The gunshot analogy is pretty accurate. However, I’d put a spin on it a little.

If someone else (a ‘competitor’ who didn’t do a good job) shot the person, I’m in there in a jiffy to mop up the mess and help my potential client out of a jam. I chalk that up to sales engineering time. Luckily for us, all of our sales people, at this time, have technical backgrounds. You fix their problem AND have a sales meeting at the same time.

Now, if he shot himself in the foot (we came running once for a problem, we had meetings explaining the benefits of our program, and they still elected to ‘pay by the hour when something breaks’), they better have a signed contract and a check in hand when we show up, or I will refer them to someone else.

I would have helped. That $250,000 would have set them up on our premium support package, paid in full, for three years. They would be one of my favorite clients.

If so, the problem isn’t your business model, it’s your pricing structure.

Or, to put it another way, I know what you are, we’re just negotiating price.

Cheers,
Matt

Case in point. I got a call this past Monday from a company who really needed our service. Not only had we provided them a report with all of the things that were wrong on their network (backup was one of them), but they had signed the contract to begin our monthly Core+ service. We didn’t officially started the service, because they hadn’t mailed in the first check yet. Actually, it was four months later, and they hadn’t mailed the check.

They just couldn’t find the cash flow.

Oh, right. Back to the call.

Their Exchange server was down and they wanted us to run over to help them out. I respectfully declined, because they would not commit to beginning our service, they way we had agreed back in August, by providing me a check.

I don’t know what they did or if they lost any data, but I know that they were still down six hours later when I called for a follow-up.

DedicatedIT clearly has the ability to fix things that get broke as they have been doing it for many years. I’m, sure DIT has references (or at least marketing materials that say just that.)

The only complaint I’m hearing is that fixing things is unprofitable for DIT.

That’s a pricing problem, not cause for paradigm shift.

Cheers,
Matt

Let the guy with the gunshot wound go to a place that makes a practice of treating gunshot wounds.

I was in a doctor’s office the other day when a bunch of EMTs rushed in to haul out a patient who was suspected of having a heart attack.

My doctor didn’t hand him off because he wouldn’t pay. He looked at the patient’s symptoms and made the decision that he needed treatment different than what that particular office was designed to handle.

DedicatedIT isn’t obligated to fix that self-inflicted server crash. Too many of the customers who came running in with a crisis ignored network assessments that would have kept the crash from happening.

Some days you can run with a stick in your hand and not get hurt; some days you poke an eye out.

If you keep responding to those I-poked-my-eye-out calls, then you either have to staff up to handle the peaks and valleys or you neglect your contract clients. Either way, you encourage bad -and unprofitable – behavior by dropping everything to bail out folks who aren’t your managed service customers.