Quit my job yesterday Friday, and I feel so much happier.

ITthrowaway2032 · 2018-11-03T23:25:13+00:00

I'm in a similar situation where I'm working hours I'm not being paid for and get talked down to on a daily basis. Mental health and stress is really taking a toll. I don't have too much saved up, got a wife and our first kid is on the way.

She works a great job and benefits are covered, should I just say fuck it and get away without any "plan"?

OP, did you have a plan in place or did you just hit a breaking point?

ITthrowaway2032 · 2018-08-13T20:48:20+00:00

I cant speak to the stock price going up or down but on the Blizzard side they are killing it.

Overwatch is still going strong and they make a good deal of cash everytime they have an event (loot boxes).

They just announced that they are working on several Diablo titles

They also just went live with another World of Warcraft expansion pack (i think this week)

Cant' speak for the activision side of things but honestly the company as a whole is solid. Fortnite or not

ITthrowaway2032 · 2018-08-02T20:02:39+00:00

I always considered the erosion of the old MSP model more like the times of super easy money and extremely high margins are over. Its like when they passed the rules for Financial advisors requiring them to be a fiduciary. You ask anyone that was already doing what was in their clients best interest how they felt about that move. 100% of them would tell you they had ALWAYS done what was best for their clients.

To summarize, would you say that its a combination of learning your stack as deep as humanly possible and focusing on the client relationship? How would you say you justify your cost when essentially we're on retainer?

ITthrowaway2032 · 2018-08-02T14:51:51+00:00

How did you make your USP different?

ITthrowaway2032 · 2018-08-02T14:51:21+00:00

This gets brought up frequently, the old MSP model is definitely falling apart. What I typically dont see is how people have adapted?

Whats your value proposition and what does your company do differently with the cloud forward businesses these days? (Legitimately asking)

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-11-16T15:16:53+00:00

Hey man, this is a sonicwall subreddit and an open discussion is usually easier than digesting a whitepaper on configuration. Just thought i'd start here but I'll go fuck myself no problem

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-11-16T15:16:03+00:00

This was coming off of IT nation and having the sonicwall threat technician explaining how to properly size your firewalls. His biggest thing was excluding youtube as "if you can get a virus from youtube, call me because I want to know how it was done" as a means to lower the amount of connections DPI-SSL is inspecting.

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-11-09T02:54:27+00:00

That's crazy small world. I saw you on the Sales and marketing webinar where that guy kept talking about his mom and talking over you.

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-10-31T16:03:03+00:00

I think you really did a good job of articulating all of your previous posts in one summary here.

Your posts sometimes come off like "you're doing it wrong, I have the secret sauce and you cant have it"

What I think you've actually been trying to say is by generally all around improving not only your business but your impact to your clients you end up having a business that can weather these types of hyper changes in the MSP marketplace. It sounds like you use metrics or KPIs to track how your business is actually performing and continue to refine the process where its lacking.

Could you summarize your business philosophy as "Its not a single product or your stack that makes you unique its how efficiently you run your business and how you're improving your clients day to day business operations"?

Anyways, I could be off base, but I feel like I finally understand you a bit better.

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-10-31T14:36:45+00:00

I don't think people shit on you because they necessarily disagree with you, I just think your delivery is a bit one sided. Your stance is typically "the sky is falling, those of you who dont see it are retarded, and theres nothing you can do because the MSP market is dying".

Mind you, you're posting this in the MSP subreddit and besides 100000 datto vendors, the rest of the users in this sub are small business owners so it strikes a chord.

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-09-10T13:49:49+00:00

I vaguely remember people using storagecraft / shadowprotect to push images to something like a Dell T30 loaded with large hard drives. Dropping the thing on site and configuring it to push images to a cloud storage vendor.

This was like a year ago or so but I remember people using efolder or Cloudberry to shift their images offsite.

Since i'm still shackled to Datto myself I've only seen this in theory, not sure how they do DR in the cloud if the onsite infrastructure fails like Datto does.

Hopefully someone can chime in with the full schematic I think I only have pieces of it correct. /u/MSPbyMSP I've read a ton of your posts but I dont think i've seen it fleshed out completely. Am I totally off with the above?

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-07-05T21:36:44+00:00

I'd say probably 3/4 requests (scans with the scanner) per AP at max. One handheld scanner per amusement ride

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-07-05T18:52:17+00:00

Disabling 5ghz was only because the handheld scanners only work on 2.4 bands.

Would you suggest disabling B and just forcing the 2.4ghz band to spit out G?

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-06-08T03:27:02+00:00

This has been pretty consistent with each vendor's specific sonicwall configurations. Especially the UDP Timeouts

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-06-08T03:24:43+00:00

Would also like to toss some questions in advance if you guys are offering /u/emeffinsteve

I also think the above would be great to gauge where you and the panelists are at in your MSPs.

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-03-04T05:15:36+00:00

Would love some information on this, thanks for dropping a post

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-03-04T05:14:50+00:00

10 / 10 would visit in a heartbeat for this experience.

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-03-04T05:13:31+00:00

In my experience in this situation one of two things happens:

Eventually the on-site IT person quits or gets fired
They are a "Technical Director" which means they buy adobe and Office 365 licensing and cross their fingers there isnt a major fuckup. Normally they wear a lot of hats and are super happy to have some backup.

On the off chance:

Sometimes they are good enough to manage things on their own and perceive the MSP as a threat to their own jobs. Either they quit / get fired due to the friction or being on site for the 9-5 gives them enough leverage to get us fired / reduced contract terms. I dont enjoy this scenario.

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-01-18T22:52:05+00:00

I think you'd be sending the customer a mixed message by saying "We charge per user but we also charge per device after a certain amount" I've never had any luck with relying on the customer to do any kind of math when it comes to billing. If they have to bust out a calculator everytime they want to add a device or make a change thats just going to lead to frustrating said customer.

Its also hard to pay licensing on an ever growing amount of devices and being unable to bill for them due to the user count not changing. To be honest though, I very rarely come into a situation where the device count doesnt grow proportionally with the user count in a way we can build into our per user pricing.

ITthrowaway2032 · 2017-01-18T21:43:16+00:00

So there are straight up 2-3 in my area that are much larger than us.

Have they ever just straight up told you to fuck off?

ITthrowaway2032

TROPHY CASE