 SolarWinds raised their prices by 4% for their RMM tools, Q-TechnoPanic. So I participate in a lot of forums and discussions with other MSP business owners on Facebook and sometimes on Reddit. And every time there's a price increase for any tooling company, Q-TechnoPanic from these people. And the people that seem to be doing it, I don't think are looking at the whole picture. And I want people to think a little bit more about their MSP pricing and how they do it, related to this especially. So anytime you become a more well-established business, I'm not poking fun at the smaller one-man show, one-person IT companies that are getting into MSP. But I want them to hopefully listen to this and think about this. When you start growing as a company, or if you are doing your pricing planning to grow, the tooling costs while they have an expense are far from where the expenses are in my company. And not because we're not 100% focused on MSP, but because people cost money. People, your labor rates are way more expensive. So when you're doing a factoring for your MSP pricing, okay, here's this little piece called the RMM system and it's going to cover antivirus and web filtering, et cetera, et cetera. All the features in scripting and automatic updates that you're going to get from a RMM tool and everything else related to your tooling will even include backups on there. So there's a cost associated with the backups. It's really important that they're done right, et cetera, et cetera. But your pricing shouldn't be just some percentage higher than what they're charging you. So when SolarWinds is a 4% increase on the RMM tool and some of their other platform tools and you go, well, I'm just going to 4% to the client. Well, you're only charging that little. And this is where I want people to really kind of focus. As you grow, as you start having a handful of employees or even a dozen or more employees, you realize very quickly payroll on Friday, even as many computers as you may have on your RMM platform, payroll on Friday for us far exceeds the monthly RMM. And I mean, every Friday payroll exceeds it. That's just the kind of the nature of a service-based business. So when you're looking at all the money coming in and out, it's not like you calculate your earnings, go, hey, this is how much I paid for tooling. And this is how much I received and recurring revenue based on my managed service offering to my client. No, the big gap in between when you're a single person, that big gap kind of needs to be there because that way your pricing for growth, and I've talked about this before, pricing for growth is very important. Especially that's how you start as a one person and grow in too many. But if you start with, hey, I just got to pay myself and I'll never think about all the other things around me, infrastructure, insurance, liability policies, just everything that goes into running a business, then you get really stuck right there. And I've seen people, they start out with, I'm going to undercut everybody's price. That's how they think you can win in the market. That's a horrible way to start out because you're on a race to zero margin and a race to burnout. When you get bigger, you realize you're not happy about the 4% increase because that's just 4% on the bottom line. But on the other side of this, it's not that impactful to my business because my overall outgoing expenses all the time are what it costs to keep all the employees here and then everything else is kind of secondary to that. So you have your tooling costs, you have the building costs and everything else, but those are not the biggest factors. Having really good people and treating them well has a big expense associated with it and I just want people to always be focused on that because that is where I'm focused, is making sure that my staff does well because if I don't treat them well and if I don't have good staff to be able to service and use these tools because as much as we want these tools to be boxes of magic that automatically make the clients' computers run right, every one of these tools, SolarWinds and ConnectWise and name any company in here has problems. They're all working towards the perfect solution so these price increases are them trying to stay ahead of the market. I'm still happy with this SolarWinds platform. No, I'm not excited about a 4% price increase that just directly affects my bottom line but that 4% does not interpret to 4% loss of my company in terms of overall revenue because where most of my money goes is payroll and if you're pricing your packages for growth, it will obviously affect but not be the deciding factor when it comes to your pricing. So oh wow, they're going to charge us just a little bit more. Yeah, it's got an impact I just wanted to break up the techno panic. People can stop and think rationally about this. Complaining your sales rep, I mean, feel free. I mean, we all want lower prices and I'm going to do that. I'm going to have a discussion with them but in the big picture, it's not the cost factor of business. I want you to think about that and how it looks when you're the one complaining. Oh my gosh, I got to pass this 4% to my client or whatever. Are you pricing it for growth? And it may be an indicator if you're in that panic mode that you may not have properly priced your packages. So maybe you still need to send that increase out for the packages but it may be much bigger than 4% because you have to price this accordingly to the cost that you have associated with your business. Hopefully it's all for a little bit of insight on there and that's my perspective because for people that also mess with me, did you see SolarWinds email? Yes, I did. I do pay attention to these things. I'm going to complain about them but I'm not going to go into panic mode and say I'm throwing that company out because of it. That's also a big undertaking for us to do that because we're very vested in both the knowledge and training we've done on the platform and having integrated all of our clients and that disruption to our clients would be more cost consumption than the 4% increase they did. Switching over to a completely new platform because of a small price increase. It doesn't matter time before one of the other companies go, hey, we're going to do it too because the big guys did it because the big people in the market right now are still in January of 2019 here, SolarWinds and ConnectWise. If you're laughing at me going, hey, at least I'm on this other platform that's not increasing, stay tuned because the companies, they know each other's pricing. They're not secret from each other. They may see call for pricing. Trust me, the companies have called each other. They're aware of how the market shift goes. They're in tune with it as well. So you may expect price increases to kind of trickle down to the other companies as well and that's just a factor of doing it. Something to consideration. Keep tight on your bottom line. Keep a Y on these things but it's not a reason to have techno panic. Thanks. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, hit the thumbs up. 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