257: Interview With Lucas Acosta, CEO of Foojee Consultants in Atlanta, Georgia

Topics:

Lucas Acosta, Founder & CEO of Foojee Consultants in Atlanta, GA joins us this week for an interview

Five Things You Should Know About Foojee

1. Foojee was born out of a calling to serve. We combined that calling with our enthusiasm of Apple products and created a company.

2. We're in it to win it. We don't outsource our talent. All of our team members are W-2 employees with benefits, and each one adds their own spice to the Foojee brand.

3. Why the name Foojee? Welp, the Fuji apple is our founder's favorite type of apple. Simple as that.

4. Since we opened shop, we've grown on referrals alone.

5. We create monthly Apple®-centric videos filled with tips, news, advice, and the occasional joke. It's how we like to keep in touch with our clients.

-Foojee is an outsourced IT shop for businesses using Apple products

-The majority is managed services for small businesses as well as MDM projects

-Video started out as a side hobby that turned into a revenue stream for Foojee. It all started when they started doing it for themselves. Lucas encourages those listening to try it yourself first

-Foojee uses a traditional email campaign with hosted YouTube videos to send to their subscribers

-Video also creates a way to keep that close relationship with your clients

-"Apple products at work" is the theme of their latest videos, focusing on using Apple products in business

-Get started using an iPhone as your microphone, using the Voice Memos app

-One thing videos do not do is generate leads.  But it helps when potential clients are comparing you to your competitors

-Visit Foojee's YouTube channel

-Lucas discusses the raw, single take vs scripted video and the pros and cons of each

-As the CEO, Lucas is still 50-60% engineer and 20-30% business development

-Lucas started Foojee in 2008 and he discusses the ebbs & flows of running a business

-He was initially under the impression that he needed to be big in order for clients to hire them

-In the same vein, Joe talks about his focus on the residential market

The main reason Lucas is part of the ACN, besides the leads, is that he wants to be aligned with Apple

Foojee's original company name was On-Site Technical Consulting!

Thank you to our Patron sponsors!

255: Live April Show - Deep Down In A Bunker In Switzerland

We welcome our new VIP Patreon sponsors:

Zvon Petric - At Your Server

Topics:

-Jerry has an amusing client story about a lost password and how he put Addigy to good use

-Speaking of passwords, Sam describes an uncanny story about how an Apple employee guessed a user's password out of thin air

-Sam describes a story of how a client was scammed via email for over $200,000.  It calls to mind that Ubiquiti was similarly the victim of an email scam to the tune of $47 million dollars!  
http://fortune.com/2015/08/10/ubiquiti-networks-email-scam-40-million/

-Two possible options for secure mail:
Proton Mail: proton.me, formerly protonmail.com
Mimecast: https://www.mimecast.com

-Joe encounters an interesting startup message in verbose mode: "Too many corpses being created"

-One of Jerry's clients has some issues with spam filtering with Only My Email and directing messages to Fast Mail

-Is long propagation time still a thing?

-GFI sucks! - According to Joe's experiences.  Media Temple isn't much better.
Go to status.gfi.com and view the history to have a laugh

-Jerry has an interesting experience with Sherweb where a certificate trust dialogue box appears for a client's email...

-Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer: https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com

-Sam runs across a situation where copying files using the Synology GUI was unbearably slow.  He ended up enabling SSH on the Synology and used a host Mac to initiate an SSH connection and utilitized the cp command:
cp -pr /source/directory/ /destination/directory/

-ACEs is just around the corner and the group shares some great quotes from previous attendees.  If you haven't already, sign up for ACEs today!

-Sam & Joe have a secret meeting at PsiMac World Headquarters

-Joe spins a yarn about calendar invites and an Apple ID, Google Calendar, and Microsoft Exchange, oh my!

254: What's up, Dock?

Topics:

-This week's show is brought to you by FLEXdesk - your help desk support that grows with your company.  Go to rootedconsulting.org/flexdesk to find out more.

-Jerry takes over Joe's Peeves Corner as he gripes about Apple Remote Desktop and its annoying habit of jumping to different computers when it is populating a list

-It brings up the topic of Addigy and their remote access client and its speedy and reliable access.  Also Addigy's SSH/command line capabilities to perhaps kickstart Apple Remote Desktop.

-Joe talks about users enabling Printer Sharing.  If users turn it on and people connect through it, changing the host computer's name in System Preferences>Sharing will cause shared users to no longer be able to use it.

-Continuing failed updates with High Sierra and the now infamous "missing or damaged" error

-It reminds Joe of a story where a client had a firmware password on a Mac that was acquired from a previous user.  In a similar situation where the Apple Store could not/would not unlock it.  They extracted the hard drive, installed it in another system and wiped/updated it.  They then placed it back in the original iMac and it successfully booted.

-Jerry floats a conspiracy theory as to why these installer issues have been so rampant

"Joe's Tech Clinic" - After an upgrade to High Sierra, the Dock and Finder were slow to respond after booting each time.  Subsequent downloads would cause the Dock to then be unresponsive, once complete.  Joe attempted many fixes: resetting launch services, removing /var/folders contents (except zz), safe boot, resetting NVRAM, SMC, nada.  Also tried trashing Dock preferences and rebuilt manually.  A key was that the Downloads folder was not in the Dock.  Unbelievably, adding it to the Dock corrected the issue!

-A nice addition to the show is additional audio from our interview with Justin Maxwell of smith.ai and Keypad.  Justin talks about his time working for Apple.

-The rumor about being caught in an elevator with Steve Jobs turns out to be true!

-Justin and his wife were at Apple during the famous "I'm a Mac" commercials.  He talks about the underdog mentality that made for a very exciting time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfv6Ah_MVJU

-He was on the team that created and released Aperture

-Joe remembers the time of the release of the Intel processor.  At that time, Justin was part of the team building the iLife website (in Flash!).  At that time, Adobe decided not to release Flash for the intel processors.  Justin's team had to rebuild the entire website, working through holidays and weekends to meet a deadline.  Released the morning of MacWorld, Steve Jobs hated it!  Justin kept a little memento to remind him of that time in his life.

-Of the many things that Justin learned from all of this, Steve was almost always right. He always thought of the user first.

253: Interview with Justin Maxwell of Smith.ai & Keypad

Justin Maxwell of Smith.ai and Keypad joins us for an incredibly informative and in depth interview.  Most recently the design lead for Google’s Android Auto, Justin has designed products and built teams for Google, Apple, Mint (Intuit), Sony, and plenty of startups along the way.  Here are two of Justin's offerings that we discuss on Command Control Power:

-Smith.ai is a superior call answering & intake service for small & solo businesses. Their live, U.S.-based virtual receptionists capture & qualify leads, book new clients, and build better relationships with your existing clients.

-Keypad is the most advanced & affordable cloud phone system for small businesses.  Keypad offers call routing, call analytics, and many customizations to help you track your performance, and convert more leads.

-Justin takes us through not only the story of how he brought these businesses to life but his life at Apple as an interaction designer for Apple.com

-As we talk Smith.ai, Justin describes the look and feel of the site and how it relates to their customers

-Smith.ai acts as your virtual receptionist, to provide a layer between customers and your business.  At the same time, they are able to weed out all of the spam or unnecessary calls.

-Justin was mint.com's first UX hire and gave him good perspective on small businesses and their needs

-Their team essentially followed around small businesses over the course of a Summer to figure out what their needs were and what they found was that phone calls were the biggest pain point

-Instead of being a brick & mortar company, they utilized VoIP technology and highly skilled employees working from their locations

-"It all starts with a phone call"

-Jerry can't imagine running his business without Smith.ai at this point.  Even just not having to answer calls at client sites to try and make a sale

-Smith.ai's system uses machine learning to help the receptionists make the right decisions over the course of a call and provide the correct answers, versus reading from a script

-Joe & Justin discuss their easy to understand pricing as opposed to minute based pricing

-Keypad is an excellent complement to the Smith.ai service.  Instead of using services like Ring Central, Google Voice or Grasshopper, which can add latency to a call, they developed Keypad.

-You can sign up for the beta of Keypad here

-Simplicity is a focus of Keypad because of feedback the team has received about similar service offerings

-Justin discusses analytics to understand when volume is high or knowing when you need additional support

-Jerry mentions a possible higher tier offering for VIP support and how to tie it in to our monthly services plans

-Joe signs up right here on the show!

-Look out for service offerings in the chat space from Justin's team

252: Migrate Is Becoming A Trigger Word For Me

Topics:

-Joe has some follow up for same from Episode 223 "It's not you, it's me" about Mail notifications

-Sam follows up on his experience at the ACN Road Show in Santa Monica, CA

-Sam shares a story from one of our listeners that recovered a stolen MacBook Pro with assistance from the police department

-In working with a client, Joe discovers that Find My iPhone was off.  He also discussed enabling show last location, which is a handy feature.

-Sam tries to inject a new segment in the show, "Sam's travel corner"

-Jerry reminds us about taking a few moments to ask clients for an online review

-Jerry talks about an experience with a client that had a failed High Sierra upgrade - "macOS could not be installed on this computer" and used terminal to correct it:
diskutil list
diskutil umount force /dev/disk1
(Take note of your disk id. disk1 in my case)
diskutil apfs convert /dev/disk1

-We reference Mike Bombich from Carbon Copy Cloner and an APFS issue that was found when dealing with sparse images:
https://bombich.com/blog/2018/02/15/macos-may-lose-data-on-apfs-formatted-disk-images

-Not to be outdone, Joe introduces yet another segment, "Joe's Kuriosity Korner"

-A client that politely declined Joe's monthly services plan ends up with an issue with data loss after a liquid spill and the Apple Store replaced hardware.  PsiMac to the rescue: had her order the hard drive from Backblaze. It contained a full copy of her home folder, which brought her data back.  Two fallout issues were Keychain related and the Photos library.  

-Sam has an issue with spotlight and Outlook 2016 and found a more recent support article to deal with the issue using the mdimport command.  This was a welcome new approach to removing and rebuilding the spotlight database:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2741535/outlook-for-mac-search-returns-no-results-and-task-items-are-not-displ

-A story you have to hear to believe - Joe's client has an issue with sending emails from Outlook and coming out as gibberish to receivers.  After upgrading from Outlook 2011 to 2016, the issue remained.  In the end, an errant carriage return in one of her contact names caused this formatting issue to occur.

"Just re-index it dude" 
-Apparently Sam

250: Interview - Justin Esgar of ACES Conference, Adam Engst Of Tidbits Contenet Network & Adam Rice of AdamRice.org .

Join us all at ACEs Conference on May 9th & 10th in Baltimore, MD! 
https://acesconf.com/ccp

ACEs Conference was created for one reason and one reason only:
To help IT consultants grow their companies.

With unique, premium content delivered by world-class speakers, ACEs Conference is the place for inspiration, ideas, business networking, and instantly-applicable knowledge. It’s no surprise that our attendees continue coming year after year—just one ACEs Conference and you’ll be sold.

Justin esgar

Adam engst

adam rice

Our Guests This Week:
Justin Esgar - Founder and creator of ACEs Conference
Adam Engst - TidBITS Content Network & speaker at ACEs - https://tcn.tidbits.com
Adam Rice - Fellow ACN and ACEs attendee extraordinaire - https://adamrice.org

Just some of the great features of ACEs Conference 2018:
-Sit Down with Charles Edge - Panel Discussion
-Adam Engst will be Moderating a marketing panel
-Mark Berman - Journey Mapping (to be revealed)

-A general discussion brews about how marketing works within the world of small business

-Find that one "golden nugget" that resonates the most with you and introduces new way to thinking about things

-Jerry brings up an excellent question that Justin answers about business owners that may think they know the lay of the land and what ACEs can do for them

-Adam Rice discusses his business location, clientele, and how his first ACEs opened his eyes

-Justin talks about the ACEs Mastermind Group, which continues the conversation after the conference: https://www.acesmastermind.com

-Addigy will be holding a welcome party overlooking Camden Yards on May 8th.  Join us there!

-Tickets are $529 but using the code CCP will give you a 10% discount.  Use your code before prices go up!

-Command Control Power will be doing a Live Show at ACEs Conference 2018 on day 1.  We hope to see you there.