 Welcome to the Vlog Thursday. Marvin's messaging. We're not at the right location. We're at the right location. We decided Big Bees was the place we're going to vlog from today. We're testing out our new microphone. I hope all the audio is good. By the way, the microphone, I want to do a review on it because it looks like a cod piece. It certainly does. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, yeah. I'm even like coming at you this well anyway. Yeah, we're staring at it. I'm about to do a review of the microphone with the other microphone, of this microphone. Yeah, microphone. Yeah, we'll figure it out. Wow. We're vlogging here from Big Be Coffee. We often have Big Be Coffee in the morning. It's now the afternoon because Marvin was at an event, which I don't even know. Marvin went to a thing this morning and said, we're going to vlog later. I said, fair enough. So it's later. It was a very cool event, by the way. If you're a Dearborn Chamber member, what we talked about is actually part of... It's a benefit of being a Dearborn Chamber member. So it talks about ways to increase, not only productivity, but morale and everything in your employees, which then obviously translates to better business for you and to your customers and all that good stuff. So if you're a Dearborn Chamber member, it's a benefit to you and there's webinars and stuff that we get as well. So you should check it out. We're a member of the Dearborn Chamber, we're a member of the Southern Wing County Regional Chamber, which coincidentally... They're right out there. ...are right out there. They see us pointing at us. We love both chambers. We do. The president of the Southern Wing County Regional Chamber and also I'm a board member of is sitting out there. So the boss. The boss. Yeah. I'm a board member. Actually, I guess technically, yeah. You would be his... I have... You would kind of be his boss, right? Well, I'm part of the board. Right. Yeah. Okay. If you were chairman of the board though, that's the main... Then I'm the man or the woman. Or the woman. Don't want to be sexist. Nope. Man or woman. When you're at the chairman level. Who is the current chairperson of the Southern Wing County Chamber? Dave. Dave. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Anyways, back... Not enough politics. That's... Yeah. Yeah. So, Amazon screwed up in April and since the letter that they canceled our affiliate account and we didn't understand why. Five months. Yeah. Yeah. They canceled our affiliate account. So, we have affiliate links on our YouTube stuff. Very open about it. Click the link below. There's an affiliate link when we have a product review. Now, that became interesting because we don't know why they canceled it. They didn't give us a really clear reason. I did some reading and there's a chance that maybe one of my employees while logged into my Amazon account clicked an affiliate link or maybe even I did. And if you click one of your affiliate links, that's a reason for cancellation because you're trying to get commission on your other account. Either way, all that set aside, they canceled it and reinstated it. But they took the money that was in the account and mailed it to one of my employees' friends. Now, who never worked for the company? Never worked for the company and lives in Arizona. Not even the same state. His only connection to the company is that he is friends with one of the employees. He's friends with one of the employees. In the end of the world, there is one other connection. Not my affiliate account, but my regular Amazon account. We had sent him a Christmas gift of some memory and we mailed it to him using the Amazon gift option and choosing a different address. So, all like over a year ago, we sent him something over Amazon through our account. It was giving him some memory. So, that is the attachment. That's on my Amazon account, not my Amazon affiliate account because affiliate account is the advertising account where you get commission on links. So, we don't know how they got the address. They mailed to him. Now, what's even weirder is he just got the check. This is in April. We never got the check from them. And I just, it's not a lot of money that's in the account at that time as we were barely, we just started using it and they canceled it as soon as we started using it. We just reset it back up. And I just didn't feel like getting on the phone with Amazon and being agitated with it. So, we just went ahead and started over. Well, they sent him the check. He just got it. And I'm like, I don't know. This happened in April and he got it and the check's dated for the other day. So, four months later. So, maybe Amazon just took a look and said, oh, these two accounts are related and he's a nice guy. I'll bet Lawrence Technology Services wanted to send this guy a present. What they sent the check is our name. So, it says two Lawrence Technology Services on the check. So, yeah, we're really puzzled by this. And if anyone at Amazon has any answers, I really doubt it. Speaking of Amazon, I went and stopped one of the delivery drivers and had a talk with them because I'm like, how do you guys lose so much stuff? And she's like, all right. Let's talk about this. Basically, inside the Amazon warehouse and the Amazon distribution center are very, very disorganized. People found ways to game the system. So, there's that. And basically, they found one guy, one, well, it's actually a group of people found out how they can all get paid for delivering the same thing without actually delivering it. So, she was explaining to me how all the shenanigans, like people have been gaming the system internally, which is causing confusion in Amazon. But she goes, there's just big holes in the system. And the other problem we brought into is when we call Amazon, we can't get any definitive answer as to where our stuff is. If it's being delivered by an Amazon carrier. And she did confirm that they are letting the people pick up the routes and the blocks, as they call them, of where they want to deliver. So, our other idea could possibly work, which the idea was we could become Amazon drivers and only pick up our own stuff. That is a great idea. Yeah, we would just take our block, if we could choose ours, and we'll just be our own Amazon. I mean, I'll pick it up at the distribution center. So, we would get paid to deliver our own stuff. Yes. And since we used Prime, we didn't pay for shipping anyway. Pretty much. So, yeah. We don't only not have to pay for shipping, we get paid to ship. We get paid, yeah. I mean, that's hard to beat. I love this idea. This is fantastic. Be our own Amazon delivery driver. Yeah. Great idea. So, there's that idea. But we would never do anything like that. There's no way we're doing that. I just to scam the system. Well, someone's game in the system, why not us? Yes. Fine. Fair enough. Fair enough. Our other fun and exciting moments are that job that we've been working on for, yeah, Marvin's growling because he's got to deal with it. So, they were so specific as to send the part numbers and the links to what vendors they wanted. This is a wiring job. And I talked about the bidding versus reality of the cabling job. So, it goes deeper. The company that they wanted us to order from just had after eight days, and we paid for two-day shipping, after eight days, so can't even give me a tracking number. So, we're trying to dispute the reef and get a refund on that, and we're finally just going with the generic rack. They wanted this weird rack where the side, the Z-channels on the side actually folded out with a hinge, which is whatever. But that was also a $600 extra up for that hinged rack and only could be bought from one single vendor that they listed in there. $600 extra. It's important to point that out. Extra. The only thing you get out of this is a stupid hinged rack. Now, if you know what the Z-channel is, it's the things on the side that hold the wire, and it does make the wiring look nicer. It is a nice add-on for a rack, but why have covers over it that hinge? Normally, they snap on. For $600, you can have hinged ones. So, they were real picky about that, but this whole job's been kind of a oops, oops, oops. And they finally let us order a rack from a local vendor so the job could get done because everything else came in because they let us substitute a couple things that were essentially the equivalent. Like, they said, get the red, or what color were they? I keep thinking they're purple and red, but it's not. Oh, they were blue, yellow, and yellow. Keystones that go on the wall because everything is about color coding. So, they let us substitute from a different company as long as the colors were close enough. They were fine with that. We got that approved, but we didn't find any equivalent on the rack, and now the rack didn't get ordered and it was a disaster, so. The rack got ordered, it didn't get delivered. So, now I have a PayPal dispute with them. I paid up PayPal. Luckily, we used PayPal, though. Yeah, so I could PayPal dispute it. Yeah, that doesn't work for some reason. It's been 24 hours and the guy hasn't replied to my dispute. Yeah, I don't know. I'm pretty sure it's a one-dude shop over there. Yeah, don't order from that company. Yeah, whenever I had called, I'm pretty sure it just rang to a cell phone and the guy would just answer, hello? And then, like, if you didn't say anything, then he would say, I will do a recap on this company after we've solved the dispute. So, I'm not going to say anything about it yet, but I might, so. Yeah. But, bottom line, we had local vendors that were able to help us out. So, thanks to ADI. We can call them out. So, thanks for helping us out. ADI helped us out, saved our day. Yeah, they got us everything we needed. So, yeah, thank you to ADI for that. So, go to ADI for all of your rack and ladder needs. Rack and ladders. I think you used to play that as a kid, in rack and ladders. Oh, no. Rack and ladders. You play it as an adult now. Not as often as I'd like. Marvin didn't even know what rack and ladders were. Now he spends a lot of time on the phone finding them at different locations to get delivered to clients. Yeah, yeah. It'd be amazing how difficult it is to get one of those. Yeah. This is why things have been going well. We've been thinking about all kinds of fun stuff. After some deals we did with some other clients, they want us to be a phone company now. Because that's like something we haven't dove into and we haven't been talking about it. I just talked to them the other day. I'm like, we've just become a phone company. And it's because some of the difficulties they have dealing with it, they're like, look, we just want the phone to ring. And we want it to be reasonably priced and clear. And we're realizing how, I know how to do a lot of this stuff and I just haven't really gotten into it. And I'm like, maybe I should. Yeah, so, you know. Identify the need and fill the need, right? Yeah, well, our customers, you know, as we've ventured into each sector of business, we put a process around it. I put good people on it. And what that does is creates a easy thing for the client because they can just call us and get everything done. Well, the other thing they can't get done right now is being an ISP, not possible in America, becoming your own ISP is just not, that's way out of reach. But being a phone company is actually within reach because of the way that we can buy bulk sip in it. So it's something we've been tossing around going, hey, maybe we should do it because we can just manage everything because they hate when phones stop working and stuff like that. Another thing related to this, and this is also what got me into this, we have a couple new clients we picked up and one of them we picked up because we had a solution at the ready. Now, we actually, we just took over two clients that have managed services. So one's going to be the insurance and one's a dental office. I like taking over managed clients because they already understand the contract and how it all works and the service support. Then what makes it more fun is we are able to provide package solutions because we have clear, concise ways we do things. So they come in and this is what happened. Our phones don't work great, VoIP phones, and they have lots of jitter and the phones are just, you know, cutting out on them. They're a managed IT company so I think you need some type of managed switch or managed routing. So they say call Comcast. This is another IT company. Comcast goes, well, we don't do that. Your IT companies do that. So then they call the phone company that provides it and they said, oh yeah, yeah, your IT company should be able to provide that. And so they kind of got the run around and they got very... Feedback loop. Yeah, they got into a feedback loop so they just called us. They're like, hey, and then someone actually, they've seen us on Facebook. Hey, Facebook works. And they just like, do you have a firewall? And I'm like, yeah. And then you go, I think that's what we need. I said, how about I come out and look because you said you just need a firewall but they were real big. We get out there and check. We confirm that there's no management. We put in a, what we refer to as a QOS or traffic shaping firewall. I gave them a price. They're like, what can you do? And I'm like, I don't know. A couple hours. They're like, really? You stock that? I'm like, yeah, they're on the shelf. So about two hours later when we had time, Steve went out there and installed it and switched over from their Comcast generic router, which is not a great idea for businesses that need features. We threw in this, got it done and they're like, that's it. It works. Like the other, we've been on the phone for a week talking to Comcast, talking to our managed IT company and to our phone service. Everyone said some of the words you have, but not one can really tell us what it would take to put that in. They gave us price ranges and time frames of weeks. You came in and you have it on your shelf. I'm like, yeah. But, you know, if you have solutions at the ready and you have concise ways to sell them, you will do better in business. This is one of those things. Yeah. And the second moral to the story is call us first. Just call us whenever, yeah. So now they're, end of August is when their contract is up with the other IT company and they're ready to switch. Cool beans. Love it when that happens. They also like my sales pitch because we don't do contracts and they're like, what? I said we offer prepaid discounts, but we don't do locked in contracts. The reason we do that is I want you to pay me because we do good service and because you like me, not because there's some legal binding between us that makes you want to pay me. That's that. Now, another interesting thing I've been thinking about. Oh boy. And I can't disclose all of it because I have inside information. But I will say, because we've worked with these companies and we've worked with some of them, but this is fun. I just don't need so many people to go, I don't know if I want to start a business because of this or there's already someone in the market doing this. And I think the best argument against that is how many large companies that I'm aware of that I can't talk about that have a clipboard process. And we're talking about companies into millions of dollars a year that wander around with a clipboard looking for someone that's the status update of where your expensive thing is in the production cycle. And we're watching some of these companies get automated very, very slowly. And a lot of them have been in business for a very long time. It's funny because people, I don't know if I want to start a business, there's already some competition in that sector. I'm like, these businesses frequently are set up and run on the premise of this is how we've always done it. Yeah, but you've always done it since 1962 when you opened, which is cool. You've been in business a long time. But these companies, someone right at standstill, they're like the clipboard. That's how my dad did it and that's how I do it. Clipboard was the height of technology when we opened it. And they still have a clipboard. They chase things around. So if you're thinking about opening a business in a sector where there's already competition and you think, how could I possibly compete in this market? You may learn just how inefficiently that process is done. Yeah. There may be much room for innovation. It's just huge amounts of innovation in some of these markets. Fill that space. Fill the gap. Some of these companies are bleeding it. And of course, the bleeding they do it because they don't realize it's a role that costs into the product. And no one realized the product could be made for that model. It's not because that you're making it for cheaper or you're just not making the margin you're making. You're doing a process more efficient. That's one of the things even we focus on in IT is we look for the most efficient ways and we're hyper focused on that. Because if I do things, if I just do it for cheaper, I just work harder for less money. That's not a good way to start a business. It's never a good, you know, I'm just going to be cheaper than the competition. You have to have a process that is better than. We work in technology, so we know all the nifty processes and new gadgets and stuff that are out there. If I make widgets all day and that's what I've done for 30 years, I don't, why would I spend any time thinking about like, just because we work in technology doesn't necessarily automatically make us more efficient because I know a lot of IT companies that are highly inefficient. Well, I didn't, I didn't necessarily mean that we're, but we are efficient. We are efficient. And in theory, we should know about all of the other available processes and gadgets and, you know, things that you can use to help make your business more efficient. So I was just, my point was just that if I spend all day making widgets, like I was saying, it's not in, it's just not in my, my brain to think about, you know, how can I leverage technology or whatever to make this better? A lot of people just don't stop to think about a more efficient way to do that. And one of the things that made Henry Ford so successful was he always was thinking about a more efficient, more effective way to do it. So there's been people who've worked in that and the last thing I'll leave you with is you need to ask your IT guy something. I haven't brought this up in a while, but it's a really good thing to do. A couple things. One, ask your IT guy to restore a file for you. Grab some file that you know you maybe have a copy of or whatever and call your IT company, whoever it is, internal or external, have them get last week's copy of that file or create some random file and stage this. Whatever. Don't give them any time. Just get them to restore it. That's how you know if your backup plan is working. So many people don't do this and that's how they found out their IT company wasn't backing it up. So do that. Also, it's worth questioning is how does your IT guy store all the passwords for your stuff. I found a couple of them to storing things and outlook notes. Not my IT guys, other ones. That's like their process. Oh yeah, we just attached notes to outlook and I guess it's a risk, but you know, I don't own the company. All you can do is shake your head. All I can do is shake my head. But ask them to restore a file, ask them how they keep the documentation safe because if they hold on to your passwords and they lose your passwords, you are in trouble and you can go for if you want, trying to sue them for neglect, good luck. You are the one who has to deal with the fallout of that so please take that into consideration before you choose and when you ask them to restore the file or ask them to find out that they are not storing your information securely, call us. Call us. Call us. Once they can't restore it. If they can't restore, great. You have good IT, you have a good backup process, managed internally, internally, what are the processes, but just do that. Get a file and do that so it makes you can restore it. And do it periodically to make sure that they are backing up at intervals that they say they are. You should do this at least once a month. Your backup system absolutely. Anyways, this is a blog Thursday from BigBee Coffee. BigBee, did we say where? Which BigBee? Oh, we're at BigBee. Earl's BigBee on Dix. Road in Southgate. Yeah, by the, Dix and Eureka I guess would be the closest. Dix and Eureka, Dix between Pennsylvania. BigBee, Southgate on Dix. Google it. Thanks to Earl for letting us hang out here. Yeah, Earl so we can hang out here and rearrange the tables. Yeah. We asked for forgiveness not permission. We'll find out after this vlog. Yeah, we're closing my store. You don't understand. Corporate. He's watching us on camera. There's a camera over there. Oh, we could. We should just film on that camera. Oh, the camera over there. Ah, man. All right. See you next week.