 I wanted to start out by making LaFontaine Bull's Wagon for having us. Thank you. Welcome to Blond Tuesday at the Chamber event. The multi-chamber event, the five-star multi-chamber event. We have Southern Wayne County Regime Chamber, Dearborn Chamber, Dadba's here. Five-chamber event. That's like Washington Park. Oh, wow. Well, that's deep. Wow, it is. Five-chambers. Five-chambers. Five-chambers. Six-chambers. Yeah, right. So five showed up, but there's an extra slot. Nobody the other way around. Yeah. I don't know how Russian Roulette works. Yeah. That's a different topic. Yeah, much different. That's an off-topic scene, so yes it is. So we're here, which means we're not recording in studio. We're probably following up with a quick one in studio. But we got it. We're meeting with all these fun and wonderful people over here at the Volkswagen dealership who is gracious enough to host us here. going on with us today and this is something important that we go to these this is how we find clients which is how we get the bills paid to clients projects money and I'm gonna get back to it because I got to go find more clients because we're a lot of money close close right you see the bank account I did yeah okay it's bad but Tom finally built some things so yay people almost like $30,000 right now we'll get it though yeah all right all right so we're back from the chamber event where we met some people and I know home back home back back to Tom where he can be introverted because I got to just get you out that because I they're like oh you're actually I'm like no no no I'm not I'm not at all I am a person who forces himself to leave the closet of my office yeah which I call the closet is so small and but it's where I like to be and so also you may have not I like to be out yes mingling with people so if you may have noticed it hasn't been as many video postings because we're buried in projects and which is good which is good now we gotta get money because people owe us a lot of it they really do a whole lot of it and it's got to be getting into the bank so it's well over 30,000 right now I think so but good news is Tom has built stuff out so I invoice everything now I can start bothering them to pay us yes because you can't bother people to pay until you bill so it's true I just like doing what I do sometimes I forget to send a voice it Tom likes to get like 10 grand in a time it just makes him feel good never mind that we may go like two months of only like a thousand yeah good news is I have a video coming up and I may do it tomorrow about how see everyone but Tom I'm the exception to any role I make I didn't want to be that guy I know that the company has to move forward to have processes in place therefore things not done by time get billed in a very timely manner and I was gonna I want to make a video explaining that process I'm gonna get to some of the knowledge management stuff too because it's kind of all related in intertwine together and an update on that client we talked about that save money on computers no it just keeps it just keeps coming like yeah there's such a fun office we're hoping eventually to land them as a managed client because they've insisted even though we told them they have no backups to keep insisting they have backups so I couldn't help it be I try not to be snarky when I visit clients I really try a bit my tongue and but I did say when when they couldn't get the data back from something that died because now something died there that are like oh I need the data from this I like oh just restore from your backups well I'm just in a girl got kind of defensive well so-and-so at the office and just some other person that works here thinks there's backups and I'm like yeah and you believe them and they're like yeah I said then have them restore them because I can't find them I said that hard drive you plug it doesn't work and she's like well I guess it's not that important I get the file back I don't think I've ever met someone as much dial but oh well and that actually started a philosophical discussion here at the office like if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it doesn't make a noise if you have backups but nobody knows how to get to them are they do you have backups they just insist that I know so I'm talking about and I don't whatever they pay their bill so they're a good you've only been in the tech business for what 25 years something like that 22 what could you what could you possibly have a 95 I know okay possibly it learns I have learned and nobody backs up and then people live in denial another thing and we're gonna keep it short today because there's gotta get back to projects another thing that's kind of discerning to me that about my industry this tries me crazy we just did another audit to find this so we take over a new client and we were auditing all the licensing oh boy yeah and it's hard being honest in this business because they don't really know I mean do they go back and sue the guy who knows he was charging them for licenses that on this when we got the license report back from the antivirus company we have our own antivirus and the other stuff expired but because he has a couple machines that are too old for our antivirus we said well you know that antivirus seem to work and we'll use on these old machines because they kind of have to be kept online for legacy reasons that's a whole nother discussion but we noticed that there's a lot more license there were computer we never had audit before as we were getting rid of it the clutter client was fine with that but it expired so we want to renew only the section there we wanted to change it companies so they come to us instead of him well hmm they let us know each computer licenses on the company was nice stuff to disclose that no it was not on all of his computers it was on other companies computers but the license in fact he was paying for for other companies so I wonder how much he was charging those companies for licensing I know so basically this our client was paying for licenses to the previous IT company and this is just the latest in a constant round of this I years ago and this is what makes me so mad about being honest is hard and being honest it sucks it makes less money but we took over IT from a guy did the same thing he charged them for office licenses and he did all the licensing inclusive to them like Microsoft office yeah okay yeah yeah he didn't actually put that on the paperwork he verbally said office licenses and then he put install MS office on the license so that's how the Amazon the invoice so he pirated office $25,000 in licensing fees he charged them for it will install fees because that's how it was listed on there so the lawyers couldn't go after them and by the way everyone's probably screaming oh just tell Microsoft then a software piracy the problem really you run into is these companies don't care Microsoft's been notified there's a the guy down the street from us that closed for other reasons he just was bad at running business oh yeah he reported him all time he's to sell computers with Microsoft office on it they don't care the software piracy association gives zero anything they just no cares given unless it's a big enough person for them to prosecute so yes they have pirated stuff installed they're responsible for it they could be in trouble too as part of their worry if they call the software piracy association the lawyer told them because he wrote it on his installing Microsoft office they needed something more than a verbal from him because he never put that in an email he sold it to him in a meeting charged them all the licensing fees they just didn't really read through the details the invoice on them for that I guess but you know you trust these IT people and they lie and so he still runs around doing that and yeah and makes me angry because then that reflects even though we had nothing to do with it it reflects poorly on the industry as a whole because that's why people don't trust us that's why when you say you should buy these computers companies say well we found something different right and it's it's just such a mess and we dealt with this when we took over another client I they were paying for software assurance but you can get volume licensing for Microsoft which made not a lot of sense for as small as an office they were and I'm like why are they charging those volume license will speed a discount deal they were charging them the company was and they kept it all mysterious and they wouldn't give us the volume license login from Microsoft and we switched them all to standard licensing because it saved them it was something like one tenth the cost with this company is charging they were charging them on an annual basis like $400 a year for each seat of Microsoft office I'm like you can buy in every year they charged them I'm like you couldn't and they were still using the old version of office so they weren't updating them every year every year they charged them the same bottom they just kept paying it I'm like I don't understand well that's their license agreement I'm like but it was super vague the way it was written and it's makes me mad that's how some of these companies in IT I want to choke them they it makes me mad because of like the casea thing I did a video on they just so many IT companies get in for the money they look for the cheapest thing all the time and they hire a good salesperson to run around selling the stuff and as long as nothing blows up at the at the place they think they're doing great in IT some of these IT people are just dead awful and you don't know it it's like the company that will we tell this a lot they're selling backups the guy was selling on backup services he charged him every month for backup services he never installed the backup software he never set it up he never installed the software never installed we couldn't even find evidence on the computer and when the computer kind of crash where we'll recover it and fix it we're like there is no backup of course the reason they fired them is they could solve and crash they called him and he's like yeah it's not working and I have a friend who's quitting his IT job because he works for all those companies that sells backup services and he's got an incident and the owner's attitude is I guess we're gonna lose them as a client because they know they've been selling them services that they're not performing and his attitude is I guess we're gonna lose them go let them know we just can't do it make up some reason oh my gosh he's like well can I just tell him the truth he goes do you like your job here oh my yeah so talking to other people I know in the IT and I'm gonna probably hang out if I have time tonight to IT and it's funny we swap stories like this 19 it just drives me nuts because some of these companies exist like this and people know I got the greatest IT company in the world like have you ever had a problem have you ever tested them have you ever had them restore something if you work in this industry or you work outside of it you want to test your IT company here's what advice try to have them restore file try to get them to do it first if they're paying some for a managed service they shouldn't be nickel and dime you if you say hey can you restore my word document from last week or whatever you need find a file that you create that's not important just in case it can't be restored deleted have it somewhere deleted somewhere so can you restore this file from the day you had it and don't send them on a goose chase see if they can't if they can't give us a call we can do IT services for you that's been my pitch for a while and you know me we were starting to get some people going yeah my tea company to completely couldn't do it I thought they were good and I'm like yeah they're not not only can they do it how long is it gonna take them to do it are they going to charge you and how much to do it yeah look for you know there's reasonable things there's times you can pay less for backup and you pay for the stores there's different agreements just be upfront ask the question are you gonna charge me to restore if you want to pay me less for backups and me charge you for restore will work something out you can be like that let me turn this off but yeah it's this industry makes me mad because some of those people because they're making so much money they keep dumping it and sales and marketing dumping it sales and marketing and kind of like they said well we'll just get another client because we screwed that one up they're playing a volume game they're playing a volume game and what we charge for backups is not cheap it's not free and but thinking of charging that and not having any of the fees I have associated with running it well I'd be my margin to be wonderful right I could I could hire a second Marvin just to go out and get more clients that we wouldn't service maybe we should start doing that yeah I just want to be at IT companies yeah so that's enough me ranting about that IT but it's a good it's a good idea though test your IT company every now and then test them see what you know what it takes for them to that's how you don't forget they can't do it then you need a different IT company better to test them when you don't need it yes then have them fail the test when you do is that's that's so often how we get clients as they fail the test when they need it and I'm just like I preach this constantly I'm like you don't know if they're good or not you just make some assumptions because you've never had a disaster and statistically statistically you're not likely hard drives generally look at the percentage of hard drives out there and how few fail your statistically looking not have a failure if you put in a good system they generally last until the age out and are no longer productive useful that is how long servers generally last it's you know I've had so many clients that we've put in the servers we've taken about seven years later and we had to do a no maintenance in between other than you know updates and stuff like that they just never broke we never had a hard drive fail we never had anything fail you know we have a client with tons of data on a radar a we've had a drive go bad in seven years on that radar is coming to the end of retirement one drive had a bad sector replace it one out of a big array it's just great it doesn't fail and keep that in mind though too that that is part of the maintenance of they do have a life and life expectancy yeah there's a life cycle to your service and if your server is 20 years old is a 20 year old desktop really on power you're really on our time right so it's yeah so statistically they don't fail a lot so you maybe mistakenly think that your IT people are heroes when you know we've even seen clients that have never had an IT company and they just use the computers because they don't surf the net they don't click on anything they just use it for the task at hand you know whatever software they run just to manage your business and never really do anything on the internet they sometimes have no problems either because they're they're very focused and only working but if you have an office full of people click on everything you really need us because oh yeah there's some people that just like to click on all the things and they're they're a threat to your office they sure are yeah if they answer the phone and ha ha ha call India like all that they call India let them on their computers and things like that that's those are the real threats those are the people that were are actively engaging us so yeah anyways thanks for watching like and subscribe more stuff coming as always but I did it slow down the videos because it takes a lot of time to produce these videos until enough money comes in from the videos to me to make more videos which is to say if you are so inclined check out our patreon check out our patreon feel free to throw money us we don't mind helping and things like that too I helped out someone actually do any money and I answered some tech questions they had I don't mind doing that either you can contract us for consulting work and things like that remotely so that's other in case you just don't get enough videos yes that's a service we've offered all right thanks for watching again appreciate it see you