I’ve long held a dream of running my own company, and that dream became a reality last year with the start of my consulting company. For the first year it has basically been a sole proprietorship, with me wearing every hat that the company needed to get the job done. The past couple months I’ve [...]
I work hard. I work a lot. Typically when I have some down time I don’t spend much time, if any, working on my own personal life, and trimming fat or streamlining my processes at home. I do enough of that on a daily basis with my business that I typically spend a lot of [...]
I have long been a proponent of removing tape as a primary backup medium, with the exception of long term offsite archival storage, and this week has clearly reminded me why I no longer recommend tape backups for my clients.
The scenario that has reminded me why is as follows:
13 DLT-IV tapes that are an archive [...]
I’m planning on rolling out our first ever rate increase to our legacy clients that will be going into effect the first of July. This is going to affect a lot of long term clients I’ve worked with for years, but weren’t the right fit for the managed services focus that I currently provide to [...]
The comments section has been moved over to the Intense Debate platform. I caught wind of this over at Alexander Muse’s Texas Startup Blog. Very nice tool which could greatly improve the blog comment landscape if widely adopted. It’ll be interesting as it will allow me to follow people that interest me and see what [...]
Not that long ago I upgraded my primary home workstation with some larger hard drives, effectively doubling the internal storage capacity of my machine. I ordered the drives through Dell (Yes, I know, probably my first mistake), mostly because they were on sale, I had a coupon for an additional amount off, and well it [...]
When the very near term inclusion of an outsourced company assisting with our onsite services to our clients became a reality, I very seriously began to look at various collaboration resources. I did not travel the popular Basecamp route here; instead I’m using a product called Central Desktop. Central Desktop very easily edges out the [...]
Something I’ve come to grips with recently is that my quoting process for clients is horrible. I know my products, I know what I deliver, but the process is painful and tedious. Currently I’m using a combination of PDFs, Word Documents and Excel Sheets to create a cohesive quote for services to our clients. Frankly, [...]
There should be a provision in every Managed Service Providers contract with their clients to perform an authorized scan and probe of their client’s networks at least once a quarter. Granted, as a highly professional and efficient MSP, there should never be any holes to exploit, but it is always nice to show your client [...]