Megan Killion walks through a managed IT services process that starts with installing a network probe to inventory devices, then generates reports and dashboards so clients can see their total IT spend and renegotiate vendor contracts to lower costs.
You know, my feeling is I don't like to waste people's time, right? Yeah. It's not in our model to come in there and just fix it because we don't— do not know your network. What we could possibly do is come in there and help you through this or help you with your current IT provider and be your Jiminy Cricket, you know, sitting on your shoulder, being your conscience. But What you're in now is exactly what we're trying to avoid. Nobody likes crisis. Nobody wins in crisis because everybody's in panic mode. And, and now whether it's us or whether it's another vendor, you're bringing in another vendor into a crisis mode and they too don't know your network. So what happens first is you have to unpeel it and you don't really know really the environment that you're in. We initiate conversations with prospects and just say, before things get crazy, what I would suggest is you bring us in and we, and we just do an audit when you're in safe mode on your network and on your current vendors and see if you're paying fair market value prices for fair market value services. We come in where the administrator has time on their hands and where we can do it in a planned event. On the network side, it's pretty simple. We would send in our probe, we would install our agent on their server, and then we let our probe analyze the network for at least a week. And the probe's got— it's multi-layered, right? So the probe, first what we do is, you know, if we send it in just to keep really light on the network, and it will just pretty much just give us an inventory list of everything that has an IP address on it, right? A lot of clients don't want us to get too, too deep into their network, but I have a need with our clients whereby I have all of these reports that are available to me, but they're a little bit confusing when I lay them all out to my client, right? This guy that we're talking to, he's actually— we've known him for 7 years. He's with one of our other accounts, and that's what he does is he pulls together all the different reporting so I could have a dashboard that's specific to me. And you could have a dashboard that's specific to you. To the IT person, this is gold. This— we send this out every month to the internal IT, to the internal IT person and the administrator if they don't have it. We look and we look at your network and we say, this is what you have, these are your holes, this is what we suggest on the network side. And then on the cost side, Is we say everything that is IT related, give us a copy of that invoice. And what we'll do is we'll compile all of that data and we'll put it in a report to let you know what your total IT budget is per month. A lot of people don't know that. They just think, okay, yeah, I use Managed services group, my IT budget is $1,000 a month. What we have found, I, I'll have to run the exact numbers, but I would have— I put, if I were to guess, at least 90% of our opportunities, a year after that we have provisioned them and after we've gone in and looked at that cost analysis, we've been able to help them renegotiate with their current vendors and bring down their total IT spend, and it justifies our monthly IT fee. And that ultimately is the proof in the pudding.
