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.
