450: Low Hanging Fruit & Slow Paying Clients

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449: Making More & Doing Less

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Topics:

-PsiMac was closed for the holiday break but Joe needed to be available for customers. He has to deal with a client billing issue. 

-Joe takes copious notes not only for his own team but for the benefit of the clients.

-With the amount of effort that goes into preparing some detailed quotes and projects, should the client be billed? Multiple options are kicked around. 

-Jerry comes up with an effective method that Sam will promptly take and make his own.

-“We have to respect our own time, even if our clients don’t.”

-It’s always tough handling billing for multiple quick emails from a customer.

-An old topic of billing for things like managed backups can be financially beneficial for a consultancy and technically beneficial for the customer. 

-Mike Bombich of Carbon Copy Cloner puts out a great product but also is a great help to the Mac community. 

-Jerry reached out for support with a drive that wouldn’t boot. A product that was kicked around and worked for Jerry, although not officially endorsed, is iBoySoft. Jerry’s situation had a positive outcome reviving an unmountable disk.

Thank you to our Patreon sponsors!

448: Carving A Piece Of Marble With A Blunt Instrument

Topics:

-Joe talks about how log4j affected things like Backblaze and UniFi. 

-Sam shares how his UniFi Mac mini died and forced him to review his backup process. 

-Command Control Power has a new sponsor: We welcome Kolide! Visit kolide.com and honest.security to learn more. 

-A classic UniFi/Sonos issue plagued Joe at a particular client. 

-In Jerry’s Sonos situation, he first replaced the old Sonos Bridge products with the newer Sonos Amps. 

-Jerry opens a debate about iPad vs Mac as a main workstation. 

-A scary moment for Joe’s client turns into an easy win for Joe. Undo to the rescue. 

-A hug thank you to our newest community members! Thank you for your contributions to the show!

447: Interview With Jason Dettbarn / Founder & CEO of Addigy - Cloud Based Mac Management Platform

Topics:

-We welcome back Jason Detrbarn, founder and CEO of Addigy. 

-Jason talks to us about taking a company-wide break over the holidays. 

-Working from home can make it difficult to separate work and home life. Sam discusses one of his tactics. 

-Sam and Joe both needed support from Addigy over the break and they were able to assist without missing a beat. 

-Joe had Migration Assistant going remotely and had to use Addigy Live Terminal to bail him out. 

-Jason talks about the upcoming Addigy Innovate Conference, February 22-23, 2022.

-Automating your workflows is the key to getting out of the habit of repeating the same tasks over and over. 

-With the partnership with Splashtop in place, Jerry is curious about the differences between that and Live Terminal. 

-Automated Device Enrollment with customizations is impressive. 

-Jason discusses how much the community is involved in the direction of new features. 

-Jason gives us a teaser into big UI changes coming in the product. 

446: Interview With Luis Giraldo - CXO at ScalePad & CEO at Ook

Topics:

-This week we welcome back our friend, Luis Giraldo. Luis is CEO at Ook Enterprises and Chief Experience Officer at ScalePad. 

-A long standing MSP, Luis started Monkey Box in 2013, which carried him over to IT Glue.  

-Luis speaks about managing his time between his MSP company and time with ScalePad. 

-Luis discusses the hero complex that consultants face, where we just want to do right by the customer but have trouble billing appropriately for our time. 

-ScalePad addresses this head on and approaches conversations with customers as a service activity as opposed to a sales pitch. 

-As Sam recalls learning about scheduled client meetings from Luis’ appearance in years past, he talks of more automated and regular reports. 

-Jerry wants to hear about Luis’ business story through Covid times. 

-Somehow he has not opened Apple Mail in months. He has moved to web mail clients and talks about the hardware being of less importance as cloud is the focus..

-Both Sam and Luis have been having trouble hiring new employees. They discuss the employee driven market. 

-Joe has had thoughts about stock options or profit sharing. Luis also brings up what small businesses have to think about to retain employees for the long term. 

-IT consultancy acquisitions and personal brands are hot topics as of late. 

Care to reach out to Luis Giraldo or learn more about him? Look no further.

LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/luisgiraldo

Paul Dippell Interview
https://www.n-able.com/studio/paul-dippell-on-operational-maturity

ScalePad - Chief Experience Officer (CXO)
https://www.scalepad.com

Ook Enterprises - CEO
https://ook.co

Luis’ Jazz albums on Apple Music
"It's Always You" - 2008 - https://music.apple.com/ca/album/its-always-you/285522012
"Day Dream" - 2002 - https://music.apple.com/ca/album/day-dream/58606887
(New album coming in 2022 with the New York-based Ben Paterson Trio!)

In the immediate future, he will be in Phoenix Jan 18-20 for the IoTSSA conference
https://www.iotssa.com/cybersecurity-expo-phoenix/

445: Digital Detritus

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Special Thanks to our friends:

Topics:

-One of Joe’s customers ordered a Mac that was attempted to be delivered by Uber. She never received it but it was marked as delivered.

-Sam struggles with focus at times and learned from a colleague about a method of efficiency by checking in on email only twice a day. Is that sustainable?

-HCS CT is still hiring. Here is our Indeed posting.

-Joe talks of his challenges working with his new Mac with only two USB-C ports. HyperDrive and others manufacturers are good options for expanding on that.

-How much are external accessories necessary as of late?

-Jerry has some built up anger for people that constantly print things.

-What about digital accumulation?

-Dropbox attempts to opt in syncing is a feature that Joe is not happy about. 

-Sam has moved towards using Microsoft SharePoint internally at HCS. 

-Between the variety of cloud services and branding changes, end users are confused. 

-The crew gets into a discussion about standardizing on software like Outlook and Apple Mail. 

-As more vendors are offering non profit solutions directly, is Tech Soup worth it these days?