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513: Pricing Your Device Management Stack
/Topics:
-Jerry & Joe talk about their monthly MSP offerings and the services it includes.
-Jerry uses Square for automated credit card payments and invoices.
-Joe talks about competing on quality as opposed to pricing.
-Offering a lower starting point without important services can put both you and the customer in a bad position.
-How do you handle consultants in your area that offer extremely low rates?
-The hosts speak to the benefits of monthly fees.
-Priority scheduling and unattended remote support are big selling points for Joe’s plan.
-We spoke with Tim Pearson on Patreon Episode 471 to discuss some great tips on managed services pricing.
-One of Jerry’s clients uses a Remote Desktop tool called NuoRDS.
-Jerry was able to remotely assist a customer while in an Uber in Belgium.
-The tool that Jerry uses to manage scheduled restarts is called Power Manager.
511: Interview With Jon Brown, VP Of Technology & Cybersecurity at Interlaced.io
/Topics:
-This week we welcome back long time supporter of the show, Jon Brown.
-Jon is Vice President of Technology and Cybersecurity at Interlaced.io and owner of Grove Technologies.
-He recently completely a merger with Interlaced.
-Last time Jon was on the show, he was still evaluating options for his direction of growth.
-He discusses how difficult it was finding the right fit as some companies wanted to “acqui-hire” him.
-More emphasis was placed on his specific value rather than he company.
-As Tom Bridge told Jon, owner/operators tend to be bad employees.
-Jon is still running the day to day operations of Grove Technologies.
-Grove is acquisition #2 for Interlaced.
-Merging tools and systems is proving to be a challenge.
-Business models differ during acquistions as well, which can also complicate things.
-Jon speaks about the stages of a merger and compares his to varying stages of greif.
-Learning to work as a team means having to let go of some of you thoughts of how to get things done.
-As Jon joined Interlaced, he rediscovered his passion for the actual technology side of things. Some of that was lost in being an owner/operator of a business.
-Joe wants to know more about using Apple Business Chat.
-Grove uses a tool called Heymarket for business text messaging.
-Group SMS is a feature PsiMac is looking for as well.
-Sam has ongoing concerns about chat features creating more of an immediate response expectation.
-Jon talks about rules and auto responders to account for some of those concerns.
-Interlaced adds a 24/7 support team for after hours support of Grove customers.
-We debate the differences/similarities of Apple Business Messages and Slack.
510: Interview With Dav James of DIJ Consulting
/Thank you to our VIP sponsors!
Topics:
-This week we welcome Dav James of DIJ Consulting.
-Dav originally started at Apple in a variety of roles and moved to corporate IT support.
-DIJ Consulting is a Monday.com partner and works a lot on the automation side of things.
-We get into using integrations with Monday and services like Zendesk for automatic creation of tickets.
-Joe does some reporting in Numbers but it is more of a manual process so automation peaks his interest.
-The basics of Monday is that it is a task management software.
-Some of the frustrations Sam is feeling is the need of many different portals to manage things. Monday can integrate with a variety of those services and provide a centralized portal.
-Something as simple as centralized alerts was a big reason why Sam moved to Monday.
-Moving large amounts of data used to be a weak link that has now seen a major improvement.
-Affordability is a big draw of Monday.
-Connecting all the dots between the various services and Monday.com may be an initial challenge. Dav is working on how to make that easier for consultancies.
-You can find Dav on YouTube and in MacAdmins Slack.
-Taking action on a show request, Dav started the Monday channel in MacAdmins Slack as well.
506: Time Machine Blues
/Thank you to our VIP sponsors!
Topics:
-We would like to thank new Patreon member Rolf Woodward, and thank Bruce Corson for increasing his pledge.
-Time Machine is hopelessly broken in Jerry’s recent dealings.
-He has been recommending Carbon Copy Cloner.
-Joe had a specific issue where the Contacts app database was extremely large and causing an issue with backups.
-Sam is very keen on company policies where local file data is not company responsibility.
-Jerry talks about supporting a customer who had some major issues after a computer migration.
-BackBlaze has a great service to ship a drive with backup data.
-Joe talks about important directories to be aware of when troubleshooting macOS.
Thank you to our Patreon sponsors!
