My New Company - Dara IT
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Another way to look at it.... when you are concerned that someone will overbill, that's concerned that a human will try to cheat you. But if you had a robot do the work and it was told to always be honest, that problem would go away.
But if you have a misaligned contract and you have robots doing all the work and decisions and all are told to be honest and never cheat - you would still have problems. The robots who are told to determine what is or is not in scope would always try to reduce scope definition as far as the contract would allow. While the other robots would attempt to shift as much cost and effort over to the vendor robots. Inevitably, one party or the other will be screwed. It's the battle of contract definitions.
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I do have prior MSP experience, both on helpdesk and in project management
In the case of this hourly tech, I caught him working on other client sites throughout the day remotely, using our site as a base, not happy.@scottalanmiller said:
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.
Yes but all someone has to do, is fill in a form, pay me the money via pay-pal and boom, hit me with their crazy requests which is not the case.
@scottalanmiller said:
- 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...
Your stand-alone AD DC would be treated as a single server £75 per month. Your cluster, how many servers in that cluster?
I will manage the AD portion for you.
AD/DC/DNS/DHCP are all treated as the same app on the server.
Lots of the same apps on different VMs, you'd talk to me for a quote, most likely the cost would not increase, but it depends on what other apps (Sage, Quickbooks, ect) you are loading onto each VM.I.e an Exchange Server VM and a DC/DNS/DHCP/AD VM would be billed as 2 separate servers.
Goes back to work-load, but bearing in mind the website is not the contract or scope of work.
We'd need to talk about that, it depends on your requirements. Why have you got those tools?
Give me a second to type a few thoughts.
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It's the problem of "free". Once a product is free or unlimited, people do weird things. Make McDonald's hamburgers 100% free and you don't just have people eating them for every meal (and getting nothing else) you also have them getting them for their pets, for people they meet, to use a ballast in a ship, etc. It's free, use it anywhere you can. It is cheaper than water.
In Japan they do this with doctors. All doctor visits are free. They have found that they have people who go to the doctor just to talk. Nothing is wrong with them. When a professional is at your beck and call, always, for free (or prepaid with unlimited support) people stop using them as doctors and start using them for anything that they can - including being their only friend in many cases.
This like in your lowest cost service: Whatever technical issue you are struggling with, we will log in remotely and get it resolved for you. That's scary. Now it is in the interest of the customer to have useless employees who don't know how to do anything - because the cost of holding their hands is yours, not the customer's. Why pay for better employees or employees who already know products when they can have each employee keep you on the phone, looking at their screen, helping them with anything and everything? Why screen issues or even track them? Why try to fix common issues? None of that makes financial sense when you have a vendor who has taken on those responsibilities.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
I do have prior MSP experience, both on helpdesk and in project management
In the case of this hourly tech, I caught him working on other client sites throughout the day remotely, using our site as a base, not happy.Again, not relevant. You are mixing concepts of having chosen an unethical partner with having created an adversarial relationship. You are missing my point completely. The issue of ethics cannot be avoided. The issue of being adversarial can.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
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.
Yes but all someone has to do, is fill in a form, pay me the money via pay-pal and boom, hit me with their crazy requests which is not the case.
I'm confused. Not sure what you are saying here. Are you saying you will just turn down the customer?
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Your stand-alone AD DC would be treated as a single server £75 per month. Your cluster, how many servers in that cluster?
So even though they act as a single server, you will bill for each one as if it was unique? Doesn't seem like good customer value. How are you defining a "server"? Some people see that as a cluster, some as a physical machine, some as a VM, some as a service, some as a container.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
I will manage the AD portion for you.
AD/DC/DNS/DHCP are all treated as the same app on the server.Those are all separate services. AD DC, DNS and DHCP are three unique things that can be run together, separately or any part of them not at all.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Lots of the same apps on different VMs, you'd talk to me for a quote, most likely the cost would not increase, but it depends on what other apps (Sage, Quickbooks, ect) you are loading onto each VM.
So the flat rate is just the bait, it's not really flat per server? I realize that it is just an estimate. But as a customer, I expect a published estimate to apply to me. I don't get a price from Rackspace and then expect to negotiate after I've reached out to them. When they publish a price, even if it says estimate somewhere, I expect that to be the price.
And it's less about where you start up front, it is more about where you go. Customer starts with AD on there. Then adds on QB. Then adds on CRM. Maybe months apart. They are making decisions based on your agreed flat rate. Do you tell them up front that once you set the rate that they can't use the server like normal without talking to you about price changes?
Why is a server used how they traditionally were, lots of things on one system, not covered by the pricing that seems to be specifically for that?
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@Breffni-Potter said:
I.e an Exchange Server VM and a DC/DNS/DHCP/AD VM would be billed as 2 separate servers.
So the expected price just doubled. That's big. If you say "flat rate by server" to a company, the literally think that the rate is one price per server. Not one price, maybe, per "operating system instance." The people making these agreements won't even know what that means. A desktop is a desktop, why is a server not a server? Make sense?
And a VM takes far less management than a physical machine. Why would each VM cost the same as something so much bigger?
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Goes back to work-load, but bearing in mind the website is not the contract or scope of work.
Not to you it isn't. But to a customer, it will easily feel like a bait and switch. Lure in with what looks very much like a flat, predictable rate. Then find out you are going into a negotiation where you could easily pay four times what you thought that the flat rate was going to be. And then finding out that it isn't flat still, but if you use the servers as normal, the rate might change on you in ways you can't predict.
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Business alignment is something that I have put tons and tons of thought into having seen it tear companies apart while everyone was attempting to do the right thing. It's something that SMBs miss. Both the IT people and the business people - it is one of those things that keeps SMBs in the small category, they miss when they are getting into relationships that are not set up for success. Mostly because they fail to empathize for the other party and think about how the relationship will look once set up and running and how that will cause people to want, or even need, to behave.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Those are all separate services. AD DC, DNS and DHCP are three unique things that can be run together, separately or any part of them not at all.
Yes they are but they are treated as combined. All are needed for a functional network, whether you only run AD or run all 3.
@scottalanmiller said:
I'm confused. Not sure what you are saying here. Are you saying you will just turn down the customer?
I'm saying that it is impossible for a customer to immediately book and agree a service like this. This is not Amazon, there is no pick an item, add to basket, pay by credit card then you get it. So the scenario you are describing will never happen.
@scottalanmiller said:
So even though they act as a single server, you will bill for each one as if it was unique? Doesn't seem like good customer value. How are you defining a "server"? Some people see that as a cluster, some as a physical machine, some as a VM, some as a service, some as a container.
Defining it by the workload of the device, the maintenance work required,
@scottalanmiller said:
Not to you it isn't. But to a customer, it will easily feel like a bait and switch. Lure in with what looks very much like a flat, predictable rate.
Yes but for your example said customer is expecting to pay £75 per month to manage 200 servers. When the £75 clearly states "per server" how per server is defined, you should talk to us about.
@scottalanmiller said:
And a VM takes far less management than a physical machine. Why would each VM cost the same as something so much bigger?
Because Exchange needs the same level of management and care whether it's physical or virtual. Which you know
Virtual Exchange helps but not massively. -
@Breffni-Potter said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Those are all separate services. AD DC, DNS and DHCP are three unique things that can be run together, separately or any part of them not at all.
Yes they are but they are treated as combined. All are needed for a functional network, whether you only run AD or run all 3.
That would apply to many Nginx services, a load balancer and a database farm too, though. Like MangoLassi... it is all one thing but has many different services that combine to make it, even though each is also used independently.
AD, DNS and DHCP are not all needed. AD and DNS have zero reliance on DHCP. DNS has no reliance on AD. Only AD needs DNS of all of those. And none of the three are needed for a fully functional network.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
So even though they act as a single server, you will bill for each one as if it was unique? Doesn't seem like good customer value. How are you defining a "server"? Some people see that as a cluster, some as a physical machine, some as a VM, some as a service, some as a container.
Defining it by the workload of the device, the maintenance work required,
Then as a customer I'd think that a cluster would be a single workload, not many. It's one thing to me, typically.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Not to you it isn't. But to a customer, it will easily feel like a bait and switch. Lure in with what looks very much like a flat, predictable rate.
Yes but for your example said customer is expecting to pay £75 per month to manage 200 servers. When the £75 clearly states "per server" how per server is defined, you should talk to us about.
Playing a game of defining "server" when to a customer there is a common definition (the physical thing they bought called a server that they can pick up and hold) doesn't feel right. This feels like a game of redefining words. I realize that in IT server can mean many things, but if you need to play that game, don't make the website look like you have a solid definition and a set price. How do you demonstrate a set price if the thing for which it is set is not defined?
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@scottalanmiller said:
And a VM takes far less management than a physical machine. Why would each VM cost the same as something so much bigger?
Because Exchange needs the same level of management and care whether it's physical or virtual. Which you know
Virtual Exchange helps but not massively.But then, why would Exchange, which requires a ton of work, be the same as AD which requires "none"? Virtual Exchange or physical Exchange at the service level is about the same. But at the server level is a bit different.
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Having read though the...almost insane level of typing in such a short space of time, I'll lay out a few items for clarity.
- @scottalanmiller Thank you for the detailed feedback, very helpful.
- Having read through it...I'm pretty convinced I need to change my pricing strategy and messaging.
What I might do is create a separate site. Home.DaraIT.co.uk which is entirely focused for that market, so there is no confusion mixed messaging.
Then for the business users, spend more time on the site about education, rather than trying to tie up knots contract wise and (to my annoyance) you are right that it is near impossible.
As a preference, would you prefer to have me on retainer per month or only be invoiced per hour as a business customer.
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IMO most businesses not looking for low end support will avoid a MSP providing any level of support to home users. I know I would.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Having read though the...almost insane level of typing in such a short space of time, I'll lay out a few items for clarity.
Welcome to this thing called @scottalanmiller
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@thecreativeone91 said:
IMO most businesses not looking for low end support will avoid a MSP providing any level of support to home users. I know I would.
Is there a business decision behind that? Surely that's the same as saying "Oh I won't use that level of internet provider, I want this provider" and pay £££ for a connection. I'm not targeting the average PC world user. I'm trying to aim elsewhere.
