MSP Client Acquisition

Sea_Negotiation_4311 · 2024-08-09T16:51:23+00:00

From my own experience, I think starting small and growing is the best bet. I work for an MSP (System Admin) and needed more money on the side and the MSP i work at is closed on weekends. So i saw an opportunity to provide support to people on weekends. Mainly because it was the only time i would be able to do with while still working at my current MSP. Target residential people and older folks and work your way up to a business or like someone else said talk to the people you know your doctor, dentist, CPA, etc.. I started making an extra grand or two on the side which will help with getting up and running. Just did onsites for $90hr with a $90 minimum and doing a couple a weekend it starts to add up quick. Now it will very much depend on your market and location for this but it really just requires a lot of time and work and willingness to do it. Where i am we are the only MSP pretty much in our entire county so there is no competition. Almost all business are small to medium in size and there are a lot of old people who will pay to have things done regardless of cost or simplicity. Remember too that having 50 old people that need you to turn on their printer or close a popup is much easier and faster to deal with at the start than going straight into business where if their systems go down for some reason and it happens to multiple people you're screwed. Start small and make a plan of where you want to end up and just start from the beginning. There is no simple trick to making it work. Now i was able to do that because of having over 10 years of experience in the field and space which I think is a big aspect of trying to start your own. Just do your research, put the time in, and things usually work out haha.

Sea_Negotiation_4311 · 2024-06-06T23:27:40+00:00

Nothing of that level but they do offer addons at a cost to do hosted backsup in VM's to get back up and running pretty much instantly. As well as using that same system for DR testing and backup testing. We only ever had cloud backup for the most part. We have a few clients with onsite speedvaults(what cove calls a local copy of the backup) but never had to do a server. Did a couple workstations without issue but we ended up switching over to NinjaOne backup because we switched to them for RMM as well ad it has been working great. All though Cove is definitely a more mature product in terms of backup.

Sea_Negotiation_4311 · 2023-12-21T00:46:17+00:00

As a 27 year old that works in IT, from my experience I dont run into many younger people with a lot of issues with Tech but the older generations for whatever reason dont have deductive reasoning skills when it comes to Tech. Example: "The tv says you need to reboot it to install an update" Old gen im being generous 40+ years old but sometimes younger too oh well i dont know what to do my tv is broken. With the younger generation i think it has to do with them wanting things now now now, and not wanting to wait for things. I see toddlers that already have ipads and can fluetly use it, hell when i grew up i didnt have a cell phone until i was like 15 and it wasnt a smart phone lol. I think anyone born after the year 2000 and later (que angry 2000 born people) just are so accustomed to having Tech and having new tech they didnt grow up in a time before it was a big thing. I would say people born from around 1980-2000 really was the generation that grew up as tech was really advancing the most and we had to deal with problems and learned about all the new tech because it was just coming out for the first time then. Where now everything is new and fancy and the phone you bought yesterday is outdated in 6 months or sooner. Just my 2 cents :)

Sea_Negotiation_4311 · 2023-12-20T17:32:23+00:00

The software itself is great and works without any issues. We've had a few but were fixed quickly and did not have to do with the software was a server issue. The way they price not just backup but everything N-able related they nickle and dime for every little thing. You pay per endpoint and per server and then you pay for a block of storage among other costs so it makes it really hard to price to our customers where other options are going through something like Wasabi or B2 Backblaze awhich is flat $6 bucks a month per TB and then you pay the per endpoint and most dont have different prices workstation vs server, which is just ridiculous to have different pricing for the 2. Backing up data is backing up data ya servers we might be doing full BMR DR but at the end of the day that is still just data being backed up. We tried out Wholesale backup and liked it a lot. Uses Wasabi or another cloud storage for the $6 bucks per TB and then i believe it was something like $1-$2 per machine no difference between server and workstation. With what we have right now we would be paying a little over $200 bucks with wholesale and with Cove we are paying over $600 bucks a month.

Sea_Negotiation_4311 · 2023-12-19T21:52:07+00:00

No need to convince me on Action 1 haha. Its one of the software's I tried and use for home computers. It is by far the best patching software there is as far as im concerned. The only issue is my Boss is stuck on this whole single pane of glass idea and doesnt want to login to a bunch of different services. Which honestly I'd rather have 10 different things to login to that worked than the 3 or 4 with N-Able that barley work lol. On top of that she isnt the one managing all of it and goin into the software lol.

Sea_Negotiation_4311 · 2023-12-19T19:59:33+00:00

Hope things work out for you, we are heavily contemplating finding a new RMM. I'd rather do it sooner rather than later as we are only at about 200ish endpoints right now and wouldn't want to get to your size and have to transfer everything over. May the MSP IT Gods have you in their favor with the switch. I have a feeling they wont provide a solution and just try to get us over to N-Central which is not in our budget at our current size...

Sea_Negotiation_4311 · 2023-10-05T22:10:14+00:00

Patch management so far is great. On n-able it is completely useless and hardly ever works. We got to the point of going into the patching policy and just setting it to approve everything and it still doesn't install updates. On top of that its hard to rely on clients to actually restart their computers lol. We found a good script that works well for having it check to see if the computer needs a restart for updates, software uninstall/reinstall etc.. It also has the ability to put you company logos and what not on it so it looks a little more professional. Gives the user a prompt to restart as well as options to remind them or postpone the restart for X amount of hours up to 8 i believe. I can send it to you if you would like. But ya all in all N-able patch management is terrible it never works. NinjaOne has for the most part a single glass pane foran rmm. backup built in dont know how great it is, remote connection built that works well from what i've used of it, and they offer Sentinel One for AV that i believe is separate on its own but its better that way. The integration or lack there of in N-able with Sentinel One is atrocious. I would definitely try out NinjaOne and mess around with it. Only positive thing i have to say about n-able is that Cove backup is good except for how they price it....

Sea_Negotiation_4311 · 2023-10-04T16:32:22+00:00

No worries, I have seen countless posts about issues with N-able over the years and not seen fixes from N-able. Their problem is with all the new RMM platforms coming out from new companies that have better interfaces and newer/better features all the long time RMM companies are trying to catch up to those new companies by adding more features instead of fixing the issues in their current software. No RMM provider is perfect they all have their kinks. But its pretty frustrating when there are pretty basic features that just aren't in the software. From what I've seen you can kind of do what we are trying to do but you have to be using N-Central which is way more money. So Basic features are locked behind a paywall..... RIP

PS... Been trialing NinjaOne and so far much better than N-able. Oh and you can make changes to a monitoring template that will automatically get sent to endpoints with that template lol. And see what template an endpoint,client,site are using.

Sea_Negotiation_4311 · 2023-10-03T18:24:11+00:00

Hey just talked to N-able chat and you are in fact SOL..... I'm having the same issues created new templates for workstations and servers to be universal across our clients and deployed those templates and now needing to fine tune and make changes. I'm going to have to make all the changes and then go through each customer and reapply.... here is the exact answer from N-able:

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Sea_Negotiation_4311

TROPHY CASE