 So a bit of a pet peeve of mine and maybe a few other IT people that I know is Companies like Maraki and there's a lot of companies out there like them and there's a lot of IT people that show a lot of love for them and Here's the problem Maraki makes a good product. I'm not passion or product I'm not a fan of this business model of you get a product from us and it turns off the minute You stop paying the licensing fees and of course Maraki part of what they do and just not the only ones doing this many companies do this They get this whole reseller program going and it's all about you know making the commissions and things like that So these IT people they are looking for that recurring revenue and I get it We're in the business to make money But instead of selling your knowledge you're pushing a product because once you sign a client of with Maraki the minute They stop paying the system turns off. So they're kind of locked into paying so you deploy the equipment They sign up for a deal, you know, whatever the annual renewal is for the licensing fees or however that become structured with the partner agreement And then you get a commission while they keep renewing. So you're like, hey, I installed these 10 Wi-Fi units And here's what my take is every time they renew and I see people going on man. It's just easy money You're also outsourcing everything because the Maraki system is completely hosted in the Maraki cloud It's all tied together. It's nice package solution and with that fee that they're doing this you're gonna get you know support from Maraki You're gonna get you know a cloud dashboard You don't have to worry about maintaining and you know, that's all inclusive in there versus other products And I'll bring up unify where you self-host it and maintain it yourself But that does require a higher level of knowledge because you are doing the work But that also allows for more margin you can set the margin of what you want to charge What's your time worth to maintain a unified server and maintain that for your clients and push updates? So two different business philosophies But Maraki decided they have another business philosophy of how they're gonna make more money And this is a discussion I'll leave a link to on reddit and this has happened over the years with vendors And I watch this every time so Maraki sets up resellers resellers sell to the clients They do the install we you know install these wireless and then here's your commission. Well now what's happening is Maraki goes You know how we can make more money We'll just go around the resellers. You've already done the work. What value add are you none? so we'll just cut you out of the mix because The reality of managing Wi-Fi is actually pretty simple We have a lot of Wi-Fi units other than pushing updates to them We have not heard back from the client You know putting very small fees on that seems very reasonable because there's a minimal of interaction between there and people get it They understand that there's not a lot needed. We put the Wi-Fi in it works. There's not a lot to it and Maraki, I think their license fees are really high. That's my opinion Take it for what it's worth But I also am not a big fan of when you turn off the license the machine they just become a brick That's it They turn off because of this Maraki is just going around the vendors and that's what this entire rant is about And a few people I even seen comments in some other Facebook posts where you know I can't verify these but the person says they work as an IT there they had an outside vendor install their Maraki system and Maraki came in Thousands of dollars less on the renewal so they went directly with Maraki for the renewal rather than go through IT vendor And you're only gonna see a lot of that with these cloud vendors And you know the first comment is oh, yeah, Sonic wall did this for a while, too They called it open season on our clients, you know people built their recurring revenue I'm selling Sonic walls because I get all these commissions on it and You know the too many IT guys so much focus on the commission as opposed to actually providing service to the client I've literally seen IT people ranting about old Tom. How do you even recommend pfSense? There's no recurring fees on that like Yeah, I know I like it because it's a quality product And it's not that I mind paying a fee when there's things like updates or if you're dealing with Intrusion detection systems, and you need different feed updates that do you do pay for that for example if you're using Snort and you buy the snort rules Those are fees and their fees because you want updated rules and there's people involved that make those rules So there's a fee Going towards it and things like that makes sense to me but people literally turning down products because there's not a commission path and I see so many IT people like this nature I mean nuts they they're so hung up on it Which of course sends them into a rage fit once they see this they're like Oh, I built this business model around selling Maraki and making commissions that just last forever Because the clients have to renew or the system turns off and now Maraki screwing me. I'm like, what do you think they're gonna do? I mean I get it. They should be more reputable about how they do it But they're not going to be I I've been approached numerous times by numerous companies I want me to resell some of their phone services and things like that and one of my big problems Especially one of them was not our IT company and I know at least one of their staff Watches on my videos me listeners and they they seem legit. They're nothing about them as shady But they want me to completely resell it to my clients and I'm kind of like what's stopping you from doing it And they're like, oh, that's bad business practice. I'm like, not really. I mean, is it slightly shady sure But once you build up a big client base, why would you keep paying me commission? You can just go direct and we've seen this time and time again with other cloud vendors and things like that This is one of the reasons I focus on being a very knowledgeable tech because my value is selling my knowledge and selling it as a service to Set up design deploy and support systems because that's me You're basing it on me or my technical knowledge of my company. That's where we're gonna make revenue If I build my business around. Oh, I'm gonna resell Sonic This is where all my recurring commission So I'll give it to them for cheap because I know they're on the hook for redoing licenses And then all of a sudden people are like, oh, no, they went around me for those licenses. What do I do for my business? Yeah, what do you do for your business? And there's at least one person here that commented and I like how people downvoted him right away They're like, oh, I just sell my clients at like direct costs and they're like, oh, what are you crazy? I'm like, no, we do a lot of that too and our clients appreciate it because the prices on Amazon are not a Secret people can Google what you're selling them. They can look these things up So we've always aired on the side of caution for this like look, you know If we're doing to mark up on things we offer to clients, you want to you know, direct by this or however They want to do it our value we provide is knowing what to do the consulting will charge to help design this network The labor will charge to install this network and secure it properly. That's where we see our value and of course That's having that value Requires a lot more training a lot more knowledge in our part But that brings us value in the marketplace versus I don't know anything I just outsource it to Maraki because I'm just a sales guy at that point and it's some people If that's what you want to be is just an IT sales guy that says look I just magically send it to this Maraki cloud and they was pay me commissions It's a great business model and till it's not or one of these companies changes are mine But there's a little rant on it my thoughts on it I'll leave a link below and feel free to discuss this on Reddit and share your thoughts on some of this You know, it's always interesting and I don't necessarily know that I'm right This is the way I run my business and some people run their business a different way We'll see who's it. It's not really a decision. Who's right? I guess who stays in business is who's right? 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