January 14, 2015

084: New Year's Resolutions 2015, Part 2

January 14, 2015/ Joe

Recorded live on January 6, 2015

Many thanks to our sponsor this week, Watchman Monitoring. We use and highly recommend Watchman Monitoring. Sign up for your free trial at watchmanmonitoring.com/cmdctrlpwr. New Year promotion for people who subscribe: and add the agent to any 20 computers in 30 days and get Custom Branding for 1/2 off.

Topic:

- Business Resolutions for the New Year

January 08, 2015

083: New Year's Resolutions 2015, Part 1

January 08, 2015/ Joe

Recorded live on January 6, 2015

This week's show has been brought to you by the good folks at Blue Mango Learning Systems, makers of Clarify. Visit Clarify-It.com to download a free trial of Clarify, and start creating how-to's and instructional documents today – and help others be great. Use coupon code CCPSENTME for 15% off.

Topics:

- helping family members around the holidays (Jerry sent a newsletter!)

- Comcast shipping new modem/router combos which include an open wifi network; Sam had issues with port forwarding and Comcast doesn't support it

- warning clients and family to be careful trying to follow instructions they find online: "stop if you see the word Terminal"

- we appeared on MacVoices again!

- the need to exercise the tech muscle when you go from being a one man show to hiring someone, to avoid getting rusty

August 15, 2014

063: Entrepreneurial Spirit

August 15, 2014/ Joe

Recorded live on August 12, 2014

Topics:

- origin stories: how we (Jerry, Sam, and Joe) got into this racket

- how to make the transition: going from working for a company to working for yourself

- moonlighting vs. jumping in with both feet

- is entrepreneurship "in the blood"?

Also:

- Aces Conf in New Orleans, LA, May 2015; acesconf.com; great opportunity to see Luis Giraldo of Ook and Justin Esgar of Virtua Computers talk shop and focus on business processes

June 14, 2014

054: Interview with Brian Best from BestMacs and Mac-MSP Gruntwork

June 14, 2014/ Joe

Recorded live June 10, 2014

- Brian got started on the Mac in the days of nine-inch monochrome screens and System 6; began working on Macs professionally in 1996; started BestMacs in 1999

- when transforming his consultancy to Managed Services, Brian developed a suite of tools in-house to be released under the Mac-MSP brand; the first to be released is Gruntwork for automating maintenance; a remote screen sharing and remote login (SSH) tool called Blue Sky is coming soon

- Gruntwork can be compared to CasperSuite; uses Munki for software updates

- the importance of working more on the business instead of in the business as the business grows

- Mac-MSP offers discounts to Apple Consultants Network members and subscribers of Watchman Monitoring

- going "all in" when transitioning to Managed Services from hourly billing: having a referral to another consultant ready for clients who don't want Managed Services helps avoid leaving clients in the lurch

- Allen's "Personal Support" plan; Easing Into Managed Services

- Gruntwork proudly displays the service provider's branding; demonstrates value by reminding users that maintenance is being run

- @Siracusa: Gruntwork will run a live disk verification, and if it fails, will automatically restart in Single User mode, run the disk repair, log the result, restart normally, and report the result #HFS+

- Apple should buy Alsoft and build DiskWarrior into the Recovery Partition and diskutil

- how to price managed services; don't undercharge, match the old pricing at a minimum

- demo videos at mac-msp.com/demo

Special note from Smile this week: We're offering a 20% discount on licenses to PDFpen and PDFpenPro, and we'll donate a matching license of PDFpen or PDFpenPro to the nonprofit of a user's choice. We're calling it "Get a Little, Give a Lot." To participate, purchase a single user, family pack, or office pack license of PDFpen or PDFpenPro from the Smile web store using the coupon code “nonprofit” during the week of June 9th through 15th. Once the order is complete, forward your confirmation email to nonprofit@smilesoftware.com and include the following information about the nonprofit: Name of nonprofit, Contact at nonprofit, Email of contact.

April 07, 2014

044: Tales from Decrypt

April 07, 2014/ Joe

Recorded live April 1, 2014

Topics:

- Sam is growing the practice

- freeing up time to do business development, plan projects, talk to clients

- travel charge?

- how to reimburse employee for mileage

- use PDFPen to strike through or highlight line items on invoice

- to send or not to send the zero balance invoice

- advising clients about billing for two techs on certain projects

- Jerry’s MacBook Air lockout; manual decrypt using command line

- issues with users connecting via SMB to Mavericks Server

March 23, 2014

042: Managed Services Roundtable with Allen Hancock, Luis Giraldo, and Kevin Ginger, Part 2

March 23, 2014/ Joe

Recorded March 2, 2014

Topics:

- offering clients "self service" options through CasperSuite or RobotCloud

- building a "book of service" to work toward an exit plan for your consultancy; building something of value; getting acquired

- the benefits of talking about your service offerings to get comfortable pitching them to clients

- the fact is, servers should be managed proactively to ensure reliability, and Managed Services is a natural way to provide proactive services, billed automatically on a monthly basis consistent with the way services are rendered

- with Mission Critical services, the consultant takes on a psychological burden to ensure that the services keep working; Managed Services makes it equitable for the consultant