Positive Effects of Quality I.T. at Work

About this episode

DECEMBER 6, 2019

Is Greg from Accounting handling your I.T. problems? What about your neighbor's son who is "pretty good with computers?" There are many different ways companies handle I.T., but what's really the best option? In this episode of the GEEK FREAKS PODCAST, Ron, Madison, and Thomas share their stories and perspectives on working in and around all the different types of I.T. environments.

MEET THE GEEK FREAKS

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!

Madison Bronkan

EMPLOYEE SUCCESS MANAGER

10+ Years in Food Service (including many years in Management), 3 Years in HR.
2 Bachelor’s Degrees (BBA, BA), SHRM/KHRMA Member.
Loves all aspects of her job: staffing, employee relations, performance management, benefits administration, process improvement, and most recently added—marketing. But her favorite part is training and development because she loves seeing individuals and the company as a whole become the best it can be and continue to grow.
Loves exploring and trying new things – traveling, kayaking and paddle boarding, food, beer, bourbon…wherever life takes her. Doing the same thing over and over again bores her. She also really enjoys hanging out with her friends, husband, and dogs.

THOMAS DARRINGTON

SERVICE TECH LEAD

Has been working in I.T. professionally for 5 years.
Holds an Associates of Science in Information Technology from Ivy Tech.
Also has held certifications in A+, Network+, ItGlue, 3CX, and Windows System Administration.
When he's not working or learning about technology, he likes to spend time with his family and his English bulldog Bob.

VIEW TRANSCRIPT >

Ron: (00:00) Welcome to the Geek Freaks Podcast. Before we get started, make sure to hit the subscribe button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Breaker, Castbox, Stitcher, and all other platforms you may be tuning in from.

Music: (00:15) [Intro music]

Ron: (00:22) So how does technology positively affect work? Right. Essentially is what I'm asking.

Madison: (00:30) For your business.

(00:31) Or, yeah, we're going to go back to inventory, baby. Always inventory, always be inventory-ing.

Thomas: (00:37) Choking on water. Give me a minute.

All: (00:38) [Pause]

Thomas: (00:44) No, you're good keep going.

Ron: (00:46) If he falls out of the chair, we'll stop.

Madison: (00:48) Okay. I think to figure out how businesses are positively affected by technology, first we have to talk about the different ways that businesses handle their I.T. Okay. So there's like a couple of different categories I can think of in marketing here. We always like to, uh, to throw Greg from accounting under the bus.

Ron: (01:13) He's a nice guy. He never did anything to anybody.

Thomas: (01:15) So I'm going to interject real quick.

Madison: (01:18) Okay.

Thomas: (01:18) I've done almost every one of these situations as an I.T. person. So I got real excited about this topic.

Madison: (01:25) I have worked, I've worked in companies where pretty much, yeah, all of these, all of these, all of these are a thing. So I guess I could just read off the, the categories and then we can go back and talk about them. Okay. So number one, no one handles the I.T. Number two, Greg from accounting is pretty good with computers. Number three, there is one in house I.T. professional. Number four, there's an in house I.T. Department and then number five is outsourced I.T. So something like an MSP, something like Omega Computer Services. Okay. So why, why is it bad if no one handles your I.T.?

Ron: (02:16) Cause it's going to stop working and it's not, it's going to be expensive. Like when I go in to do sales and people are like, well we handle it all. They have, they've, they've committed a lot of bad sins in our industry, right? So they've, they've went to Best Buy and bought the $600 computer and they wonder why it's broke all the time. Or then they find somebody that's like my kids, nephews neighbor's really good at I.T. And he did it, set it up this way and it's set up completely wrong. So then that kind of feeds into the other one, like Greg from accounting is doing it right. And that's not necessarily his primary job. So now you're looking at somebody that says, okay, well my primary job is accounting and now I'm fixing I.T. Stuff. So now I'm not concentrating on my, my, my job, I'm doing all this other weird stuff that I really don't know what I'm doing, but I know enough that I can get by. And then you look at, so if you know Greg in accounting's handling your, your I.T., and let's say you are an accounting company who's worried about the compliance of the company, right? So now Greg from accounting that barely knows tech is now trying to figure out the compliancies wrapped around, you know, the information that is held onsite. So it's like they, they do, they try and they try, but they, they, they can't do it.

Madison: (03:19) Right.

Thomas: (03:19) Because they're an accountant.

Ron: (03:21) Not even that. I mean you can learn like you could learn a lot [inaudible] yeah, this is not your primary task. You really don't know what you're doing.

Thomas: (03:28) Join to become I.T. You join to become an account.

Ron: (03:31) Or they buy a $600 computer from Best Buy that's home and then they can't get it on the domain and then they wonder why and then they got to spend another hundred dollars you know, you're tripping over nickel to save a dollar or whatever the saying is, triple over dollar, save a nickel, whatever the case is. They don't know what they're doing to the depths that they should be running a business on it.

Madison: (03:49) And then other employees to go back to Greg, other employees have an issue with their computer and they don't know who to who to go to because they're like, well, last time Greg tried to fix it, he didn't and it was a complete show and now...

Thomas: (04:06) Greg gets thrown under the bus because he was just trying to help out and be a cool dude and now everybody's like Greg jacked up my computer.

Ron: (04:12) Think about that. Think about how that works for us. You know what I mean? Everybody, you know, granted it's different for us because we have such a positive experience. But if you, if, and this is why we don't do things a certain ways, some other companies do is, but it's like if you touch a computer at one time, whatever that issue is, you own it. Failure or success. You own it. Right? So we're actually setting Greg up for failure no matter what. Right? Because something isn't gonna. I mean, we've all seen it and we're like, Oh, I can't get this to work. Oh, it worked. One time. Greg fixed it. He's a magician. Oh God. Greg gets back and you didn't do it. I hate you Greg.

Thomas: (04:45) And it's your fault these haven't been processed and yeah yeah yeah.

Ron: (04:48) It's tough. But I think it's, and then you go to like, you take it another step forward. So Greg's out of the picture and now you have a one person I.T. Shop. So then you have these trunk slammer for a better lack of terms. Like, so we spend [inaudible] we'll get back to that. Uh, one person I.T. shop the biggest disadvantages, he goes on vacation, he gets hit by a bus. Unfortunately something happens to him. Then what happens to your business?

Thomas: (05:12) Right.

Ron: (05:13) Nothing.

Madison: (05:14) Yeah.

Ron: (05:15) You're screwed. You know your domain...

Thomas: (05:17) You have the greatest documentation all the time because otherwise you're in trouble.

Ron: (05:19) And we all know that that's not the case for much of anybody. Right?

Madison: (05:23) It's all in his head.

Ron: (05:24) You gotta get that IT Glue. But like the one up to you, it's, it's tough. It's, I don't know, free add. Sorry.

Madison: (05:32) Feel free to sponsor, just kidding.

Ron: (05:34) But like you don't, you don't understand like, and you won't know until it happens. You always take it for granted. Like for a long time I did my mom's companies I.T. by myself. I didn't know. I just knew the password. You don't think about it. It never becomes a thing until it's a thing. So then in, in house I.T. department, that's tough because it's expensive. Real expensive.

Madison: (05:56) I think that big companies do that really well. Um, but I think you have to be a decent size company for it to be worth, worth your investment in quite a few quality I.T. Individuals.

Ron: (06:12) Oh yeah, yeah.

Thomas: (06:14) No, absolutely.

Ron: (06:15) So if you're not, and you have that one person, that runs, you have that one SYS admin that runs your network. What happens when he goes on vacation? What happens? You're now you're calling him, cause I did it for a long time. It was the only I.T. Person for for awhile and it was incredibly hard for me to do anything. I got all the after hours, I got all the vacation calls, I got everything no matter what. I was always on call. But for a complete in house department, yeah it's, it's tough.

Thomas: (06:38) And if you have to like a whole team, it's just a huge expense cause you have to pay for, you know, benefits and insurance and salaries and all that stuff for you know, four or five individuals to run all your stuff.

Ron: (06:51) And it's expensive. Yeah. And then on top of that you have the, the equipment spend, you have the networking spend, you ever tool spend. You have all the spend that is hitting your budget inside of a, an in a house, you know, in house.

Thomas: (07:03) And based off the previous podcast with a high turnover rate, you have guys going out and coming in and you've got to retrain them and spend all that money and time for that.

Madison: (07:12) That's true.

Thomas: (07:12) You know.

Ron: (07:13) I don't know how much it is to spend. I know you probably know what it is, but to train somebody is expensive as heck, I don't know what the number is. I know there's some number you can type...

Thomas: (07:20) 51 days or something like that to get somebody fully trained back up to...

Madison: (07:25) No, that's just a...that's just to fill an I.T. Position. It's 51 on an average of 51 days. Yeah, that's just to fill the position. Not even...

Thomas: (07:34) Not even to give them not even including training and such. Okay. I misunderstood that number.

Madison: (07:38) Yeah, so you're already a couple of months, couple months behind and then yeah, it costs, I can't remember exactly, but it's like equivalent of their salary to get them trained.

Ron: (07:49) And I think to even take that even one step further, I think it's not just I.T. Jobs that take that long to fill.

Thomas: (07:53) Right.

(07:54) Think about some of our small businesses that are looking for CSRs or anything. It's incredibly hard.

Thomas: (07:59) Right.

Ron: (08:00) And then once you get them, you have to train them and spend the money to do that. And God forbid they don't work out.

Madison: (08:06) Yeah.

(08:07) Because now you're another 60 days in. Yeah. Jeepers creepers. And I think it goes back to training though too. Like we've been, I know since you've been here, we've been trying to make our training more streamlined and simplified, right. So that it's just do your thing, do your thing. So it's less time suck for everybody else.

Madison: (08:25) So, right. So it can be repeatable.

Ron: (08:27) Yeah. But it goes back to that last podcast of like, turnover happens especially in I.T. Um, and...

Madison: (08:33) So then that last one outsourced I.T. So that's, that's what we do. So I mean, yeah, we can toot our own toot our own horn and whatnot. Um, but there are a lot of reasons why it benefits, uh, a business owner, a small and small and medium sized business owner.

Ron: (08:59) And it's, I can only speak to our existence and like our experience, but I know that there's a lot of MSPs and a lot of outsourced I.T. companies that pop up and they're like, I can do that. Like I've lost deals to people that like much lesser value and that's fine, but the end of the day we spend probably $5,000 a month just on tools for you guys to use.

Thomas: (09:21) Right.

Ron: (09:22) They're not making that type of an investment for tools to even have the ability to do their job on that high of a level. So it's kinda tough because you have to be able to juggle the tools, the tickets, and there's not a lot of companies that can do that successfully. So I think if you're, if somebody is going to outsource to a company, they should ask those questions, the maturity of the company, because that becomes a thing at some point.

Thomas: (09:41) Right. The nice thing about, I don't know, the thing that I like about MSP is, is that, um, it can be like a partnership. So instead of them being your employees, they're invested in you. Yeah. So, um, even if you have onsite I.T, you know, I've worked for companies that had onsite it and then we also worked with MSPs to make sure that they, they just monitored our systems and made sure that everything was online and functioning and um, consistent with the standards we had. So that freed us up to do other stuff. So, um, yeah..

Ron: (10:19) The cost is another positive too, right? I mean it's first for a business owner, it's half the cost, half the price, pretty much less than that. I mean some are or average deal sizes. I don't know off the top of my head, but it's not expensive to have a fully outsourced I.T. company with, there's 19 of us. Uh, if Thomas gets hit by a bus, God forbid, you know, we still have all the information.

Thomas: (10:43) You guys are still good to go. That's fine.

Madison: (10:46) They have 19 people supporting their systems, also maybe like 10 people.

Ron: (10:55) And I think it's incredibly, that's an incredibly powerful thing. Like I use it a lot in the sales cycle because people underestimate like really how much manpower that is if something goes wrong. So think about if something does hit the fan, there's 10 11 of us ready to jump in the fire and do what we have to do to make sure it's right where if you do have inhouse, they're more than happy to do that. But if you don't have a complimentary package of like an MSP or somebody helping you or even a VAR, it can be very daunting. Think about like, uh, even 25 people get CryptoLocker or ransomware. That's a hell of a cleanup effort. That's a hell of a situation that throw somebody in. And if they're by themselves, it's very overwhelming. But if you have the support of a outsource company or supportive of a VAR or even a partner that you can lean on that helps out a bunch.

Madison: (11:41) Well and go back to the cost of like software we use on a regular basis, that business may not, they may not have been able to afford like SentinelOne, something of that nature that could have, um, like protected from ransomware or whatever it is. And then you're stuck kind of planning what's next in the midst of a crisis.

Ron: (12:07) Well and you go back to Bob and accounting or was his name Greg from accounting, like he doesn't know how to set up a computer appropriately so everybody has admin rights because it's the easiest form to do. They probably have weak passwords. I mean there's a lot of things that as you kind of grow and scope out your business, it may work well when there's two to three employees, but as you grow, the needs of the business changed dramatically and you have to figure out what that means. What type of partnership is that? Is that, you know, development used to be always big in house for these larger companies and now that's all outsource because it's not cost effective to have inside.

Thomas: (12:39) Right.

Ron: (12:39) It's no different. It's just how do we figure out what you need when you need it is like the biggest thing you can do. But people tend to overspend. Think about when we do audits for new customers through their ISP and like charter and stuff. They've never touched that. Right now, this is the first time we're calling and saying, Hey, charter free ads, Hey, ISP guy. How do we, you know, how can we get this bill cheaper, the speed faster? Like, Oh yeah, we got a plan going on, blah, blah blah, save you 50 bucks a month. And it's simply because nobody's had the time or really cared about it. They could have saved a couple thousands of dollars.

Thomas: (13:13) Right.

Ron: (13:14) But that's also where the a partnership or a VAR or an MSP or whatever comes into play for whatever your company needs to do.

Thomas: (13:22) Plus we also make sure that, you know, you get the right thing.

Ron: (13:25) Yeah.

Thomas: (13:25) Like you're not just like, Oh, those numbers sound good. Like Mbps. Yeah, sure. Like no we actually know and we can make sure that based off of the resources that you need and the programs that you use, that you're going to get, you know, the speed you need and et cetera.

(13:42) And I think in this example, the benefit of it too, like to even think past the business owner seat, think past my seat to the employee seat, standardization, someone to talk to. That's not Greg. So now you don't have this animosity between you and Greg and accounting. And an entire team. The support relationships with everybody and understanding I guess would probably be the best or you know, with that relationship and understanding and trust that has to be developed over time. But it does develop, I mean a lot of people that I've talked to are scared to outsource their I.T. if they're in house and now they're coming to us. Well we don't, we don't know you guys. It's, we're pretty easy to get along with. We want as your stuff to work and make sure you're happy. Yeah. And I think that goes back to the culture. You know, they can look at our website and see what we're doing and Facebook and Twitter and all that other fun stuff. And I think that does help it to go back a couple podcasts. I think that now that we're talking about it does ease some of this anxiety, I was going to say tension?

Madison: (14:35) No, I, I think so. Um, and I also talked to friends who work at maybe like larger organizations who do have in house I.T. departments. Um, which is, that's great. That's fine. They can handle a lot. But, um, they complain that sometimes things take like a week for something to be resolved because it's just only so many people in that I.T. department, whereas two people serving a thousand. Yeah. Um, so it's like, yeah, I had this issue and I waited a week for it to be resolved. Meanwhile, the company's just, I mean, losing efficiency and, and productivity out of that one employee.

Thomas: (15:18) Right.

Ron: (15:19) And it's, I think like outsourcing your, I.T. is kind of the only out of the options we talked about is kind of the only option where you get to see your ROI in some form or fashion. Because you got Greg that does two jobs now. So he's getting paid to be an accountant, but yet he's working in the tech rooms and I.T, and it's not really his primary task. You got nobody doing it. Right. So now all the companies losing everything because now they can't work. And that situation, if the company goes down, who's, who's responsible. Yeah. But nobody who me, I guess I'd be like ohh...

Speaker 3: (15:50) Think of ransomware in that scenario there's no backup. There's nothing.

Ron: (15:54) Yeah. And then the one house person, if you're outnumbered, you're out numbered. You have to be able to prioritize and attack. You can't just be like, oh I'm outnumbered number because that's what I like to go back to your example. That's what happens. They are outnumbered and they don't know how to prioritize or they're just too overwhelmed with the amount of tickets that they have that it does take six weeks to get back to something that's like, um, you know, like a user login. I know for some of our local businesses that are large, that takes two weeks to get a login. Yeah. I mean, to think that we close, we're out numbered 36 to 3,600 to seven people, five people in our service desk room and we're closing things within five hours.

Madison: (16:32) Yeah. But think about that one I.T. professional, they only have so much knowledge in their heads, so much knowledge that they can grab from a, from a knowledge base or Google or whatever. Um, we have a lot of really smart individuals in our service desk and there's still problems that they find that they don't know the answer to. And what do they do? They ask someone else within the company like, Hey, have you checked this database? I saw these answers here. Um, what, like further things would you try if you were working on this? And then oftentimes there's a, there's an answer given back and some collaboration there. So I don't know that it just takes the brainpower of maybe a couple people to work on one, one issue.

Thomas: (17:23) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. We have, we have a wider resource to work with, um, you know, with our projects department and our onsite team and you know, even with, again, you know, shout out to marketing where we have to occasionally work with them to get to get, you know, articles published and designed in the right way so that it's more user friendly because we're just like, here's a bunch of tech mumbo jumbo. And they're like, Oh, let's clean that up for [long pause]we ran out of video.

Ron: (17:53) Batteries dead, Ooh, not on video. Um, lastly though, but like what if you had to look at it as an overarching theme, what is, what are the benefits and the positives that a company that's using an outsourced I.T. company like us? What are the, what do they get? I mean, we named it a ton of them, so I guess we could recap. You save money, you get better customer service, uh...

Madison: (18:16) More timely solutions, timely solutions.

Thomas: (18:18) Wider resources.

Ron: (18:20) What'd you say?

Thomas: (18:21) Wider resources.

Ron: (18:25) A broader range of, uh, the ability to do more things within your business, right? So now you can do things, now you can worry about your business. Uh, the ability to concentrate and have those employees concentrate, having their time back giving, Greg his job back to say just worry about accounting brother. We'll do the rest. I think there's a lot.

Madison: (18:46) Better, more efficient like software and hardware where they may...

Ron: (18:50) Think about the hardware.

(18:51) Not buy that firewall from...

Ron: (18:55) Best Buy. That's fine. Yeah. Big box store, blue and yellow. But like people do that and they run their entire business on a $99 router from the big box store and they think it's great and it's fine, and then something happens. They're like, Oh, I don't know why this happened. And we go in and say, well, it's because you have this firewall that nobody uses anymore. Nobody wants, or whatever the case is and the it's hackable or whatever the case is. That just screwed me up then my train of thought. But it's, you got to spend the money to get the protections. And even with like our plans, you don't have to spend the money. Right. We're MSPs are set up to be as cost effective as possible. Most of them most are. We are, some of our competitors are not, but most are.

Thomas: (19:39) You know, we do our best to make sure people are getting what they need.

Madison: (19:43) So you don't have the like 50 bills of all the software or whatever that you're buying as well as, Oh, I don't even know. Phone systems, all of that. You just have the one, the one bill.

Thomas: (19:58) Right.

Ron: (19:58) Well with us you do. Yeah. So you have the single point of billing with us. But think about even from a budgeting aspect, right? So we're set up differently, so we're all, you can eat where some, some companies aren't, but it's still pretty similar is that now you say, okay, it's thousand dollars a month, that's all you're paying. So now you have this relationship that's built on trust and you know, knowing that we're going to do the right thing or whoever's gonna do the right thing. It's not a, it's not a time and material thing. It's not a prey and wolf situation from [inaudible] situation. It's very different. And then if you have on in house I.T. team and something happens, how much you're paying an overtime, how much are you paying to get that remedied a lot of money.

Thomas: (20:38) So plus they gotta fight against budget constraints and all this stuff with uh, purchasing equipment or when they're trying to push new equipment to make their job easier, they have to calculate all these different licenses for everything.

Ron: (20:50) And, and it's, it's crazy to like want to have that conversation when we're closing the deal and they're like, Oh yeah, it's, well I don't understand why the cost is so high. There's laptops are 600 bucks. I was like, no, the laptops and the equipment you get are like $2,000 a piece. Right. Because we have to make them last as long as possible in three years. And they still don't grasp that because they're still used to buying, you know, I can open an office for $3,000 with these two, $200 laptops that break that I got on Black Friday. But they'll be broken in a year. Right. They'll rebuy them. So there's a lot of budgeting issues and constraints and you know, budgeting, black holes, I guess I would call it where you're just kind of like throwing money away. Printers, people. I talked to a prospect that was buying $200 printers every couple of months. I was like, just buy one.

Thomas: (21:33) Yeah, that happens a lot actually.

Ron: (21:35) That's a little bit of money.

Madison: (21:37) My dad does that. He buys a new printer and if he needs ink, he just buys another new printer instead of buying ink.

Ron: (21:44) It's more cost effective.

Thomas: (21:45) Does your dad need an MSP?

Madison: (21:48) Shout out dad.

Ron: (21:49) Shout out daddio. Oh yeah. We can give your dad a printer. No, you can have the one in the hallway that doesn't print cause it's out of ink right now. That's on me. It's on me. I'm going to buy a new printer. We do need that one. But uh, anyway, that was positive, positive November. No negative, no negativity. November, um, positive November. I like to call it myself cause it was positive and it was upbeat and we, we had good laughs and we had a good time. Madison shut down like a robot halfway through, but she rebooted. We got her back on track. Yeah, we're good. Yeah. All right. Cue the outro.

Music: (22:33) [Outro music]