 want to talk about managed IT services and how we offer them here. This is a short video but I wanted to just kind of get it out there as a lot of people ask how do we do MSP. So I'm just gonna give a rundown real quick here. Things I'm not gonna cover is pricing and the reason why always comes down to the pricing is based on how you offer your services, how much your payroll is, how much your building costs if you have a building and one of the things I want to make sure is important yet yes if you're starting out as a one-man show you can certainly if you're a single individual IT person undercut the entire market and I see this posted in forums. Oh yeah I'm just gonna undercut everyone because you know the tool costs this much and I only have to pay myself. Well then you're locking yourself into either a being unresponsive to your clients when you take a day off, b never taking a day off, c the other post I'll see from that same person six months later of I can't hire anyone because I don't make enough money. I'm like yep you didn't build any margin for that. So there's a whole trickery so to speak that trick orators of science and magic to try and figure out how to come up with your pricing and part of it's going to be based on where you live, what a person costs in California, cost of living being so much higher, cost of everything being so much higher in certain areas like Silicon Valley. If you're an MSP based out of there you have a much higher labor rate overall so you're gonna have to charge more for your time. So I'm not gonna dwell on that. Now when it comes to the RMM tools there's a lot of them out there and the RMM survey I'll leave a link below. Surveys I take with a grain of salt because it's based on who took the time to fill them out so it's not necessarily absolutely representative of market. Also a lot of that data is macro and it's extrapolated out to thousands of companies so any error is then exponentially expanded upon but it looks like in basement I have talked to any of the bigger MSPs that I've sat down and had lunch with and other business owners. Connectwise and SolarWinds are your two big companies for any of the larger MSPs that I've met they seem to use either one of them. There's other ones out there and it's important that you choose a good tool but please note none of them are perfect, none of them are going to solve every single problem and do it in an absolutely perfect way. All of them have a learning curve, spend some time RTFM and learning the products and understanding them very well that's an important aspect for whichever tools that you use. That being said it's hard for me to do comparisons people say what do you think about this one or that one? I don't have time to review all of them because installing them, setting them up and moving all of our clients to it to get a real-world understanding of it. A lot of time and effort, a lot of costs on our part of switching so I don't have time to switch everybody out. Not to mention it can be disruptive for the client because you know switching out all the tool sets on there may cause some disruptions in them. The idea is for you to continue keeping their systems up to date not breaking them because you can't decide which RMM tool you want to use. So that's one of the reasons we are staying with SolarWinds but we're also happy with them. It's not like I'm having so many problems or any of the issues I've had have been really really minor overall. Once you tend to tune the dashboard and understand and get your setup going and you put that effort in it it runs it pretty well. The actual verbiage of how we offer the services. Now we don't have gold, silver, bronze plans. We keep it very simple and being simple makes it easier to sell so that's what's worked for us. I'm not saying I'd never change my mind on it but over the years of doing this MSP and the businesses we have on there we found this to work very well. We found to be profitable and it's that's a whole different topic of like I said once you decide your prices you kind of have to look at what your outlay in cost is and outlay in payroll and outlay in time to make sure you adjust your prices accordingly. We have adjusted them accordingly. We've come up with a price that I think is really good. It seems to have a good margin for us and provide good services and good value to our clients. So the offering and how it looks for us like I said is one offering and with a few different add-ons so it's not like we're trying to sell you a better package but there's add-ons and components that may be related to your industry and we will talk to those clients and offer that. One of them is going to be Office 365 and Google G Suite. So clients are on one or the other. We actually have quite a few people on G Suite. We have a lot of on Office 365. Some of them want us to manage it. Some of them are perfectly fine and are very tech savvy and can manage it themselves. We do not force them to hand over the keys to us or we don't do MSP and we've seen a lot of MSPs that are very hard-lined and that's the only way they want to do it. I get it but you know we don't and we found that to be very you know we have people that don't have a problem. They don't change staff many times. They have the same few people that have been working there for like 10 years and they're fine to just manage it themselves and pay the bill annually. Lots of them have GoDaddy for you know GoDaddy's big advertiser. They signed up for it and if you're into the CSP market you know it's hard to pull some of the stuff out of GoDaddy. It's kind of a more pain in the butt than it is taking over from some of the other systems if they didn't sign up directly. Back to the managed services. So our standard base rate comes from these primary services. Persistent remote workstation access by Lawrence systems. That basically let them know that we persistently have access to the system. We persistently are monitoring the system. We're actively engaging it and we can click a button and take over remote control over that any Lawrence system staff. That's an important aspect of it. Microsoft patch management. Keeping systems up to date and patches incredibly important. We make sure we're monitoring it for clients. Antivirus software with daily updates and web filtering. Web filtering and antivirus two critical components making sure they don't open random things that are not good for them to open a random attachments. The web filtering and antivirus provided by SolarWinds which nice thing they've integrated at all. I don't have to buy separate licenses. The licenses included with my RMM make that work very well. Updates to Chrome, Firefox, etc. The etc. becomes down to the client because some of them have different applications. We look at what applications are running and whether or not they're applications that either A SolarWinds will update or B, we have to update. That sometimes can be factored into pricing. We have some clients have been on long time break fixed, but they want to switch over to MSP. We're fine. That's always a happy transition. And one of the things that we'll do is whatever their enterprise application are running, we'll include the updates to that application. Some of them are released on quarterly or based on different when they have feature updates or just version updates. So we'll decide whether or not they want us to include that in there or is that a separate billable per project. Some of the dental offices we deal with have software that's really easy to update and some of it's not as easy to update. Ones that are easy, it's easy for us to put it in there. And like I said, this becomes kind of a personalized when you're doing your evaluation of a client. What software do you run comes up and you have to understand that. This is where the advantage comes in of having a break fix because with the break fix side, we've already had plenty of experience. We know how long it takes to do the updates. We know whether or not it's a difficult company to deal with or an easy company. The other things we do are making sure any problem solved and under 15 minutes are not built. And I say that because this is where you give peace of mind to your clients. And this is where they've had a great relationship with us over this particular part. They want to be able to call you and say, Hey, I can't print. We know that's one of the more common things that come in. They just want to be able to pick up the phone call you say I can't print outlook doesn't open. And we haven't really had a problem with this. If the clients are fairly tech savvy, they don't solve. They don't have them any problems in general, but they do have a problem. Something doesn't work. And when you have access to their network, you have access to the workstation, that phone call comes in, you can solve it very quickly and then we don't build them for it because most all the time as many of you know, why does outlook get stuck? I don't know. It does. Sometimes we've got this occasional problem with this plug in one client has for their HIPAA compliant email and encryption thing that the plug in breaks randomly about once every couple of months. It's so easy to fix any time we fix something, we create a work instruction on how to fix it. We're like, Oh, yeah, outlook didn't open open safe mode checkbox uncheck box, save close outlook open again. It may never happen again on that particular workstation for that particular client. But being able to solve that one, it's very disruptive to their business when they can't send emails and can't get quotes out. So you've now solved it. They didn't get a bill that works really well. And this is kind of that hybrid approach I talk about. By offering these minimal things, the trivial things that just kind of are disruptive to business and covering those as part of our MSP, it makes it easier sell for the clients versus when it's a project, Hey, we need a new server. And there's one right back there behind me. If you can kind of see there's a big Dell server, that's a project that's not the included in our MSP. So we come up with the price, we get the new server, we have a transition time where the new server is going to be put in. That's all project billing. And I know there's some MSPs out there and it's just just not what I'm doing right now. And I'm not saying it's a bad business model. It's a different business model than what we offer. They do they refer to as the all you can eat plan where it's unlimited tech and all the projects are included. That's a lot harder to price and it varies a lot from company to company. The idea is you're supposed to make a bunch of money on this from business side, because you are collecting revenues for that client. So to speak on their behalf that we when they have a project you can lay it out there. Not as much something that we do. We like billing it on a project basis and we find this works very well for our clients. Like I said, this is an ease of sale is something we focus on providing value, but not overcharging and overcharging is a real subjective thing. It's not like I think everybody's overcharging. But sometimes we've taken over quite a few actually lately where they said you know that previous MSP did this whole least hardware everything inclusive and we realized we're paying for it over and over again. We decided new IT people came in and said wow we can save ourselves a lot of money by just buying it ourselves because honestly here in 2019 most of 2018 other than a random power supply failure which a lot of times we recommend people buy something that has a service contract and warranty like that Dell server back there has a five-year onsite warranty for the hardware. We don't really stay in a hardware business. We focus on the software where we can provide value. So we let them buy the server. They brought it here because they wanted to do it themselves directly and save money. We are perfectly open to that. If they want us to take care of it we will. If they want us to do the other side we will. But it's kind of a mixed bag. Some clients are much more tech savvy and no problem doing it. Other ones do that. We're not hard-nosed either way about it. The same thing is when we take out a MSP client. We don't rip out everything they have. We look and see if we can use things they have. If they don't we will write recommendations on putting new equipment in. We've left existing firewalls. We've got clients that have prepaid sonic wall, Meraki, different variety of things. So they've already have two years left on our contract because they pre-bought some of the licensing for it or they bought even sometimes five years at. We don't rip it out. There's nothing wrong with it. It's updated. It's supported. It's within reason. So we'll leave that. A warning though. If you decide to be a company like us and you let people have their own so you don't have this cookie cutter homogenized network. It's going to require more skill on your part. That's just a given. It's hey everything in one single massive dashboard of one component is wonderful. I get it. It's easier to manage. But if you're want to do that cool. But that's not we are willing to be more flexible. But I do warn you it requires to have a knowledge of a lot of different firewalls. A lot of different settings and documentation for all that for how their network is set up. And that's something we care about a lot is making sure all the documentation is right. I've talked about this before. We on the fly. This is why we really like media wiki. I know there's other place out there and it was popular. If you want to use it go ahead. I I don't really have an opinion on it. You're just always remember you're putting all of your data in someone else's cloud as long as they do it right. I've got no reason to believe they don't. That's fine. They can see all the data or anyone at them. That company can see the data. So it's just something to concern. It's concerns me a bit and something you can think about. But honestly like someone pointed out time you're just saying is there firewall better than yours. Do you have the skills to lock down and secure your data in your network properly. But that's not something I'm going to do all on right now for the managers plan. But it is an important way to how we manage it is making sure you have good documentation for your clients. And sometimes it means when you do a discovery before you onboard them you spend some time mapping their network finding IP's using different tools. I've talked about using and map we and map their whole now I want to find all the stuff. And then we use a solar winds tool which also has discovery tools. So once we onboard them we're keeping an eye on everything we got to find all the components and all the things plugged in the network and document, document, document. When you do takeovers from other IT companies maybe do a separate video about this first they're usually being taken over because they were bad at their job so their documentation don't believe it. It's probably wrong and so far I've never seen an IT takeover that we've done where they've gotten good documentation. Maybe maybe they have the right name of the server it's usually downhill from there hopefully the passwords are right that's the first thing you check and go from there. Now a couple component cells outside of the persistent workstations and things like that is backups. Now not everyone needs them and I see that because we work with a lot of insurance agencies right now and they completely use essentially web portals for all of their CRM like they log into web portals it's the smaller ones not like your state farm and some of the big names you've heard but the smaller agents they usually just log into each one of the reseller portals. They save nothing on their local workstations everything is a series of web portals they log into so why should they back it up matter of fact some of them even have Chromebooks which of course they're not even on our MSP plan they're like we just refresh them if needed so we sell back up on an as needed basis what we do sell it per workstation or per server and that's pretty much it it's that simple offering on there now a lot of these people started out as a break fix so we sold them on the break fix part of it because they wanted to use us on a project basis and we've eased them into being on the MSP side other ones they understand that model they're just really unhappy what the MSP that they have and we'll do that too but we don't do forced like rip out your network and it's funny I'm wearing a button-up shirt because my next meeting is with another MSP client of ours that you know they want some more upgrades we always look at what we can do so we can do some future planning with them that's what this meeting is they also had someone come in there and pitched them and they left them right out there like yeah this guy really wanted to sell us we let them do a sit down they just wanted to come do comparison I don't mind I'm not I don't have any confidence issues so if you want to compare my stuff and the guy was like oh no totally rip all this out and by the way they they went with Unified they're an office that mostly uses I think I got 23 laptops and two desktops so most of stuff is wireless because they're sales people who come and go we put in nice unifies they have no problems no issues with it they use our MSP and all the different laptops because they're wandering around they're sales people that do presentations and you know the guy said oh you have to rip all this out they're like we put it in last year he looked at it but then immensely and then here's the recurring here's the maraki they were they only do maraki everything has to be top to bottom and I get it but they also had no chance in hell of taking a client from me with that offering and they also realized pretty quickly because the guy was not very tech savvy very different on that so yeah that's it for the MSP offering can I give you an idea of how we do it and how we kind of do hybrid and how we move into that so hopefully this was enlightening if you have questions discussion think I'm wrong leave comments below or join us in the forum so we can talk more about it thanks thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video go ahead and hit the thumbs up if you want to see more content from my channel go ahead and hit subscribe and the bell icon and hopefully youtube will send you a notice if you're interested in contracting launch systems for any type of IT services work or consulting work go ahead and head over to laurancesystems.com and fill out our contact and get in touch with us if you would like to help the channel out in other ways you can use our affiliate links below in the description or we have a link directly to our launch systems page where we have a list of different affiliate offers and it's very appreciated if you use any of those for signing up any of the services and many of them offer you discounts if you want to head over to our forums there will be a link in the description for our forums wherever they may be because we've been looking at different forum platforms but they'll always be relevantly linked right there all right once again thanks leave some feedback and comments below on this video if you loved it if you hated it I try to reply to everyone people who hate and the people who love them so thank you very much and see you next time