Celebrating One Year of the Geek Freaks Podcast
About this episode
AUGUST 14, 2020
It has been 1 year since the release of our very first episode, but 25+ years of Omega Computer Services. We have a great staff and are very fortunate to be where we are right now. Time sure flies by when you’re being geeky. In this episode of the GEEK FREAKS PODCAST Ron reminisces about the start of Omega and explains what sets us apart as a managed service provider for small and medium-sized businesses.
MEET THE GEEK FREAK
RON HARRIS
VICE PRESIDENT
- 15 years in the industry.
- Enjoys spending time with his family, riding his Harley, and finding time to sleep.
- Fun fact: Ron broke both of his arms.
- He's a simple person, enjoys work, but also enjoys being alone reading a book or learning something new. Loves candy DOTs!
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Celebrating One Year of the Geek Freaks Podcast Transcript
Speaker 1: (00:00) [Music]
Ron: (00:09) Hello and welcome. I'm Ron Harris and today we're celebrating, we're celebrating our first birthday. Geek Freaks Podcast's first birthday. It's been one year since we started the podcast. It's been a heck of a ride. So I, from the bottom of my heart and everybody here that works on this podcast and the show and going into all that, thank you so much for listening, uh, being a part of this journey. It's been eyeopening, crazy, insane, all those good words. Uh, but we're, we're super excited to have you listen to us every month and hopefully get some information and some nuggets out of it. So we appreciate it. Thank you so much that being said, I think now's an appropriate time to talk more about us and what we do and why we do it. Now. You're familiar with me. You've probably listened to the podcast and heard my name.
Ron: (00:56) Uh, I'm Ron Harris, I'm the vice president and I do sales here at Omega Computer Services. And I think it's important that we understand the journey to what got us to 2020. So let's start from the beginning. Bill Wisser started the company in 1995, uh, primarily as a, uh, programming house. So he has, uh, contracts with, uh, bigger medical companies in the area that he's been programming with for 26 plus years. And I met Bill I was 21, so 15, 16, 17 years ago at this point, uh, Bill and I have been friends and, uh, I guess he's been a mentor to me and one of my best friends for the last 15, 16 years. And we kinda came to this idea, you know, we worked together. I was a help desk admin at a company, and he worked there as a contractor. So we had met, it was love at first sight, we became really close friends. Uh, we played ping pong, we got to know each other. And from there kind of blossomed all these ideas we were going to do. He knew he wanted to make a change and he knew he had to diversify the company and I wanted to do something else. I wanted it to be a part of something that was going to continue to grow. And I think that stems from my grandfather who started our family business and that's still going to this day, but I always had this drive to do more. I did not want to be a cube cubicle King, if you will, or a desk, a help desk guy, my entire life, I wanted more and everybody does, but I was given the opportunity to do that. So, uh, in 2009, uh, I quit my job as an I.T. Director and joined Bill on this adventure in 2009, 10 and 11, uh, we were floundering, right?
Ron: (02:42) We were trying to figure our way in this crazy world. I had known about managed services, Bill and I had marketed it. We've done a ton of research. We had our business plan drafted up, and if you've ever started to try to start a company or even a lemonade stand or anything, you quickly realize that on paper, on spreadsheets in your mind, everything is very amazing and awesome. And in real life, it's super, uh, incredibly hard to get a business going. Now we, uh, I guess I should say I was incredibly lucky to have the support of Bill. Um, and he was still working, doing contracts. So that kept us afloat. And that allowed us to kind of figure out, uh, what the hell we were doing. Right? So we started doing it and we were doing traditional time and material managed services. So a managed service provider is outsourced I.T. essentially for small, medium and large businesses.
Ron: (03:39) Now you can go to enterprise with it too it's, that's just a different, that's a different game, but, uh, we, we flirt with it. We never really push up into it today. Um, I'm sure in the future we'll be getting there, but right now we're, we're sticking around, you know, the small, medium sized businesses. So, um, anyway, so we were trying to figure out what it was. We were traditional time and material. So you would call in with a service desk issue. I would answer the phone and I would start charging you. Now, the kind of the, I guess for lack of better terms, the * part of that was, is I was learning on your dime. So it didn't really make sense to us. And as two dudes that really pride ourselves on being, you know, customer service, we're customer service oriented company and people, it was hard. It was hard to look at people and be like, I'm going to stick. It should only take me 15 minutes. And then it drags out to be 45 minutes because I'm trying to figure this out. It just didn't make sense. So from there, we went to, uh, I went from, you know, we, we floundered with that in 2013, I went to a sales training and I learned value. And I learned to understand what value means to everyone, to people. How do you continue to bring value? How do you, you provide value?
Ron: (04:56) How is value interpreted by other people in certain situations? Uh, it was basically a seven day 40 hour bootcamp of not sleeping and understanding the sales process. I came back, um, and we had a great meeting Bill and I, um, kind of sat down and kind of looked at the overarching theme of what we were going to do. And I remember it very vividly because we were at a conference in Florida and we were sitting in the hotel room talking, right. Now we were at a very large impasse with our business, much like I'm sure if you were a founder or a generation first generation, second generation business owner, you've had that same impasse. Do we cut our losses now? Or do we work like hell to hit the top of the mountain? Now I don't know who listens to this that knows me or knows Bill there's really no quit in either of us.
Ron: (05:48) So no matter how dark it got or how, you know, how much money we were behind, it didn't matter. We were going to push through. We were going to now to Bill's saint-like aura, that he gives off. He took a lot of sacrifices. His family made a lot of sacrifices. He made a lot of sacrifices to ensure that we stayed whole, uh, during some crazy times. And when we're taking a lot of risks as a business, and now I'm very happy to say those risks, risks have paid off and, uh, we're doing fantastic. But it was because of that conversation in that hotel room, where we were able to be really honest about what we wanted out of the business. Now, if you have a business partner or a family member or anybody that you have to work with on a high level, you understand that there's a time to be honest and frank and, um, Bill looked at me at one point and said, Hey, we're not going to be able to do this. And I said, I need six more weeks, which would have been, um, fine if we, if it just, if it just wasn't going as bad as it was, we were selling backups. We were doing heres and there's, I just, wasn't a salesman. I was at a tech. And then after we came out of this, we said, we had that conversation. I said, I need six weeks. And in that six weeks, I was able to turn over a couple of contracts and really get the ball rolling. But in between there, in that hotel room, when we were having these conversations, we said, we had to change our plan. We had to be different. So that was the day. We didn't know, I'm not going to take credit for this.
Ron: (07:20) We didn't come up with it. But we were one of the first companies to do it in our area. It was flat rate I.T. services. So we were taking it and saying, okay, what's the rough estimation. We were going to spend on a computer. What do the tools cost? What are we supplying in this? And setting a flat rate to it. Now, the value of that for you or any business owner is huge. Because now I can look at you and say, Hey, Mike, I know that you've been paying a bill that's anywhere between $1,500 and $3,000 a month. And then you've had to buy equipment. So we're going to say, it's going to be $1,500 flat rate, as much as you want. So you can call the service desk as much as you need. You can use this as much as you feel the need to, and we're going to charge you based on the number of employees you have.
Ron: (08:00) So that was huge. It was no longer predator and prey. It was no longer, Hey, you're down. This is awesome. We're going to sell a server. We're going to get 20 hours to work on this broken server. We're going to sell you a new server. It's going to be great. We're all going to make all kinds of money. No, we're not going to do that. That's not who we are that doesn't make us feel good. That doesn't, that's not how we operate. We're going to charge you one flat rate. We're going to service it. We're going to maintain it. We're going to take care of it. And we're going to make sure it's up and running. Now, if it goes down, we're going to replace it. That's going to be our dime, right? Because we're putting our technology and our service ahead of everything, because that's what you're essentially essentially, as a business owner, when you get into one of these contracts with a managed service provider is you're giving us keys to your castle.
Ron: (08:44) You're putting all your faith in us. And we have to return that not with heavy handed bills or invoices or incidences or high level priority things, we're going to take care of you. So out of that, we scrapped our, I think it was silver, gold and platinum plans because they were confusing as hell and hard to price and hard to maintain. And we went to two different plans. We went to a light plan. So pro care light, and pro care full, very simple name. Um, and they, they pretty much have only one major difference, full maintenance, backup, networking, new firewall, um, all you can eat, uh, service desk, projects, all that good stuff. And then full includes all the hardware. Cause when we looked at this, we looked at it from the standpoint of like, if I'm, if I'm a, uh, an insurance agency owner, I'm a financial service owner.
Ron: (09:41) The last thing I'm spending money on is computers. But it's also our biggest issue is that we have old, outdated technology. We have beige computers with cows on the boxes, and we're not doing anything with them. So when you're paying that seasonal accountant to pump out, um, returns and make sure your customers are being serviced, they're also waiting on slow, dated computers. So we looked at it, we looked at that as a challenge for us. How can we remove that headache? So we did that with the full plan. So now I can go to you as a business owner and say, yep, I'm going to replace all your equipment, your server, your network. I'm going to rewire your building. It's going to cost X a month. You're going to say, wow, that's crazy and say, you know what else is crazy? I'm going to give you a fully featured VoIP phone system.
Ron: (10:28) That's going to save you money, but some money back in your pocket. And we're going to take care of you a hundred percent all the time, no matter what on call after hours, we're going to make sure you're up and running. And people really took to that. We went in 2014 to, to now 2020 with the pandemic and everything stuff slowed way down. But before that, in 2019, we were probably at five years of triple digit growth because the plan was there, the value was there. We don't, if you say, Hey, Ron, um, I wanna, I want to do this project. I want to move from QuickBooks to Peachtree, but whatever the case is, we're not going to charge you to do that. We don't charge extra for any service for any of our customers, because you're already paying a premium to us. And you mean the world to us.
Ron: (11:19) So we're going to take care of you. Now that's a huge differentiator in between what our competitors do. Our competitors will say, Oh, you want to move from QuickBooks to Peachtree. That's going to be $5,000. And it's going to take probably another 20 hours to get it installed and laid out. And then we'll work with the vendor we include in our managed I.T. services. So let's, so let's break the plans down very simplistically, uh, first portion being managed I.T. Now, both plans have this. We're going to take care of unlimited service desk. Uh, so you can call as much as you need it. You can submit as many tickets as you needed the field service or onsite visits. So every quarter we come out, we visit with your staff. We check your equipment, we check your servers. We sign off on it. Um, any workstation setup that you have to do,
Ron: (12:07) so if you hire a new user, you're not spending 20 hours, 12 hours trying to figure out the latest update. We do that for you. You say, Hey, Ron, um, we're hiring Bob. We're really excited to get Bob on board. Can you get this computer set up for him? We sure can. When's Bob start date? And it's this day, we make sure he's got his computer, his mouse, everything's all set up. He's jamming down the road. So he's ready to train. Project management and implementation is included with each package or each plan. I wish I should say plan. So if you're going to do a project, we're not going to nickel and dime you, and we're not, we're not going to add to the expense of what you're trying to do. We're going to, we're going to work with you. We're going to be a partner in this situation, and we're going to help you.
Ron: (12:44) And then a client success team. So our client success team is, uh, individuals in different departments inside of our organization that are making sure on every level that you're being communicated with, that you're going down the road, the appropriate fashion, and you're getting the attention you deserve. So on top of that, this is where it gets a little nifty and tricky is we do a ton of vendor management for you. So if you're a Office mManager or a Vice President, or an Ops Manager, or somebody that is being tasked with taking care of I.T., you probably have 14 other jobs lining up under it. We want to remove those hats. We want to take that I.T. hat off you and we want to wear it. So we're going to call Charter, we're going to call Comcast. We're going to make sure you're getting the faster speed for the cheaper price.
Ron: (13:24) We're also going to make sure you know, and if we do have to loop in, let me back up. If we do have to get you in on the call, we're not going to make you wait on the phone. We will call you when we need to get you involved. And we'll say, Hey, Mike, we got Comcast on the phone. They need to get some verification information from you. And we'll talk about the changes we're making, right? So you don't have to do that. You will not believe how much time and money people are able to save with this program because we simply make phone calls to vendors that they don't give enough attention to because there's just not enough time in their day. We can take a phone plans with our voice program or even a ISP. So internet, we can drop those prices just by making phone calls, because it's just something we don't do.
Ron: (14:05) I, I, myself, I'm a business owner. And the last thing I think about is internet. Most of the time, unless Bill says both the internet budgets getting crazy. And I say, well, we should look into that, right. But if it stays the same and it's the same, you know, in the speed's good and we're okay, we're not going to look into it. We look into it annually for all of our customers. Um, and on the other side of that is just remote desktop support, antivirus, Office 365 anti-spam, um, backup. We include a backup server. I'll talk about that in a minute. So we include a new enterprise level backup system. We put a new, uh, Cisco Meraki firewall in, we replaced your switches. We'll do any rewiring. We have to. There's no sense. There's literally no sense in putting new computers on your desks and having ancient wiring in the walls.
Ron: (14:50) We look at all of that during the onboarding process, right, is to say, okay, is this old cat five cable? Or is it cat six? Or what is the case? Do we need to rewire this? And you don't pay a dime for it. We, we, we take care of it out of the monies from the contract, right? It's not like we're, we're just paying for it out of our pocket. It's just, it's in the contract. We're going to do what it needs to do or do what we need to take care of it. And we moved down the road. Now the other side of the token is security, right? So, uh, both plans include certain flavors of security. Um, every plan we include anti-spam, anti-malware, EDR. So SentinelOne is our antivirus. Uh, we give that to all of our customers and with certain verticals or niches that we work in, we have to supply, um, compliance pieces.
Ron: (15:34) So that's where the security portion ramps up a little bit, right? So if you need audits done, you need to work with vendors. We do all that for you. Uh, we have a SOC that manages the network 24/7. Um, we work with different vendors to supply different, um, security features to you. So account lockouts, password rotations, uh, that kind of stuff, identity management software. So if you get hit for a phishing attempt and you get on the dark web, there will get a flag for and saying, Hey, this is that. But we also include end user training with our security offering. So hopefully you're not getting phished. And if you do click on the link, you get some education tied behind it. So there's really no shame in the game you just learn, right? So if we can educate you and again, um, support you, educate you and make sure you have the tools as everything evolves, the tools evolve, right?
Ron: (16:20) And that's what our, that's what our whole goal is to make sure you guys are safe and secure so we can keep what is yours. There's, there's two things that I can never give you back, and that's going to be your time, right? So I can't say, Hey, Mike, I'm sorry. You sat on the phone and wasted three hours with Comcast. We should have done it. I can't give you that time back. That's a very shitty feeling, and I can't give you your data back. So if you're a second generation business owner, or, um, you know, maybe you just got a really kick ass sales department, that's turning in leads and you're gathering all this good information. You have to protect it. You have to take care of it. And that's where, that's why we put in a backup solution. We provide it. It's not an option.
Ron: (16:57) It's the same thing with the firewall and some of the security things we do. It's not an option it's built into our price. We give it to you to make sure that you're taken care of and protected by doing the right thing right out of the gate. It's not a negotiation piece. It's nothing it's just saying, Hey, we know that your data's important to you and you know, you need to keep it safe. So we're going to back it up. Now, uh, the, the tool we use is called Veeam and we take image based backups, and we replicate them offsite there. So they're in three places. You're happy, you're healthy. Anything happens to the building. A tree falls on it. Storm comes through. You're going to be okay. We can spin you up in the cloud so you can get some remote connectivity and going down the road.
Ron: (17:33) Now, again, it's included in each plan. The other thing, um, that's included each plan is professional services. So that's going to be more of the, the niceties, the transparency. So you can get into our ticketing system. You can get into our documentation system. You can see our password rotations. You can have all that knowledge of what we do at all times. Service level agreements. So we close 98% of our tickets within eight, eight hours. So you put a ticket in, by the end of the day, it's closed. Now, I'm the one that holds it up. So if something has to be ordered or you're adding a new user, that's where it gets a little held up, right? Cause there's more moving pieces to it, but that's part of the professional services. Getting that set up, getting a move in third party audits, technology consulting. So a technology consulting is us having a conversation, doing some roadmapping, doing a QBR quarterly business review, excuse me, sorry.
Ron: (18:33) Um, so we can have a conversation and say, Hey, what Mike, what's, what's going on with the agency? What are we looking at? Are we going to acquire another agency? What's your staffing look like? Do you think you're going to be up next quarter down just to have those conversations so we can make not guesses like educated movements and keep you guys where you need to be, so you can focus on your business, right? So if you're going to say, Hey, yeah Ron, I'm going to acquire another agency in the next six months. I'm not going to put you in a 24 port switch. When I know you're going to have 48, right. 48 ports are going to be needed. We're not going to do that. We're going to keep everybody aligned and going down the road. And then let's talk about the quarterly business reviews.
Ron: (19:14) That's part of the huge part of the professional services that we offer. Um, the quarterly biz QPRs are kind of paramount and we do them on your schedule. I used to try to do them every month, but that never really works. Nobody wants to talk about it stuff every month. I know it's probably horrible. Listen to me every month, talk about it. But, uh, we meet, you know, semi-annually, annually meet with the business, sit down with key players, tell you what's going on in your network. If there's anything that's causing a lot of noise, noise for us are a lot of tickets. Uh, you know, maybe we've had to come on site to talk about a program multiple times. Maybe even if it's even an end user, that's struggling with a solution we put in or a solution that the business is using. We have conversations wrapped around that.
Ron: (19:55) Like, what does that look like? If you have Anne, who's having a ton of problems with the new Microsoft Office, we need to get out there and we need to help her. Now we don't have time for her to lose productivity while we wait for Microsoft to make some fantastic change. It's not going to happen. We need to get out there. We need to get in front of it. We need to talk to her. And then we talk about all that stuff, right? And then on top of that is the reporting. So every month from us, if you're a customer of ours, you get a report. What we did, why we did it, how long it took, um, any incidences who your top 10 requesters are, all the devices on our management. It shows you all, everything that's going on and all the things that we manage and take care of for you.
Ron: (20:33) So there is some accountability to what is going on. So if you get a report and you say, Hey, what's this, we can have a conversation, an educated conversation about it. It's not based on, uh, you know, I guess he shed, he said, she said, because you're seeing the data live. As we would see it. There's nothing to hide from us. We'd like to be very transparent with our information. So the biggest change in between the two plans is the hardware. So let's talk about that. So, um, if you're on the full plan, we're going to provide everything. Dual monitors, dock, mouse, keyboard, and a phone system. Now we'll get to the phone system in a second. But the, the devices that you use at the desk are all depending on what your, what you and us, and what I talk about right, is going to be saying, Hey, Mike, uh, you have two producers.
Ron: (21:18) And you know, we're starting to see tablets be more used in the field. And, you know, with COVID going on, we would like to see the CSRs that are in desktops now moved over to laptops because it makes sense to have some mobility, because if they're not, if you're not at home, traveling with it, you're plugged into the dock it operates just like a desktop. So it's not really a big deal when it comes to that. But that also allows you to kind of keep on the, I won't say bleeding edge, but like the leading edge of technology. So in three years, you're not looking to spend another 30 grand to replace your equipment. We're going to do it for you. And that allows us to have that conversation to say, Hey, Mike, uh, tablets are garbage. Now, now we're going back to laptops or, Hey, Ron, I saw that we were at a conference and this guy had a nice Two and One I'd like to look at that. Perfect. Let's do that. And again, since we're based on employees, the only time the cost for us goes up or down out of that flat rate is if you hire or unfortunately fire, or let go for any reason. So you say, Hey, Ron, we're letting Anne go. She's great. But we just had to make some cuts. We pull the seat off the contract in a way we go, right? So it's all in the name and the vein of being easy to work with, allowing everybody to be productive and to, to, to serve your customers, just like we want to serve you. You guys want to serve your customers. And that's super important to what we do. We are a customer service based organization that happens to work in technology. You won't see our C-SAT probably under 99% every month because we put a tremendous care into what we do every day.
Ron: (22:56) And we, you know, I fully a hundred percent believe that staff that, uh, Madison has assembled. And, uh, we all worked really hard to train and to get there has been fantastic. And they understand that you don't, um, you won't find a better, um, I.T. company in Michigan right now. I don't think, and I can say that because I work here, but, um, my feeling is, and never losing a customer for any service based reasons. I can stand by that. So it's been fantastic we're super happy and fortunate to be in the place we are in right now in 2020, we've came so far by making, you know, the changes we've made. We've grown from, you know, obviously zero customers to almost a hundred customers. We manage about 3,600 devices, about two or 3,600 people, about 2000 devices we're backing up almost 90 terabytes a night, uh, just of data alone.
Ron: (23:50) And again, with our, with the backup disaster recovery, I don't, I, I may have skipped over that, but we, we back it up, we replicate it, we pull it to the cloud. We are protecting your data to the nines all the time, because it's super important. Um, and we, we do a lot, uh, the phone systems, I don't know, I've talked so much for the last 25 minutes. I don't even know if we talked about the phone system. So what the full plan we provide you with a fully featured, um, hosted VoIP system, right? It's not a cost to you. We give it to you in the full seats and it saves you money. You take that phone bill, you make it, you know, three, $400 down to 30, $40 a month. And you're getting a feature rich phone system, all the fixings are in it.
Ron: (24:28) So again, it's always about value. It's always bringing something new to the table. It's always providing customer service, providing products, making sure that the products are right, having feedback sessions. Um, we, we are super into what we do and we're super into our customers. We're super into our prospects. Uh, we just wanna make sure that we're doing the right thing by everybody all the time. So it's, it's been a fantastic journey. Um, I could talk about it for hours. I think 25 minutes is enough. I'm sure people might be sleeping by now, but I appreciate you guys listening. Um, and if you ever need anything, have any questions, want to learn more? Don't hesitate to reach out I'm on LinkedIn. Um, you can probably find my email all over Spotify and all this other fun stuff, but reach out to us. We're all here. We're here to help. And, uh, yeah, we appreciate it. One year podcast anniversary. It's been fantastic here's to another year, hopefully. Um, and if you guys ever want to see any different topics or maybe have more specific things you want to listen to, or hear me ramble about, don't be, don't be afraid to reach out we're here. Thanks guys. Take it easy.
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