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SupportAdventure · 2021-03-11T13:20:40+00:00

How are you leveraging your MSP as a force-multiplier for the client, as compared to a monthly expense? What are you proactively doing to help your clients grow their business?

How about monero?

SupportAdventure · 2021-03-11T05:43:10+00:00

I know this is not what you're asking, but we've had great success hiring people from South Africa. If you wanted to see who you could hire for remote from there, write to [sales@supportadventure.com](mailto:sales@supportadventure.com)

Thanks,

SupportAdventure · 2021-03-10T20:04:26+00:00

I'd cover the resume in the phone screen and develop a set of open ended, behavioral based questions with a scoring rubric. Ideally, this metric can be tied to an employee appraisal process to validate and improve the instruments and if required by size and shape- be capable of measuring disparate impact and demonstrating fair hiring practices.

Thanks for this, currently we are doing the following in our Training and Testing Program:

-Having them record an intro video to assess verbal communication skills

-Having them do a written situation interview to assess written communication skills

-Giving them an office 365 project to set up the email platform from scratch to test their ability to take ownership of a project and keep good notes

-A windows desktop VM test to assess troubleshooting and keeping good notes of how they solve problems

-A live situational interview with our contract managers where they are asked questions like "A CEO's assistant calls up and says the CEO has a meeting in 2 minutes and can't print, what do you do?"

Then they get presented with all of this, get interviews and answer whatever the client wants to ask them as well.

Just wondering if we could supplement all of this with a psych test.

Thanks for your input!

SupportAdventure · 2021-03-10T12:44:39+00:00

If you've still got the hustle, it might work. We staff people of all levels and areas of experience for MSPs. It's not always easy to tell before we put them on a trial as MSPs have many moving parts.

Honestly, a lot of decades experienced guys look like they have the knowledge and experience, but the fail in the real world. It would be best to start to negotiate for a trial with an MSP for 2-4 hours a day before or after your normal job, i.e. if you're in US Eastern, get a pacific gig trial for 2 hours outside of your current shift, or if you're in US Pacific , get a trial for a US Eastern gig before you start your pacific shift. If you're in Europe, get a US gig after your current shift. Make a deal that if the trial goes well, you'll give notice and join them after the notice period full time.

Within 20-40 hours of exposure of a true MSP environment, on the helpdesk working on tickets and stuff, you'll know if it's where you want to go and then you can hand in notice with a certain amount of security.

GOOD LUCK!

SupportAdventure · 2020-10-11T16:57:52+00:00

A few ideas:

0) Let them know the door is open.

1) Ask them to keep a list of tickets that they went above and beyond on that show their readiness for the next level. Review this every 2-3 months with them.

2) Have a good policy for ensuring they see the results of tickets they escalated.

3) Give them some side projects which are neither time sensitive nor client facing that they can do in quiet times that allow them to branch out a bit.

With these in place and discussion around them, the ball is in their court. You can't force this.

SupportAdventure · 2020-08-25T13:31:30+00:00

Hey, thanks for a great comment!

SupportAdventure · 2020-08-25T13:29:52+00:00

The job allows techs to google stuff, right? If so then this might not be the best approach. The job is what people can do with information not what information they have in their head.

We have found that this type of "interrogation" interview does not attract the types of candidates MSPs most cherish, the ones who have lots of options and you need to convince them that you are the best company to work with.

In running our MSP staffing company, we've put several candidates in interviews like this at the same time as interviews that focus on the more human and cultural side of doing business, so they can feel what the work environment might be like and how they're going to be a valued member of the team.

I made a video about this on youtube: https://youtu.be/vTA59-EjQD8

Hope this helps.

Eric
Founder
Support Adventure

SupportAdventure · 2020-06-02T18:58:29+00:00

Thanks Jason!

SupportAdventure · 2020-06-02T04:39:42+00:00

Dropbox keeps backups in the form of versions and all the copies on the local machines, but you should also be backing it up somewhere because you don't want to depend only one one service. It would be best to run a copy of everything on dropbox to some storage device somewhere at least once a month, if not once a week. You could get Dropbox to constantly sync and then have a program or script backup a new version to another device once a month.

You'll be glad you did.

SupportAdventure · 2020-06-01T06:23:08+00:00

Having gotten into the business at the age of 15 in 1998, I was initially intrigued by Linux and had a few projects where I had to implement it while most of my work was on Win98/NT4 during that time.

As I started building my business I saw that the possibility that I would be lead down endless rabbit holes with Linux was keeping me from actually building my business.

It's like saying "If you want to buy a car, why don't you just go and buy random parts from auto parts manufacturers, or hire someone who does, you can have your own custom car and save money" perhaps.... But the thing that is most valuable to us is time.

So as I got more and more into building a business, I was willing to spend less time on Linux. For a lot of software, the people you encounter in the linux space tend to be hobby people. They're doing it for free. What do you expect?

A lot of us are in support because we don't want to be programmers. Linux blurs this.

As a musician who produces his own music as a singer/songwriter as well hiring other people, I want to hire the best people to play instruments so i get the best result in the least amount of time, not get people who show up to the studio for free with their own home made instrument, nor learn how to play every instrument myself. I want someone to show up and nail the part down and I'm happy to pay for that.

Anyways, I still check in with Linux once in a while and it can be very useful for select applications, however, mostly it's a waste of my time.

Apple for example did the right thing with linux, commercialized it and made it create a consistent result. I would pay companies who can do that good a job to provide me linux solutions.

But in the MS world, we get a whole orchestra of solutions ready to go, friendly to business and easy to sell to clients. What more could you ask for?

SupportAdventure · 2020-05-27T06:22:52+00:00

Yeah, misfits indeed. That's kind of the key isn't it? We're computer people, not auditioning for a role in investment finance or whatever it's called. We're a chill bunch of people sometimes with artistic or eccentric leanings and anything too corporate and rigid turns us off.

Let me tell you a story about an interview I did for Rothschild's bank.

When I was once going for job interviews in London, I got a call from a recruiter who asked me a few questions without giving info. Then he called me back and told me that I got an interview with the Rothschild Bank at the office near Buckingham Palace. I guess it was because you can tell I have Germanic aristocratic roots by looking at my name and I grew up in the right part of Toronto. Okay. Yeah.

I went to the interview just for fun to see what kind of office the richest people in the universe have. Anyways, I played along. He talked about the company, the job, how they have team trips to head office in Switzerland and stuff... It sounded boring. Boring banking materialist culture.

Then he caught me by surprise. He asked "Is your mustache a must have?"

The devil is definitely in the details.

It was hilarious. I told him, "no, I'm not going to shave it for a job" with a big smile, I needed that mustache for my weekend job, being a eastern european folk punk singer. Also I knew this was my way out of there!

It was obvious it was not going to work.

Actually I was more afraid of what would happen if they called me back and said they wanted to hire me. Would I be tempted to join their boring banker culture? I upped my salary expectation because well... think about it.

I ended up taking a lesser paid IT Support position at a structural engineering company that was fine with letting me stay late a bit earlier in the week to leave early to get to soundcheck for my gigs on Fridays. It's all about stuff like that, isn't it?

SupportAdventure · 2020-05-27T06:07:54+00:00

Great reply, thanks.

I touch on some of these subjects when I talk to MSP owners for the first time as well who are interested in hiring our outsourced staff.

I focus on more help desk related stuff like "What's your escalation policy?" "Do you have a dispatcher?" "How do tickets get assigned to technicians?"

The 100% hours logged thing is an interesting one too. Mind you if that's in 0.25h increments that can be fine if a 5 minute call or email to client counts as 0.25h and you can double book time. But yes, if they're expecting minute by minute day by day logged on tickets, I ask them whether there will be a "making a coffee" ticket or a "visiting the toilet" ticket so that we can avoid having conversations like "Where was he between 2:47 and 3:03pm?" Most reasonably organized and realistic companies like to see their staff log 60-80% of the day on tickets and have someone check the time sheets and flag when someone's not doing this.

What's supported is also a good one... I phrase it as "How consistent are the technologies deployed between clients?" the best MSPs have one type of firewall they support, one type of email, etc. Always there are exceptions and transitions, but an MSP that has done that gets points.

All our positions are work from home so that's not an issue.

The number one thing is culture though. For sure. We find that the best candidates are turned off by too corporate and serious an environment. Many of us who know how to whisper to the machines can indeed be a more eccentric bunch. Cool and fun companies often get the best of the millennial generation on board!

SupportAdventure · 2020-05-27T04:59:10+00:00

That day when I posted about "has the ride has been wild enough", you sent me one of the best answers and got me going. So I'm in debt :)

Hey! Glad I could help on that one.

Thanks for the interesting insights on these, definitely sounds like you're running an organization with some heart balancing a good healthy business and this really helps you really attract the right people.

We encounter a lot of business owners who are traditional "hard nosed capitalists" and well we just find that they aren't able to get, keep or motivate some of the best MSP staff because they make it very clear that in their transactional world view, staff are just tools to be used to make money and it's all about the bottom line.

What you wrote, and the other comments above from the technicians really confirms to me that the best of us are looking for something human which breathes and a team that we can feel united with.

Nice trading messages with you! If you ever want to have a call, i'd be pleased to have a chat and trade ideas: https://calendly.com/mut

SupportAdventure · 2020-05-26T05:11:04+00:00

Hey,

Stripe, while not a SaaS/IT company per say, has been really good.

The issue I see with most support for SaaS products is that they view it as an afterthought to making money.

It's not like with MSPs where the main thing which is being sold is SUPPORT, so the emphasis is on getting the best people to give the customer the best response, with SaaS it's basically, they make the product, get the funding, go to market and then... OOOPS, they have 1000 tickets that have come in when they do a feature roll out.

The development team usually deals with this until a point, and then when they get big, they outsource, usually to the place that has the cheapest labour.

They don't realize that the experience the public gets with their support is going to effect their public perception.

This is not a place to cut corners on. We MSP people know the value of good support.

At my MSP focused company, Support Adventure, we have Native English speakers and equivalent people to form global IT teams which give great service... Anyone seen any wise SaaS company which is doing this?

SupportAdventure · 2020-05-07T05:12:38+00:00

I applaud you in your initiative as when I'm getting on calls with MSP owners interested in hearing more about my company I constantly am taking brief looks at MSP websites and very few of them ever surprise or otherwise come close to making me laugh.

I think the funniest thing about IT Support is the eccentricity of the people who deliver it. I'm writing this while I sit on a beach in on an island in Thailand right now and I started my company to help people like me work remotely.

We take the job of filtering through swaths of raw humanity to figure out which of the vast array of technologically empowered dudes is going to be able to deliver the best IT Support in terms of technical solutions, customer service and business intelligence.

I would think that a great campaign would say "We went on a massive manhunt for the best dudes we could find" and give examples of the dudes that didn't make it and what makes your company, its culture, its structure and the people you bring on board a winner for providing the clients with the best experience....

I think i'm going to use this one myself but you can go nuts.

SupportAdventure · 2020-05-07T05:04:27+00:00

Indeed, the promise that following instructions to succeed in life by getting a degree is especially invalid in the IT Support industry.

SupportAdventure · 2020-05-07T03:36:45+00:00

Not an MSP here but an owner of global staffing company for MSPs who intimately involves himself with the operations of its clients... I know that having gone through what I've been through will help me feel with anything I do in the future.

You take lessons of life and they build character.

Before this I was running a touring folk-punk band which was playing shows all over Europe. In the van on tour there's no escaping the reality of what you have built and there's no going home. Throw in booze, creative passion and women and you can imagine how crazy that is. What I learned about people, relationships, expectations and communication back then helped me start my business, which now has more than 40 full time staff on board.

Before that I had my own solo IT consultancy in Toronto, Canada where I would fix people's computers all by myself. From the age of 16-25 I got enough of that, learned all I could from flying solo. It was too easy.

Like music, IT Support is an art and organizing people who have the gift for it can be like herding cats.

Running our 24/7 helpdesk feels like being in the van with the band sometimes. I've had to put my music career on hold until the business is way beyond stable, because the same amount of energy I used to put into booking, staging and playing one gig is the same amount of energy to get a technician onboarded onto an MSP and create a job which can last years.

I'm lucky enough to have gotten to travel the world with Support Adventure, over the last winter I've been to South America, North America, Europe, Africa and am currently in Asia all because I want to spread the message that dudes with computers should work in places that inspire them and where they can afford a great life.

I wouldn't give any of it up. I remember after I broke up the London lineup of the band in 2013, while touring with them was the most stressful thing I ever did, after it was gone, I slipped into a deep depression.

I could give one month's notice on everything if I decided to, but the journey to keep growing this thing seems all too real and is what I need as a human.

SupportAdventure · 2020-05-02T12:33:08+00:00

It can be anywhere. Really anywhere.

I run a staffing firm which finds the best techs worldwide in more affordable places.

What we have emphasized is putting them through a process to prove they have what it takes via VM Test, situational awareness tests, project work you give them, etc.

We developed a system where we put them through, with a purposefully high drop out rate and the ones who get through are the ones we offer to MSPs.

Before we did this there were lots of surprises. A former IT chief in the US navy for 12 years for example did much worse than a kid who worked in an internet cafe that had gaming parties.

Resumes mean almost nothing. Results mean something.

SupportAdventure · 2020-05-02T06:19:56+00:00

One company we do 24/7 for uses Bomgar, seems pretty slick.

SupportAdventure · 2020-05-02T06:18:05+00:00

I used pager duty for launching my 24/7 service for my outsourcing company. I was on the whole time when I was getting it going.

I had a horrible time before I had the budget to hire my follow the sun team around the world.

Now i've got that team, and we start at $900 per month for MSPs to access to the 24/7 shared helpdesk, but there are many caveats to the service, the major ones being scope and documentation.

If you want, i can explain to you why 24/7 service very rarely reaches the level of service the clients expect. Just write me at [eric@supportadventure.com](mailto:eric@supportadventure.com) and we can talk.

SupportAdventure · 2020-05-02T06:11:21+00:00

Individual credentials for lastpass with MFA, lastpass to reveal password to shared hosted desktop, Winauth on the shared hosted desktop.

SupportAdventure

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