My New Company - Dara IT
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Although I think maybe the goal is bench support, not IT consulting or MSP work. From reading the site, I did not get the impression that the goal was to provide IT services. But to directly compete against GeekSquad where all of the "unknown costs" happen on the business side and the costs from the vendor are basically set.
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One of the things to keep in mind is that bench services is able to be set prices by having strict caps and contract limits and enormous margins so that they can absorb a lot of mistakes. Normally they rely on being a loss leader for sales, as well. Look at GeekSquad or Staples, their bench services are only there to improve sales. You need the sales to make it make sense.
IT departments, even internal ones with crazy amount of control, can't have set prices. There are just so many variables. You can work to be predictable, but getting a set price for internal IT is really not something that you can do.
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Right, no more stolen logo. if the site has not yet changed for you then you might need to clear cache. Brochure has been yanked for now, to be updated.
Interesting to have a few fresh set of eyes over the whole piece.
I guess I'm influenced more from live events.
You can hire a projector from anyone, but the quality of the engineer to set it up and operate it will be different depending on where you go. All of them disclose pricing for the bread and butter, hire our kit, basic bench work but anything custom is quotable.@thecreativeone91 said:
I think a B2B IT company shouldn't see it self as commodity, if people want commodity they go to geeksquad, staples etc. you shouldn't try to compete with them.
B2B and consumer to start with. The UK price for comparison is 3x what geeksquad charge, too many people have been burnt by that level of service. I guess you'd compare it with a two star hotel trying to compete with a 4 star hotel, both of them are hotels but you get a different experience.
@scottalanmiller said:
Although I think maybe the goal is bench support, not IT consulting or MSP work. From reading the site, I did not get the impression that the goal was to provide IT services.
Bench Support is a starting point yes. Are the other aspects not presented well enough? Auditing/Project work? Spent quite a bit of time on the lay-out so that all 3 areas were clear.
@JaredBusch said:
We very specifically do not reference ourselves as a MSP.
Unless I'm badly mistaken, I've been careful not to say that anywhere.
@JaredBusch said:
We bill by hour period. We tell our client, there will never be a month with no work as everything needs checked occasionally, but if nothing is wrong, that will be minimal time.
I might say that then it places the client in a very disadvantaged position. Let me play this out hypothetically.
Apart from trusting that you will do the right thing by them, there is no motivation for you to prevent issues happening to them down the line as that is hourly work you will want to bill for, if bad things don't happen, revenue vanishes.
Not accusing you of anything, just spinning the other side of the coin.Where as with this model, it is in my interest to prevent issues/problems, If a client is stable and happy across a year, that's a years worth of revenue as my incentive plus by preventing issues, I get an easier life. You cannot prevent 100% of problems but there is a lot of work you can do.
Having said that, I agree with blocks of time to a point, If you've commissioned a whole new server/network, then surely you would want to mark a separate pool of billable hours for "snagging" - Which if they don't use is refunded to them but they've been up front and agreed it.
@scottalanmiller said:
Normally they rely on being a loss leader for sales, as well. Look at GeekSquad or Staples, their bench services are only there to improve sales. You need the sales to make it make sense.
Don't intend it to be a loss but it certainly is meant as a means of beginning to establish trust, The most powerful advertising tool I have ever seen is word of mouth recommendation, If we deliver a service that is.
- On time
- On budget
- Trustworthy
- High Standard
With the small stuff, you are more likely to take the risk on larger projects.
There may come a time when the bench side is dropped completely, I've done some number crunching and although the numbers are not massive, they are enough to justify offering it to those who need it, especially when you already have a pool of clients.
Really grateful for the points raised/feedback. Would be pleased to hear more.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
B2B and consumer to start with. The UK price for comparison is 3x what geeksquad charge, too many people have been burnt by that level of service. I guess you'd compare it with a two star hotel trying to compete with a 4 star hotel, both of them are hotels but you get a different experience.
Wow, it is less than GS charges here. GS is like $120/hr.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Don't intend it to be a loss but it certainly is meant as a means of beginning to establish trust, The most powerful advertising tool I have ever seen is word of mouth recommendation, If we deliver a service that is.
That's not how business IT works. Here are a few thoughts on this:
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Word of mouth pretty much does not exist in business. It just doesn't, especially around IT services. There are tons of reasons that we assume around this, but the reality is if a customer loves us or hates us, they tell no one. We've had customers for over a decade that could not live without us and love us to bits but..... have never discussed us a single time. Companies don't talk about their IT providers, they just don't.
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Establishing trust doesn't really work. You aren't doing the work that establishes trust, you are just burning the opportunity to get the ball rolling.
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Once you establish a low price, the customer will look elsewhere for someone who is trying the same loss leader approach with the other service that they need. And if you try to raise the price once the relationship is established, then they won't trust you.
Service loss leaders don't work. People are not loyal like that.
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www.geeksquad.co.uk/services/tech-support
Different market, different country. - They are many similarities between US/UK but some things are very different.
The more well known "GS" version we have in the UK is PC world, mostly retail stores and they have an office in each store for GS style techs.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
There may come a time when the bench side is dropped completely, I've done some number crunching and although the numbers are not massive, they are enough to justify offering it to those who need it, especially when you already have a pool of clients.
We don't allow bench services because of the insurance problems. Keeping someone's computer on site is a liability nightmare. Won't touch it. No money is worth that.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Where as with this model, it is in my interest to prevent issues/problems, If a client is stable and happy across a year, that's a years worth of revenue as my incentive plus by preventing issues, I get an easier life. You cannot prevent 100% of problems but there is a lot of work you can do.
What you have is an adversarial agreement. This is the primary reason we won't consider these kinds of pricing structures. It is in your interest to deliver as few services as possible - maybe even to the point of incurring risk for the client. It is more cost effective to be risky and lose some clients to disaster than to do the right thing for most of them. It's like SAN sales, you make more money selling customers something risky, even if you lose lots of clients, because the margins are great. So this makes you the financial enemy of the client.
Likewise, it is in the client's interest to push for scope creep and get as many services provided within the agreement as possible. They have no interest in your cost problems.
This type of agreement requires you both to overcome the inherent "enemy" structure of the agreement. It rarely works.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
You cannot prevent 100% of problems but there is a lot of work you can do.
No, you can't. And when you take on all responsibility for preventing issues, any issue that comes along, even ones that you have no way to prevent, it looks like it is your fault because the responsibility for spending money to protect them was yours, not theirs. Every decision is yours, not theirs. Every failure, every blip, every outage makes them say "could he have spent more money and have prevented this? I'm sure he could have, I bet he's being cheap."
This type of arrangement leaves you looking bad, often even when you've done a great job.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@JaredBusch said:
We very specifically do not reference ourselves as a MSP.
Unless I'm badly mistaken, I've been careful not to say that anywhere.
No one does, really. MSP means nothing to customers. It is the set pricing that moves you into the MSP space (if you go beyond bench services.)
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I feel like seeing that you do more than desktop / bench support requires looking a bit more than you would tend to do. I see servers there now.
As a potential customer, when I look it seems that you handle ongoing support of servers that I have set up myself. But how much support do you really do?
Some questions would be...
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Do you charge the same per month for managing an AD server that does nothing as managing a massive, enterprise, thousands of users MS SQL Server? If so, why would I use you only for the expensive ones and someone who charges by the hour for the low utilization ones?
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What do you consider a server? A VM? Or a physical device? Or a cluster? For example:
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What is the charge for the single, stand alone Windows AD DC?
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What is the charge for a Windows AD DC cluster?
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Do you only service the server and not the application running on it? Who will manage the AD DC portion of the server?
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If you do manage the apps, how much do you charge for that and how do you define the server and the applications?
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If you manage the apps, do you charge by the app? If so, would that be AD DC, DNS, DHCP as separate items on a single server?
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Do I get charged differently if I put lots of apps on one OS instance compared to having a separate VM for each application?
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Is a physical server one thing? You charge the same for an HP Microserver running one workload as a DL580 G9 running 200 VMs?
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Is a Dell VRTX one server, four or thousands?
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Do you pay for things like ILO, IPMI and DRAC to make remote management possible? Do you expect me to? Do you charge the same regardless of the remote support software and hardware that I have been willing to invest in? (If so, why would I pay for any of that stuff?)
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@scottalanmiller said:
- Word of mouth pretty much does not exist in business. It just doesn't, especially around IT services. There are tons of reasons that we assume around this, but the reality is if a customer loves us or hates us, they tell no one.
I'm afraid I disagree, I've seen a UK based company grow from a garage based office, to a premium installation and service company in 25 years, all without advertising, all through customer referrals, networking and building a brilliant reputation.
I've sat in meetings where people swap contacts about different sectors who have helped them, from the brilliant Project Manager who delivers on the building project, to the contact who runs a print firm who swoops in to save the day at the last minute.
@scottalanmiller said:
We've had customers for over a decade that could not live without us and love us to bits but..... have never discussed us a single time.
In 10 years, you've had no positive referrals or recommendations at all? How do you know that a customer did not recommend you?
@scottalanmiller said:
- Establishing trust doesn't really work. You aren't doing the work that establishes trust, you are just burning the opportunity to get the ball rolling.
@scottalanmiller said:
(MSP style agreement, ect edited for brevity)
This type of agreement requires you both to overcome the inherent "enemy" structure of the agreement. It rarely works.Yes but what's to prevent an hourly agreement becoming the same enemy of the client? I've hired on "hourly" techs at providers, I got billed 8 hours to fix an issue with a single wireless access point, they got dropped quickly after that. Where as if the issue is:
"Fix my wireless AP please" - I make no extra money by dragging out the fix, I would do if I was hourly.
Scope-creep "Just one more thing" happens in hourly fixes as well, even if you draw up a gun and say no, they still argue either way.
@scottalanmiller said:
It is more cost effective to be risky and lose some clients to disaster than to do the right thing for most of them.
Contracts or type of agreements aside, If doing the right thing is not at the core of what you do, you'll find ways around those agreements. This is impossible to prevent, this is more about the values of the provider.
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IT services are extremely complex. That you only support Windows helps, that eliminates so many things that could come up (Linux, BSD, RISC architectures, etc.) but still leaves so much complexity. I feel like you are relying on your customers fitting into a very specific mold and not leveraging your flat rate contract to their advantage to make this even remotely work.
If servers only every do light web sites, AD, file serving, etc. Sure, a flat rate isn't too bad. But still just so many things will come up.
You will run into the customer with lots of VMs, all Windows, and all running something weird that requires all kinds of special support pretty quickly and find that you are bleeding weeks of labour on a single server contract and have no time to support anyone else, even though the other people pay you 100x the rate.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@scottalanmiller said:
We've had customers for over a decade that could not live without us and love us to bits but..... have never discussed us a single time.
In 10 years, you've had no positive referrals or recommendations at all? How do you know that a customer did not recommend you?
We've had one or two known recommendations in sixteen years. Nearly every one ended up being a customer we had to fire (the ones who we were recommended to, not the ones recommending us.)
True, maybe we have some cheerleaders and there and they just don't have friends who listen to them. But it has to be rare considering that no one ever reaches out to us because someone recommended us. It just doesn't happen. But we have customers that love us. Heck, lots of us have been in customers' weddings or vacationed with them or whatever.
At scale, we just don't see this happening. Not for IT services. Other things, sure, but not IT.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Yes but what's to prevent an hourly agreement becoming the same enemy of the client? I've hired on "hourly" techs at providers, I got billed 8 hours to fix an issue with a single wireless access point, they got dropped quickly after that. Where as if the issue is:
That's different. Hourly agreements are "aligned" in the same way that standard employees are. It's not perfect, but the "effort" is aligned. If the customer needs more work than you expected, they pay more for the work that you do. You charge for what you actually do, they pay for what they actually get. It's a direct relationship rather than an inverted one.
What you are mentioning, being charged too much, is different completely. That's not related to the relationship type, that is just someone who either could not do the job or lied about the time (or it really takes that long, always an option - compare to internal IT, often little things really do take all day.) Once you are an IT service provider, you will start to realize how much time work actually takes and how little people intend to pay for that work!!
But the core issue that you are listing is simply overcharging. That is unrelated to being aligned. That's no different than a customer thinking that you are going to bill for one server and you surprising them with labeling every VM as a server or every service on those VMs as a server. There are ways to "pad" service no matter what the agreement is. But one agreement at least ties your effort to the cost, one makes it inverse.
Don't start from an intentionally adversarial position, start with good intentions.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
"Fix my wireless AP please" - I make no extra money by dragging out the fix, I would do if I was hourly.
No, you make more money by claiming it is outside of scope. Or you make more money by rushing through the fix and not doing a complete job. Flat rates take away all of the value that an IT department would provide - the slow, thoughtful, taking ownership of things and investigating options, doing the right thing just because you should, etc. It makes it so that extra firmware update? Nah, it can wait, or doesn't matter. How much time do you plan to put into checking logs when you only change 30 minutes of labour a month for everything? Not much, I assume.
Dragging things out doesn't provide the value that it seems to, because that takes time away from other billing. It requires you to work for the money and it requires you to compromise. If you drag out with one customer, you don't have time to service the next. So unless you are out of work to do, dragging out doesn't do what you think that it does. And you have to pay the tech for that time, so the profits are small.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Scope-creep "Just one more thing" happens in hourly fixes as well, even if you draw up a gun and say no, they still argue either way.
No, it doesn't, because the scope of hourly work is "the amount of work that is done in an hour" and nothing more. Hourly work inherently solves scope creep by eliminating it conceptually. Scope creep is exclusive to contracts that require a scope definition, hourly does not.
NTG works very hard to have aligned contracts and scope creep never comes up because what the customer wants is our scope and the time it takes to do that is the time. No need to argue over scope, no need to try to legally bind each other to make it all work. Work takes time, they decide how much work they want done, we do the work. Easy peasy. Everyone is on the same team. When they want us to work, we make money. When they want us to stop, we get to go have a beer and stop working.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Contracts or type of agreements aside, If doing the right thing is not at the core of what you do, you'll find ways around those agreements. This is impossible to prevent, this is more about the values of the provider.
Yes, but there are two concepts here. One is what you are describing which is simply being unethical. The other is having a contract where the profits are make or lost in enforcing technicalities. In an aligned situation, it is in the interest of both parties to do the right thing because both succeed together. They work, legally, as a team. It requires one of them lying or cheating for a problem to arise.
In a misaligned contract, the legal departments are at odds, each trying to figure out how to make the most many or get the most work out of the wording of the contract. The contract is complex and even when you want to work as a team, your contract makes this very hard. This is not a theory, this is a real life lesson I have learned. If you are made into legal adversaries, it is basically impossible for you to have a long term, healthy business relationship.
In the second case you have big problems on top of one of the parties attempting to lie or cheat. Don't introduce major issues when there are enough issues that cannot be avoided.
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One of the important things to remember here is that this is business, not people. A misaligned agreement with your neighbour might work because it is you and him and it is personal. A business is many people. Don't think of this as an agreement between you and an owner and it is a friendly handshake. Once you have employees who get "more time off" by "doing less" things will start to change. And once he has employees who "get more through scope creep", things change. You might start out great, but a legal agreement that makes the companies see each other as a means to make money or get free service, your personal agreements or feelings won't matter.
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Here is a very simple example:
Relationship starts off great. But after a while, it is time for the customer to purchase new desktops, the old ones are getting too expensive to maintain. In an aligned relationship, if the customer decides to invest in awesome desktops, modern OS and good tools, the vendor does less work and the customer saves through a reduction in billing and the vendor has more time for other (or more) customers.
If the customer decides to skimp on hardware and tools and makes the vendor shoulder an additional labour burden, that's fine. Because the customer spends less on the hardware and the vendor does more work and gets paid for it. The vendor is happy with either decision from the customer, because the vendor gets paid based on the effort that the customer decides they have to do.
But in the misaligned model, when the customer's financial department runs the cost of ongoing support they will see your in the cost model as a fixed price. They will say "oh wait, why would we invest in more reliable hardware, better support tools or new operating systems if the key values of all of those things are lost?" It's completely innocent. It's nothing personal. The financial model simply says to shift as much cost over to the vendor as possible because by investing less in doing things "right", the cost of support leaves the customer and goes to the vendor. It's very simple business decision making. If you look at the numbers, it makes you do adversarial things. If you ignore the numbers, you are being foolish.
