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It is often said that one of the values of providing managed services to the small business market is the relationships that are built – you become the trusted advisor.

While I 110% agree with this I would suggest that providing technology solutions alone does not build this type of relationship. We could employ the smartest engineers in the world and set them on the task of quickly and efficiently fixing technology problems but if they are not tending to the people problems that come along with the daily technology problems we would not be successful.

On any given day you can hear the leaders and employees in any of our offices reciting the phrase “People first, technology second” as they go about providing exceptional customer service to our clients.

We often use the example with new employees that they could login to an end users system remotely and fix a technology problem in 15 seconds flat but still leave the user with a bad experience. Whereas if the engineer is taking care of the person (communicating, matching the callers mood, addressing their anxiety, empathizing, etc) and need to research the technology over the course of many hours or even days the user will have a great customer experience and they will be willing to refer us to their friends and colleges (we measure this daily and will get into NPS in another post).

I truly believe that this unwavering focus on service and people is what has set us apart from our competitors over the years – not the latest managed security offering or monitoring tool. Don’t get me wrong, you have to have the right offerings for your clients, tools are a rule of the game at this point, and you have to be able to fix technology issues, but these things alone will not make you successful.

So as you set out to build recurring revenue in your business or attempt to take your current recurring revenues to the next level remember to wrap your offerings in a service that allows deep client relationships to be fostered – this will make all the difference in your long term success.

I always say: “We are not a technology company we are a people business, we just happen to be really good with this technology stuff…..”

Let me know if you have a service focus in your business and how that affects your client relationships.

JC

It is interesting for me to read how Mike came to managed services because for me it was a very different experience. I have always been a service person that happens to be good with technology and at the time I met Mike I had just wrapped up being a one man shop charging my small network of clients anywhere from $100 to $150 per hour to fix computer problems. Even when I did not know what I was doing I was good enough at managing my relationships and had a deep enough circle of technology friends that I could scramble to figure things out without my clients getting upset.

The pitch of starting a ‘recurring revenue’ IT services business didn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me at the time but I was caught up in Mike’s ability to paint the big picture and sell the future (anyone that has ever met Mike can attest to his ability to do this).

The future was clear, I would fix technology problems remotely for clients around the country and he would figure out how to sell the product. What was different for me was Mike’s focus on the business side of things, processes, scalability, getting away from billing hours, selling value, servicing clients around the country / world. These were all things that me and my technology friends had never talked about when painting our vision of creating an hourly IT consulting business.

Over the next few months we brought on a sales person, who is still with us to this day, signed a few clients, started providing service and set off on our journey of learning. We spoke with every expert we could find and quickly came to realize that the experience we had from creating and running Everon put us in the position of being the industry experts. Every time we would get on the phone with someone that was a leader or vendor in the industry the call would quickly turn to “well tell us how Everon does that, or accomplished this, or decided that, and can I fly out to meet you and see your operations” because the so called experts had not built a managed services business for themselves.

Today I like to call Mike the leading mind on managed services in the country – he does not accept this designation because of his modesty – but I guaranty that Mike’s name will come up if you start digging around the managed services industry to find out who is doing it right!

I am not saying that we have not had to learn things the hard way a lot of the time but I am saying that our experience over the years should provide some interesting reading if not invaluable content for those in the industry!

The rest, as they say, is history.

JC

I figured a little history would be useful so everyone could know where I am coming from!

The idea for what is today known as Everon was first a glimmer in my eye back in 1999 or so. That seems like so long ago!

I had gone to work very briefly for the founders of what is now All Covered. It was a crazy environment and one that I eagerly exited quickly, but I did learn a lot and I could never get the potential of the industry out of my mind. It was an entrepreneurship case study if there ever was one:

• Huge market
• Highly fragmented
• No major brand
• Known for its poor service

Somebody was going to make it big in this space eventually!

Immediately after leaving All Covered, I started a small regional ISP that was reselling DSL lines through Covad. This was the boom-times of the Silicon Valley, and I was scrambling to learn everything I could about technology while trying to figure out how to make a buck. I was in completely over my head to be honest - I had a business degree but no real experience and no technology background. But hey, it was fun and I was learning!

We eventually got a decent client base going - almost all SMB customers - and were frequently called upon to help configure our client’s networks to use the DSL lines. We didn’t mind because we were making a few extra $ here and there. However, we quickly realized that driving around the Bay Area getting stuck in traffic was no way to make a living. Our solution: we made our consulting/support customers buy a piece of Funk Software that provided remote control; that way we didn’t have to drive.

We eventually sold the business for a little bit of money and went on to start a software company, and then I went on to business school at Babson College.

But I could never get the following out of my mind:

The combination of recurring revenue from the DSL lines and the ability to serve our customers remotely was a pretty nice model!

Anybody that knows me knows that I have the entrepreneurship bug bad, so as I was finishing up business school I was thinking about what business I was going to start, not what job I was going to get. I considered all kinds of businesses, but I could not let the SMB IT services business idea rest.

If somebody was going to make a killing in this space eventually, why not me!?

Around this same time (2003), the remote control tools and network management tools that we use today were starting to come into existence and were becoming practical to use. So, after a few conversations with my wife explaining why it really was the right move to go with virtually no income and start another business (while we had just racked up some student loans and she was pregant with our first child!), Everon was launched!

I made every mistake in the book!

I priced too low, I included the wrong stuff in my service packages, and I sold to the wrong customers.

One thing I did do right was find Josh Clifford, who is now the Chief Service Officer at Everon. That was dumb luck, so I can’t really take any credit for it.

I remember the first few days of working together very clearly. I sat him down at a desk with a phone and a computer and said,

“I’m going to go out and start selling now. One day that phone is going to ring and on the other end will be a person with a computer problem. If you can’t fix it, we’ll probably go out of business. No pressure.”

And with that, we were off to the races! 4 and 1/2 year later we’ve learned a lot, had some fun, and made some money; and I really think that the most exciting times for our industry and our company are right in front of us.

MRC