158: Balanced Billing & The "Partner Plan" With Richard Wingfield Of Envision Design

Recorded on may 31, 2016

TOPICS:

Richard B. Wingfield - Head Geek, Envision Design, LLC of Houston Texas:"I have been using Mac's in business since original Macintosh in '84 and Envision, as a consulting firm, has been around since 1993. Started part time as sole proprietor and 20+ years later we are now a firm of 5 full time consultants here in Houston.  

I tell people I am a "recovering architect" as I got my start in technology practicing architecture and being the "tech guy" in every firm I ever worked for. I even helped manage a DEC vax/vms system for a firm in Austin soon after graduating from The University of Texas with a degree in Architecture. 

This episode examines Richards own "recipe' for Managed Services. Here is a brief description as discussed:

… Simple Hybrid Partner Plan is setup so almost all the clients “get it” and are not confused about how it works

- 3 part invoice is made up of

- small monthly fee per device (each mac, each windows, each iOS or android, each server… fees like $25/mac or $49/windows or $250/server etc) client must enroll ALL computers in the office (cant get cheap and have some on the system and some not)

- our “consluting fee” - which is time for humans to do the work to manage, monitor, secure and maintain systems and ALWAYS includes a minimum of one 2hr visit per month

(more if needed or requested)

- fees for services or hosting (if we host kerio email or rackspace or web or crashplan backups or re-sell backblaze) 

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You can find more about Richard and  Envision design here: Web: http://www.envisiondesign.net

Twitter: @GEEKSapplied

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Thanks to all our Contributors: JD Strong - Strong Solutions
Daniel Escobar - Proactechs, Luis Giraldo- MonkeyBox

084: New Year's Resolutions 2015, Part 2

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

074: Managed Services Refresher with Luis Giraldo of Ook and MonkeyBox

Recorded live on October 28, 2014

This week we're thrilled to be sponsored by Smile, makers of TextExpander – which just got a whole lot better with iOS 8 and custom keyboards. Visit smilesoftware.com/restart to learn more.  Try TextExpander for free and tell your clients!

Thanks to Luis Giraldo for joining us once again to discuss Managed Services.

How does one Quantify the Value of Managed Services?

MonkeyBox integrates with Watchman Monitoring

Previously:
010: Managed Services discussion with Luis Giraldo
041: Managed Services Roundtable with Allen Hancock, Luis Giraldo, and Kevin Ginger, Part 1
042: Managed Services Roundtable with Allen Hancock, Luis Giraldo, and Kevin Ginger, Part 2

067: Watch Me Do

Recorded live on September 9, 2014

This week, we're thrilled to be sponsored by Watchman Monitoring.  Visit WatchmanMonitoring.com/cmdctrlpwr to find out how Watchman Monitoring can keep an eye on your client machines and notify you of over 100 issues.  When you sign up (and we know you will), be sure to tweet @cmdctrlpwr #CCPsentme to let us know and support the show!

Topics:

- Which Watch?

- iPhone 6 vs. iPhone 6 Plus? compare sizes to iPhone 5

- back pocket vs. front pocket?

- Sam's story of a client unplugging the backup hard drive from the server because they thought it was slowing the system down – should have had Watchman Monitoring installed, which can let you know if a drive is unmounted

- Joe moves his Drobo disk pack from old Drobo Gen 2 into new Drobo Gen 3 and realizes huge speed increase: 123.7 MB/s write & 171.9 MB/s read vs. 27 MB/s write & 24.6 MB/s read; Sam is already using his new Drobo Gen 3 as primary storage on his home server

- Software Update prompts to upgrade the Mac OS on a Server, which kills the Server: we consider this a bug!

- something goes wrong, end user flails, copies and pastes from forums, then finally calls you, the professional

- Bender from Forget Computers automatically backs up server settings

060: Server, Services, and Such

Recorded on July 8, 2014, aired on July 22, 2014

Sponsored by Smile. Check out Smilesoftware.com for a great screencast from David Sparks about PDFPen for Mac, and to learn why you should use and recommend Smile's awesome software to your clients.

Topics

- MacBook Air torqued

- creative client interpretations of rates and service offerings

- Managed Services discussion; revisiting Easing into Managed Services

- Jerry recommends AJA System Test with the following settings: "MBytes/sec", File I/O API: Unix, "Round frame sizes to 4 KB", "Enable network volumes", Test: Disk Read/Write, Video Frame Size: 1920x1080 10-bit RGB, File Size: 1GB, "Disable file system cache"

- Jerry's legal firm successfully replaced Mac mini Server with Synology

- "working off the server" vs. copying files locally for editing and then copying back to server

- scheduled server restart to work around SMB service interruption? Sam suggests scheduling a launchd job to stop and then start SMB using serveradmin command

- Jerry recommends TP-LINK TL-WR710N 150Mbps Wireless N Mini Pocket Router with USB port for storage for streaming movies to iPad when traveling

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

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.