Overview of Our Managed IT Services Offering at Lawrence Systems

I want to talk about managed IT services and how we offer them here this is a short video but I wanted to just kind of get it out there as a lot of people ask how do we do MSP so I'm just gonna give a rundown real quick here things I'm not going to cover is pricing and the reason why always comes down to the pricing is based on how you offer your services how much your payroll is how much your building costs if you have a building and one things I want to make sure it is important yet yes if you're starting out as a one-man show you can certainly if you're a single individual IT person undercut the entire market and I see this posted in forums oh yeah I'm just gonna undercut everyone because you know the tool cost this much and I only have to pay myself well then you're locking yourself into either a being unresponsive to your clients when you take a day off be never taking a day off see the other post I see from that same person six months later of I can't hire anyone because I don't make enough money I'm like yep you didn't build any margin for that so there's a whole trickery so to speak to trick readers the science and magic to try and figure out how to come up with your pricing and part of its going to be based on where you live what a person costs in California cost living being so much higher cost of everything being so much higher in certain areas like Silicon Valley if your name is PBS out of the air you have a much higher labor rate overall so you're gonna have to charge more for your time so I'm not going to dwell on that now when it comes to the rmm tools there's a lot of them out there and there are mmm survey I'll leave a link below surveys I take with a grain of salt because it's based on who took the time to fill them out so it's not necessarily absolutely representative a market also a lot of that data is macro and it's extrapolated out to thousands of companies so any error is then exponentially expanded upon but it looks like in base mode I have talked to any of the bigger ms peas that i've sat down and had lunch with and business other business owners connect wise and SolarWinds are your two big companies for any of the larger MSP that I met they seem to use either one of them there's other ones out there and it's important that you choose a good tool but please note none of them are perfect none of them are going to solve every single problem and do it in an absolutely perfect way all of them have a learning curved spent some time RTFM and learning the products and understanding them very well that's an important aspect for whichever tools that you use that being said it's hard for me to do comparisons people say what do you think about this one or that one I don't have time to review all of them because installing them setting them up and moving all of our clients to it to get a real-world understanding of it a lot of time and effort a lot of costs on our part of switching so I don't have time to switch everybody out not to mention it can be disruptive for the client because you know switching out all the tools sets on air may cause some disruptions in them the idea is for you to continue keeping their systems up-to-date not breaking them because you can't decide which rmm tool you want to use so that's one reason we're staying with SolarWinds but we're also happy with them it's not like I'm I'm having so many problems or any of the issues I've had have been really really minor overall once you've done a tune dashboard and understand and get your setup going and you put that effort in it it runs it pretty well the actual verbage of how we offer the services now we don't have gold silver bronze plans we keep it very simple and being simple makes it easier to sell so that's what's worked for us I'm not saying I'd never change my mind on it but over the years of doing this MSP and the businesses we have on there we've found this to work very well we found to be profitable and it's that's a whole different topic of like I said once you decide your prices you kind of have to look at what your outlay in cost is and outlay in payroll and outlay in time to make sure you adjust your prices accordingly we have adjusted them accordingly we've come up with a price that I think is really good it seems to be have a good margin for us and provide good services and good value to our clients so the offering and how it looks for us I said is one offering and with a few different add-ons so it's not like we're trying to sell you a better package but there's add-ons and components that may be related to your industry and we will talk to those clients and offer that one of them is going to be office 365 and Google's in Google G suite so clients are on one or the other way she have quite a few people on GC we have a lot of on office 365 some of them want us to manage it some are perfectly find and are very tech-savvy and can manage themselves we do not force them to hand over the keys to us or we don't do MSP and we've seen a lot of MSP are very hard lined and that's the only way they want to do it I get it but you know we don't and we found that to be very you know we have people that don't have a problem they don't change staff many times they have the same few people have been working there for like ten years and they're fine to just manage it themselves and pay the bill annually a lot some have GoDaddy for you know Co today's big advertiser they signed up for it and if you're into the CSP market you'll it's hard to pull some of the stuff out of GoDaddy it's kind of a more pain in a buck than it is taking over from some of the other systems if they didn't sign up directly back to the managed services so our standard base rate comes from these primary services persistent remote work station access pirate Lauren systems that basically is let them know that we personally have access to the system we persistently are monitoring the system or actively engaging it and we can click a button and take over remote control over that any learnt system staff that's an important aspect of it Microsoft patch management keeping systems up to date and patch this incredibly important we make sure we're monitoring it for clients anti-virus software with daily updates and web filtering web filtering and antivirus two critical components making sure they don't open random things that are not good for them to open a random attachments the web filtering and antivirus provided by solar winds which nice thing they've integrated at all I don't have to buy separate licenses the license is included with my higher amount make that work very well updates to Chrome Firefox etc in the etc becomes down to the client because some of them have different applications we look at what applications are running and whether or not their applications that either a SolarWinds will update or B we have to update now sometimes to be factored into pricing we have some clients have been on long time brake fix but they want to switch over to MSP we're fine that's always a happy transition and one of the things that we'll do is whatever their enterprise application are running will include the updates to that application some of them are really something quarterly or based on different when they have feature updates or just version updates so will decide whether or not they want us to include that in there or is that a separate billable per project some of the dental software dental offices we deal with have software that's really easy to update and some of its not as easy date ones that are easy it's easy for us to put it in there like I said this becomes kind of a personalized when you're doing your evaluation of a client what software do you run comes up and you have to understand that this is where the advantage comes in of having in a brake fix because with the brake fixed side we've already had plenty of experience we know how long it takes to do the updates we know whether or not it's a difficult company to deal with or an easy company the other things we do are making sure any problem solved and under 15 minutes are not built and I say that because this is where you give peace of mind to your clients and this is where they've had a great relationship with us over this particular part they want to be able to call you and say hey I can't print we know that's one of the more common things that come in they just want to be able to pick up the phone call you that can't print out look doesn't open and we haven't really had a problem with this if the clients are fairly tech savvy they don't solve they don't have them any problems in general but they do have a problem something doesn't work and when you have access that our network you have access to a workstation that phone call comes in you can solve it very quickly and then we don't build them for it because most all the time as many of you know why does that look at stuck I don't know it does sometimes we've got this occasional problem with this plug in one client has for their HIPAA compliant email an encryption thing that the plugin breaks randomly about once every couple months it's so easy to fix any time we fix something we create a work instruction how to fix it we're like oh yeah I looked at an open open safe mode checkbox on check box save close outlook open again it may never happen again on that particular workstation for that particular client but being able to solve that one it's very disruptive to their business when they can't send emails and can't get quotes out so you've now solved it they didn't get a bill that works really well and this is kind of that hybrid approach I talked about by offering these minimal things to trivial things that just kind of are disruptive to business and covering those as part of our MSP it makes it easier sell for the clients versus one it's a project hey we need a new server and there's one right back there behind me if you can kind of see there's a big Dell server that's a project that's not the included in our MSP so we come up with a price we get the new server we have a transition time where the new server is gonna be put in that's all project billing and I know there's some ms peas out there and it's just just not I'm doing right now and I'm not saying it's our bad business model it's a different business model than what we offer they do they refer to as the all-you-can-eat plan where it's unlimited tech and all the projects are included it's a lot harder to price and it varies a lot from company to company the idea is you're supposed to make a bunch of money on this from the business side because you are collecting revenues for that client so to speak on their behalf that way when they have a project you can lay it out there not as much something that we do we like billion on a project basis and we find this works very well for our clients like I said this is an ease of sale as something we focus on providing value but not overcharging and overcharging is a real subjective thing it's not like I think everybody's overcharging but sometimes we've taken over quite a few actually lately where they said you know the previous image he did this whole leased hardware everything inclusive and we realized we're paying for it over and over again we're decided you know new IT people came in and said wow we can save ourselves a lot of money by just buying it ourselves because honestly here in 2019 most of 2018 other than a random power supply failure which a lot of times we recommend people buy something that has a service contractor warranty like that Dell server back there has a five-year on-site warranty for the hardware we don't really stay in a hardware business we focus on the software where we can provide value so we let them buy the server they brought it here because they wanted to do it themselves directly and save money we are perfectly open to that if they want us to take care of it we will if they want us to do the other side we will but it's kind of a mixed bag some clients are much more tech savvy ain't no problem doing it other ones do that we're not hard-nosed either way about it the same thing is when we take out a MSP client we don't rip out everything they have we look and see if we can use things they have if they don't we will rate recommendations on putting new equipment in we've left desisting firewalls we've got clients they have prepaid SonicWALL Meraki different variety of things so they've they've already have two years left on our contract cuz they pre bought some of the licensing for it or they bought even sometimes five years that we don't rip it out there's nothing wrong with it it's updated it's supported it's within reason so we'll leave that a warning though if you decide to be a company like us and you let people have their own so you don't have this cookie cutter modernized Network it's gonna require more skill on your part that's just a given it's hey everything in one single massive dashboard of one component is wonderful I get it it's easier to manage but if you're want to do that cool but that's not we are willing to be more flexible but I do warn you it requires to have a knowledge of a lot of different firewalls a lot of different settings and documentation for all that for how their network is set up and that's something we care about a lot is making sure all the documentation is right I've talked about this before we on the fly is why we really like MediaWiki I know there's other place out there and IT who is popular if you want to use it go ahead I I don't really have an opinion on it you're just always remember you're putting all of your data and someone else's cloud as long as they do it right I've got no reason to believe they don't that's fine they can see all the data or anyone at that company can see the data so it's just something a concern it's concerns me a bit and something you can think about but honestly I like someone pointed out time you're just saying as their firewall better than yours do you have the skills to lock down and secure your data in your network properly but that's not something I'm gonna dwell on right now for the managers plan but it is important way to how we manage it is making sure you have good documentation for your clients and sometimes it means when you do a discovery before you onboard them you spend some time mapping their network finding IPS using different tools I've talked about using nmap we and mapped their whole now I want to find all the stuff and then we use the SolarWinds tool which also has discovery tools so once we onboard them we're keeping an eye on everything we got to find all the components and all the things plugged into network and document document document when you do takeovers from other IT companies so maybe do a separate video about this first they're usually being taken over because they were bad at their job so their documentation don't believe it it's probably wrong and so far I've never seen an IT takeover that we've done where that I've gotten good documentation maybe maybe they have the right name of the server it's usually downhill from there hopefully the passwords are right that's the first thing you check and go from there now a couple other components cells outside of the persistent workstations and things like that is backups now not everyone needs them and I see that because we work with a lot of insurance agencies right now and they completely use essentially web portals for all of their CRM like they log into a web portal it's the smaller ones not like your State Farm and some of the big names you've heard but the smaller agents they usually just log into each one of the reseller portals they save nothing on their local workstations everything is a series of web portals they log into so why should they back it up matter of fact some of them even have Chromebooks which of course they're not even on our MSP plank they're like we just refresh them if needed so we sell backup on an as-needed basis but we do sell per workstation or per server and that's pretty much it it's that simple offering on there now a lot of these people started out as a break fix so we sold them on the break fixed part of it because they wanted to use this on a project basis and we've eased them into being on the MSP site other ones they understand that model they're just really unhappy what the MSP that they have and we'll do that too but we don't do forced like rip out your networking it's funny I'm wearing a button-up shirt because my next meeting is with another MSP client of ours that you know they want some more upgrades we always look at what we can do so we can do some future planning with them that's what this meeting is they also had someone come in there and pitch them and they laughed them right out they're like yeah this guy really wanted to sell us we let them do a sit-down they just wanted to come do comparison I don't mind I'm not I don't have any confidence issue so if you want to compare my stuff and the guy was like oh no totally rip all this out and by the way they they went with unified they're an office that mostly uses I think about 23 laptops and two desktops so most our stuff is Wireless because they're salespeople who come and go we put in nice unifies they have no problems no issues with it they use our MSP on all the different laptops because they're wandering around their salespeople to do presentations and you know the guys that only you have to rip all this out they're like we put it in last year he looked at it but then instantly and here's the recurring here's the Meraki they were they only do Meraki everything has to be talked about him and I get it but they also had no chance in hell of taking a client from me with that offering and they also realized pretty quickly because the guy was not very tech savvy very different on that so yeah that's it for the MSP offering um can I give you the idea of how we do it and how we kind of do hi we move into that so hopefully this was enlightening if you have questions discussion think I'm wrong leave comments below or join us in the forum so we can talk more about it thanks thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video go ahead and hit the thumbs up if you want to see more content from my channel go ahead and hit subscribe and the bell icon and hopefully YouTube will send you and notice if you're interested in contracting launch systems for any type of IT services work or consulting work go ahead and head over to Lauren systems comm and fill out our contact and get in touch with us if you would like to help the channel out in other ways you can use our affiliate links below with in the description or we have a link directly to our Lauren systems page where we have a list of different affiliate offers and it's very appreciated if you use any of those for signing up any of the services and many of them offer you discounts if you want to head over to our forums there'll be a link in the description for our forums wherever they may be because we've been looking at different forum platforms but they'll always be relevantly linked right there alright once again thanks leave some feedback and comments below on this video if you loved it if you hated it I try to reply to everyone the people who hate and the people who love them so thank you very much and see you next time

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 47,303

Rating: 4.9273214 out of 5

Keywords: Managed IT Services, managed it services sales, managed it services video, managed it services business plan, managed it services contract template, managed it services presentation, how to sell managed it services, managed services it support model, managed services, it services, msp, it, it support

Id: rQMamJcNuJw

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 08 2019