Justin's team had to rebuild the entire website, working through holidays and weekends to meet a deadline.  Released the morning of MacWorld, Steve Jobs hated it!  Justin kept a little memento to remind him of that time in his life.

-Of the many things that Justin learned from all of this, Steve was almost always right. He always thought of the user first.

252: Migrate Is Becoming A Trigger Word For Me

Topics:

-Joe has some follow up for same from Episode 223 "It's not you, it's me" about Mail notifications

-Sam follows up on his experience at the ACN Road Show in Santa Monica, CA

-Sam shares a story from one of our listeners that recovered a stolen MacBook Pro with assistance from the police department

-In working with a client, Joe discovers that Find My iPhone was off.  He also discussed enabling show last location, which is a handy feature.

-Sam tries to inject a new segment in the show, "Sam's travel corner"

-Jerry reminds us about taking a few moments to ask clients for an online review

-Jerry talks about an experience with a client that had a failed High Sierra upgrade - "macOS could not be installed on this computer" and used terminal to correct it:
diskutil list
diskutil umount force /dev/disk1
(Take note of your disk id. disk1 in my case)
diskutil apfs convert /dev/disk1

-We reference Mike Bombich from Carbon Copy Cloner and an APFS issue that was found when dealing with sparse images:
https://bombich.com/blog/2018/02/15/macos-may-lose-data-on-apfs-formatted-disk-images

-Not to be outdone, Joe introduces yet another segment, "Joe's Kuriosity Korner"

-A client that politely declined Joe's monthly services plan ends up with an issue with data loss after a liquid spill and the Apple Store replaced hardware.  PsiMac to the rescue: had her order the hard drive from Backblaze. It contained a full copy of her home folder, which brought her data back.  Two fallout issues were Keychain related and the Photos library.  

-Sam has an issue with spotlight and Outlook 2016 and found a more recent support article to deal with the issue using the mdimport command.  This was a welcome new approach to removing and rebuilding the spotlight database:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2741535/outlook-for-mac-search-returns-no-results-and-task-items-are-not-displ

-A story you have to hear to believe - Joe's client has an issue with sending emails from Outlook and coming out as gibberish to receivers.  After upgrading from Outlook 2011 to 2016, the issue remained.  In the end, an errant carriage return in one of her contact names caused this formatting issue to occur.

"Just re-index it dude" 
-Apparently Sam

250: Interview - Justin Esgar of ACES Conference, Adam Engst Of Tidbits Contenet Network & Adam Rice of AdamRice.org .

Join us all at ACEs Conference on May 9th & 10th in Baltimore, MD! 
https://acesconf.com/ccp

ACEs Conference was created for one reason and one reason only:
To help IT consultants grow their companies.

With unique, premium content delivered by world-class speakers, ACEs Conference is the place for inspiration, ideas, business networking, and instantly-applicable knowledge. It’s no surprise that our attendees continue coming year after year—just one ACEs Conference and you’ll be sold.

Justin esgar

Adam engst

adam rice

Our Guests This Week:
Justin Esgar - Founder and creator of ACEs Conference
Adam Engst - TidBITS Content Network & speaker at ACEs - https://tcn.tidbits.com
Adam Rice - Fellow ACN and ACEs attendee extraordinaire - https://adamrice.org

Just some of the great features of ACEs Conference 2018:
-Sit Down with Charles Edge - Panel Discussion
-Adam Engst will be Moderating a marketing panel
-Mark Berman - Journey Mapping (to be revealed)

-A general discussion brews about how marketing works within the world of small business

-Find that one "golden nugget" that resonates the most with you and introduces new way to thinking about things

-Jerry brings up an excellent question that Justin answers about business owners that may think they know the lay of the land and what ACEs can do for them

-Adam Rice discusses his business location, clientele, and how his first ACEs opened his eyes

-Justin talks about the ACEs Mastermind Group, which continues the conversation after the conference: https://www.acesmastermind.com

-Addigy will be holding a welcome party overlooking Camden Yards on May 8th.  Join us there!

-Tickets are $529 but using the code CCP will give you a 10% discount.  Use your code before prices go up!

-Command Control Power will be doing a Live Show at ACEs Conference 2018 on day 1.  We hope to see you there.

249: Live Show - A Series Of Unfortunate Events

We're sponsored this week by Watchman Monitoring, a favorite tool of ours that should be in every professional consultant's toolkit.

Visit WatchmanMonitoring.com/cmdctrlpwr and sign up for your free trial to find out how Watchman Monitoring can keep an eye on your client machines and notify you of over 100 issues. Be sure to tweet @cmdctrlpwr #CCPsentme to support the show!

Topics:

-Joe calls back to a 27" iMac hinge repair.  Sam & Joe have both used https://www.themachack.com to hold up the display.  But Joe references that Apple will reimburse customers with proof of repair.

-TI83 Calculator was Joe's calculator of choice in high school.  You can still get one on Amazon!
https://www.amazon.com/Texas-Instruments-TI-83-Graphing-Calculator/dp/B00001N2QU

-The Jiggler was a handy program Jerry had used to keep FileVault moving along.  But unfortunately he has some follow up news regarding FileVault that wasn't so great.

-The team discusses fusion drives and weighing cost options for clients

-Joe introduces a new segment to the show, "Joe's Konspiracy Korner"
In this week's konspiracy, Joe throws around theories about a rash of errors on macOS computers. - "macOS could not be installed on your computer.  The path /System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg appears to be missing or damaged"
Some solutions offered from Stack Exchange - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/299808/high-sierra-the-path-system-installation-packages-osinstall-mpkg-appears-to-b

-Sam got bleeped! Guess the banned word and we'll give you credit on the show!

-Sam brings up a scenario where a client lost her iPhone with Find My iPhone off and a lost iTunes backup password.  Jerry offers a possible solution in LCOM Soft:
https://www.elcomsoft.com/

-Some Synology follow up from Sam regarding rebuilding a RAID.  This was discussed on an Episode 241 with Weldon Dodd.

-Jerry has some rave reviews about a podcast app for Apple Watch called Outcast
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/outcast-for-apple-watch/

Some more of Jerry's reviews:
PopClip Extensions
pilotmoon.com/popclip/

Card Hop
https://flexibits.com/cardhop

-Joe's pop quiz: how is a shut down and cold boot different from a restart?

-Another new segment from Joe!  How to think like a client?
This week: Backups.  A client wouldn't realize that the key to laptops backing up reliably is to plug them into power while they are open and awake, unless they support Power Nap (Dark Wake). The default setting is not to back up while on battery power.

-One of Jerry's clients has an issue where she thought all of her documents appearing as My Documents.zip.  The explanation is something we have all encountered before.

-How much time have you spent assisting clients with downloading and running TeamViewer?

THANK YOU TO OUR PATREON SPONSORS!

248: Interview with Jeramy LeCompte and Daniel Allen of FLEXdesk by Rooted Consulting

Topics:

We have the great pleasure of having not one, but two guests on this week.  Jeramy LeCompte and Daniel Allen of Rooted Consulting join us to talk about their outsourced help desk service, FLEXdesk.

Jeramy lecompte

daniel allen

FLEXdesk is a flexible, outsourced HelpDesk service that allows you to quickly and easily scale your business with a highly qualified and experienced team without adding the expenses associated with traditional employees. This allows you to focus on customer support and gives you peace of mind to provide a great customer experience.

-Daniel answers some questions regarding minimum requirements and overall logistics of onboarding new clients

-Jeramy also talks about providing tier 1 and tier 2 support for their customers as well as offering tier 3 when necessary.

-Everyone on the FLEXdesk team has obtained at least Apple Certified Support Professional status

-They discuss the challenges that all teams face when dealing with a new end user that may be unfamiliar with the personnel

-Documentation is key and makes the handoff seamless to the FLEXdesk team

-Some benefits of FLEXdesk:
    -Allows you to free up time to focus on building your business
    -Takes out the need to hire a full time employee
    -Reduces costs in training and on-boarding 

-Scheduling and prioritizing is a critical aspect of how they operate

-Looking to get started?  Email support@rootedconsulting.org to reach out to a member of the team.  Or visit www.rootedconsulting.org/flexdesk