350: How Many Billable Hours?

Topics:

-Command Control Power has a few new Patreon sponsors to announce. Thank you to the following patrons for responding to our call:
Bruce Corson
Rocco Russo
Kevin Cox
Steven Kurtz

-Joe wants to know how many billable hours his fellow consultants bill in a given week

-Sam & Jerry quickly produce their numbers as they were not aware there was a quiz

-An addition that Sam mentions is the recurring revenue from MSP clients, which helps as a stable baseline for those slow weeks/months

-Jerry wonders how relevant those billable hours are in comparison to simply knowing how much revenue is needed to “keep the lights on”

-Subtracting raw numbers of a 40 hour work week (for admin tasks, internal meetings, etc.), Joe ends up with 19 possible billable hours per consultant, per week.

-With Joe & Sam having employees, Jerry poses questions about incentives for them to keep the numbers up and bring in revenue for the company

-Sam had an issue where his employee was not documenting quick fixes with MSP clients because he thought it simply didn’t matter.

-Even when time is not billable, or you extend a discount to a client, you should always document and show this to the client. You never know when you need to call back to this information.

-Jerry pushes Joe & Sam to find out how they physically document hours not dedicated to clients

-Quoting job estimates takes time that a consultant can master over time

-Sam disappears right in the nick of time!

349: They’re Not Jerks, They’re Just Stupid!

Topics:

-Command Control Power needs your help. If you feel like the show has benefited you and your business, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/cmdctrlpwr

-Joe happens to be in his office for a change yet Sam is recording at 65+ MPH

-As Sam is using AirPods to record, they discuss the naming convention behind AirPods Pro

-Joe has a mail migration to handle for a client and is sad to discover POP mailboxes in the mix

-Local mailboxes create a need to migrate to a mail server using a mail client.  Both Joe & Sam prefer Outlook over Apple Mail for this purpose.

-Curve balls in a project like mail migrations always make billable time a challenge

-This calls to mind a recent proposal that Sam presented to a new client, only to find that they had additional devices that he didn’t account for

-As Sam looks to increase monthly revenue, he is focusing on additional services like JumpCloud & Backupify.

-One of Sam’s clients decides to openly risk data loss when presented with cloud backup options in Backupify.

-This same client recently had a migration from a local file server to Google Drive and even with a planning meeting involved, still came up with surprises and workflow changes that made the process an ongoing challenge

-Joe recalls a story of hanging up on a client after being disrespectfully addressed

-“They’re not jerks.  They’re just stupid!”

-Respect in a working relationship is an absolute necessity 

-Sometimes you should not take on a new client if you see red flags

-A benefit of “co-opetition” is warning each other about difficult clients

-Joe has been performing a number of migrations to Dropbox lately

-Sam has a question for Joe & fellow consultants when choosing cloud storage services if a client has a product that already has that functionality

-“Failure mode observations” by Joe.  Could this be another corner?

348: More Fiddleable Time

Topics:

-Command Control Power needs your support. If you feel like the show has benefited you and your business, please consider supporting us on Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/cmdctrlpwr

-Jerry has a real head scratcher with a new client who had files disappearing from the desktop. He tried various fixes, including the keyboard shortcut to show hidden files: Command + Shift + Period. As it turns out, it was Parallels Desktop that had a toggle to hide items on the desktop. Face Palm!

-The next thing Jerry had to deal with was, how much should he charge?

-PSA from one of our listerners - 10.15.3 appears to correct the bug of data loss in Apple Mail. Thanks to Claire @ Passion Support for bringing it to our attention

-Another listener and “verified oldster” Glenn Kowalski describes the details behind some older network terminology like AppleTalk & LocalTalk

-Joe describes some helpful details about local IP address reporting within Watchman Monitoring

-Joe describes his frustrations with diagnosing logs on macOS

-Shout out to our friends at The TidBITS Content Network for their invaluable contributions

-Joe shares a story from listener Tim Nyberg of The Mac Guys where a client fell for a painfully obvious scam

-Jerry has a positive experience to share setting up Eero in a residential environment

-With mesh networks, Joe also leans towards Eero for ease of setup and maintenance.  But he does have concerns about privacy and ownership by Amazon

-The Eero Pro portal to manage all of your clients is a nice benefit to centrally manage things like updates and adding devices. https://pro.eero.com

347: Dream On

Topics:

-Not surprisingly, a UniFi topic kicks off the show.  As Jerry rolls his eyes about the UniFi Dream Machine, it appears UniFi has released a rack mountable Dream Machine Pro: https://store.ui.com/products/udm-pro

-Joe recounts a story of him installing a Dream Machine and Flex HD
https://store.ui.com/products/unifi-dream-machine
https://store.ui.com/products/unifi-flexhd

-Joe has a PSA  and UniFi best practices to share: Turn off Settings > Site > Uplink Connectivity Monitor (only if no mesh access points in use!). Turn off Settings > Site > Auto-Optimize Network. Turn off Settings > Wireless Networks > SSID > Advanced Options > High Performance Devices. 
Modify the DTIM Period? 

-Wi-Fi channel management and manual vs automatic is something Sam & Jerry differ on

-DHCP vs static vs DHCP reservations.  What do you do?

-Joe has a new business idea for an auto power cycling router

-The gang jokes about photos clients take and send to help diagnose issues

-Sam discovers that you can set up a single UniFi access point without the use of a controller and simply use the app

-UniFi “rolling upgrades” via the controller can be confusing, as noted by Joe when doing it recently.  It's mostly been successful, because the Start Rolling Upgrade button is only available when viewing the "Wireless" tab, which only lists the APs – and yet, it includes the switch update as part of it 

-Jerry has a client that requires manual firmware of their 16 Ubiquiti UniFi devices using SSH

-Zendesk has a great API to use with mail clients so you can quickly change the status of tickets, assign to agents, etc.  Sam discovers this late in the Zendesk game but it has already made him much more efficient dealing with tickets: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203691006-Using-the-Mail-API-to-update-ticket-properties-from-your-inbox

-Another PSA from Joe, Apple has begun recycling serial numbers for Mac computers so companies like Watchman Monitoring need a new method of determining the estimated age of a machine.
https://beetstech.com/blog/decode-meaning-behind-apple-serial-number
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/06/apple-randomized-serial-numbers-late-2020/

-Sam has an odd end result when dealing with an old issue of Spotlight being unable to search Outlook emails

-The “Focused” email in Outlook can be too easy to click on and confuse the user.  Jerry has seen this all too often.  Joe wants to rename it “randomly hide some of my stuff”.

-As the spotlight conversation goes on, Joe mentions a script he created in Addigy to destroy and rebuild the spotlight database: https://prod.addigy.com/#/macmanage/community/scripts/5dddb3325ff0a156d595558d

346: Vandelay Tech Industries

Topics:

-Jerry & Sam have a rare show together

-Sam is short staffed for a week and, of course, everything happens at once

-A discussion brews about the state of business in Connecticut 

-Working remotely is something Joe is very familiar with but Sam discusses working remotely with clients that move out of state

-An Apple retail store is relocating to a closer location to Sam & Joe, possibly creating new opportunities

-When business is slow, Jerry has some methods of drumming up business by developing partnerships.  One example is Drive Savers’ partner program: https://drivesaversdatarecovery.com/partner-programs/

-Another great podcast that Jerry suggest (and Sam won’t listen to) is “The Dream” https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dream/id1435743296

-Sam was in a difficult spot training a fellow consultancy on Jamf Pro for a client.  When their newly trained employee left, the client was now left in the lurch.

-Jerry talks about some red flags to look out for when meeting with potential new clients

-As Sam tries to automate more in his business, he came across a Zendesk integration called Deadline, by SweetHawk: https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/deadline/

 -A tip from Jerry for after hours or automated replies to inquiries is the smith.ai web widget: https://docs.smith.ai/article/pzfvnbq5xl-how-to-access-your-smith-ai-live-chat-widget-code

-Sam is exploring a similiar web widget from Zendesk: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203908456-Using-Web-Widget-to-embed-customer-service-in-your-website

-Teaser for another show, Sam goes head first into Addigy functionality and finds a treasure trove of features

345: Taekwondo MSP

Topics:

-Sam is on the island of Manhattan teaching a Jamf class

-He also has an update to the issues affecting him since upgrading to Catalina, including the loss of iCloud reminders.

-Besides blocking Catalina with Addigy and other MDM solutions, ignoring Catalina in Software Update is a good addition: sudo softwareupdate —ignore “macOS Catalina”

-Sam describes frustrations when attempting to set up voice recognition using “Hey Siri” on his HomePod

-Making a push through Addigy is a focus Sam Is trying to make a priority in 2020

-A bug in Safari with Addigy is properly displaying APNs Push Certificate expiration dates.  Other browsers work as expected.

-Joe has had success with clients using secure passwords with the strong password feature in Safari

-Follow up to Joe’s SIM hacking issue with his client - the department that handles issues with porting at Verizon is the Unauthorized Port Team

-A client that Sam parted ways with had decided to fight his final bill so a mutually agreed upon number

-Sam decided to add verbiage to his MSP that ensures his company is always involved in the decision making for technology related purchases

-A big thank you to Richard Wingfield and Justin Esgar for solid advice in Sam updating his MSP agreement

-New billing practices, additional details, and per user/per device pricing are some of the changes and updates that are being planned out

-The next trick is to find the time to implement all of these changes