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IT Pros: exclusive shows await you on Patreon, focusing on the more challenging aspects of running your practice and working with clients and employees.

427: Guest Host - Tim Pearson of CreativeTechs

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Topics:

  • This week we welcome long time supporter of the show, Tim Pearson of Creative Techs.

  • Tim joins us as a co-host.

  • He talks about traveling on the ferry to do onsite work.

  • The group discusses the wildfires out west.

  • Tim shares a story about the time he made a mistake of wearing a Star Wars shirt, causing his meeting to go way overtime.

  • The group helps Tim with approaching a mistake he made in his business.

  • Jerry’s talks about the “Screwdriver Effect”

  • Getting fired by a client is a great opportunity to take another look at how you do things.

  • Everyone discusses MSP and contracts with clients.

  • How are the group members finding new work throughout the pandemic?

  • Sam explains how he started getting referrals from the Apple stores.

  • The group talks about the Apple Consultants Network program and its benefits.

  • What is everyone seeing regarding to employees coming back to the offices?

  • Some people work better in offices and some at home.

  • Do you have employees or paid friends?


426: Who Am I?

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Topics:

  • Jerry & Joe discuss client credibility.   

  • Jerry recently did work with a client who made changed without consulting him.

  • How do you build up credibility with your clients?

  • Jerry takes photos of projects he is proud of as a method to show his work to other clients.

  • What is the most effective way to communicate what you do with your clients?

  • Clients don’t always have the same image of you that you have of yourself.

  • Joe describes how he uses keywords on his site to appeal to potential customers.

  • Photos are worth a thousand words.

  • A good URL shortener that Jerry recommends is bitly.com.

  • There can be tremendous benefits when there is an inherent level of trust with the client.

  • Some clients want to know exactly what you do for the money they’re paying and some just completely trust you.

  • When there isn’t a level of trust between you and the client if can make things difficult.

419: When Jiggled by The Jiggler

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Season 8 is here!

  • Thank you to our long time sponsor, Jon Brown of Grove Technologies for his continued and increased support of Command Control Power.

  • If you would like to contribute to the show, please visit http://patreon.com/cmdctrlpwr

  • In the latest “I should have known this” corner, Joe learned something new about widgets from the TidBITs newsletter.

  • Sam adds another TidBITs tip about AirTags.

  • Jerry revisits the Mouse Jiggler app from Episode 246: Let Go Of My Echo or Echo Location that helped his Fusion Drive encryption proceed, and shares some excellent feedback from Tom Bridge re: encryption requiring the mouse to be moving. Tom suspected Apple is "using the entropy from the mouse cursor to do part of the encryption" which is apparently the case in High Sierra with APFS (although Jerry's drive was not APFS). 

  • Jiggler 1.9 : No-Doz for your Mac

    http://sticksoftware.com/software/Jiggler.html

  • A benefit to working remotely is that the client won’t see every time you have to google an answer!

  • Sam purchased a 13 inch MacBook pro M1 and then somehow a random serial number got added to his apple business manager.

  • He made the mistake of not listening to Joe’s rules for making a new migration work properly.

  • Joe and Sam are both very happy with their newer M1 computers since they finally have devices that can keep up with everything they do.

  • Jerry suggests Synology Migration Assistant because it works very well for him.

  • While completing a migration Jerry ran into a password problem.

  • Both Joe & Jerry have gathered a treasure-trove of knowledge from a series of YouTube videos from SpaceRex. He has put out helpful videos that can improve Synology performance like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYEEfAI-Upo

  • Little tips like disabling SMB1 or SMB encryption on Synology to increase speeds have been helpful.

  • Jerry also talks about the realities link aggregation.

  • Always consider the quality of drives you add to your drive array.

  • Avoid SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives and look instead for CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) drives.

  • “Cache” is king.

  • Jerry has a real issue with terrible unboxing videos.

  • Jerry would love to have a better partner relationship with Synology.

  • Joe wants to talk more about ransomware, malware, and protecting your data more in future episodes.

  • Important tip: Always have a backup!

  • There are risks to relying solely on backups without an “air gap”.

  • Sam and Joe highly recommends the Security Advisor on Synology


416: Interview With Annie Chen VP Of Product At Splashtop Inc

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Topics:

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  • This week we are joined by Annie Chen, the VP of product management at Splashtop.

  • Splashtop is a Silicon Valley company founded in 2006 that started off as a browser based product.

  • Today they focus on remote access to your devices, working closely with GPU manufacturers to optimize and leverage hardware encoding to achieve high performance.

  • Jerry commends Splashtop on the feature parity and he talks about how Mac had seemed to always receive the short end of the stick with other remote access products.

  • Splashtop has three major offerings: Splashtop Business Access, Splashtop Remote Support - useful for MSPs looking to replace their RMM products, and Splashtop SOS for quick remote access.

  • It is easy to try out and adjust to Splashtop, which Jerry found really helpful.

  • Sam recently tried to use SOS with a customer and ran up against macOS security settings but was able to deal with it by blindly typing in admin credentials on a Mac

  • Annie explains how the Safe Reboot feature works, which will help you reboot a computer remotely without losing access.

  • Jerry likes how the screens that Splashtop SOS presents to the clients because it makes it easier for them to know what to do.

  • Joe has been really happy with the consumer side of Splashtop as well.

  • With Splashtop’s next version release, Mac Streamer will support native hardware encoding.

  • They have recently formalized their MSP support group and an advisory panel.

  • Splashtop is also working on having a specific build for M1 that they hope will be a universal binary and installed on Mac as a whole.

  • They have just launches a monthly subscription plan for Splashtop’s remote support product.

  • With Splashtop your subscription can grow as your business does.

  • The group is impressed with Splashtop’s feature set in general.

  • Jerry mentioned how Splashtop’s competitor would show advertisements even though you paid for the product.

  • Focusing on security and protection, Splashtop has set up a security advisory counsel as well.

  • Annie says the remote support and SOS products are really great for MSPs and service class teams.

  • Visit Splashtop.com to set up a free trial and see what all the fuss is about.

408: The Mystery System

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Topics:

  • Sam talks about how efficient the MFA set up on 1Password is.

  • When clients are prepared with their 1Password vault it makes it a lot easier for the group to do their jobs.

  • Creating a vault with client data can be very helpful.

  • Does anyone create separate vaults for each of their clients?

  • 1Password is huge for teams, however, setting it up isn’t always worth it if it’s just for one person.

  • Joe talks about the new, app-less 1Password extension.

  • Sam shares information from a recent article that came out about chrome data-harvesting.

  • Joe shares a story about a client who had a scary problem with the Nest security system because they didn’t migrate their account when Google bought out Nest. They refused to return her money when they weren’t providing the monitoring services she was paying for.

  • Lately companies have seemed a little lax when it comes to their clients threatening to cancel their service.

  • Sam is very hesitant to recommend Kitcast because of an issue he had with the customer service. They actually discovered they had a problem with how they deploy their app but they seem to be very slow on fixing it.

  • Joe asks Sam about his billing and MSP that they had talked about 6 months ago and the two of them discuss how they bill their clients.

  • Sam talks about an “uncouth” interaction he had with a rude client.

  • Joe explains how he used Omni Disk Sweeper to help discover what was causing a weird problem for one of his clients.

  • What is the mystery “System” that often contains a lot of data that seems to be non-removable?

407: A Ticking Time Bomb In Your Business

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Topics:

  • What exactly is technical debt?

  • Jerry has two pretty big professional clients who have accumulated quite a bit of technical debt.

  • Spending money on important things will save you the trouble of dealing with it later.

  • The group talks about how these clients who refuse to spend money sometimes aren’t sustainable.

  • News Flash: On TeamViewer you can now disable in-product marketing messages.

  • Sam is looking into a business continuity document that can be very useful especially with clients who don’t listen (thanks to Michael Thompsen of Origin84 for the tip).

  • When your system can’t keep up with you it can cause you to be unproductive because you end up wasting time on things and switching tasks.

  • Sam tells a story about how one of his client’s old systems finally kicked the bucket and he had to get all of their data back.

  • Tip: Update your software about every 2 to 3 years.

  • You end up paying less to keep up with updates than to fix everything when it goes wrong.

  • Joe actually had to buy floppy disks for a job he had to do on a Powerbook 100.

  • Jerry shares two useful tools he uses: Smith.ai and a helpful calendar app called Harmonizely. Harmonizely allow clients to schedule appointments and offers direct integration with Daylite..

  • Daylight training has been transformative for Jerry.

  • Sam can’t bring himself to start offering calendaring services to his clients. One reason is a need for control.

  • Joe also talks about showing just how unavailable you might be.

  • Jerry talks about the mysterious “alien arrow” that one of Joe’s clients has been telling him about.

  • What is Casper Sky??

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Thank you to our Patreon sponsors!