Potential Client Decided to do Exchange Migration Themselves
Late last year, a small rural municipality reached out to me to get a better understanding of their IT infrastructure and what could I do to assist them with several major issues. I was approached by a marketing staff member who claimed some self IT knowledge and had tried address some of their issues themselves but only realized they were in over their head.
They had asked me to come in and start fixing everything. I've worked around enough mid-sized clients over the years to realize I don't touch anything without first doing an audit and reporting back to the potential client what they have going on and what needs to be fixed. Which is what I did for this particular potential client.
Let's just say all PC hardware was 4-8GB ram of Core2Duo to i3 gen 5 hardware levels using platter drives. No network segregation. No business grade firewalls (just low end consumer devices only). No AD with wide open file shares in workgroups, etc. Email is POP3 through a webhost vendor. Antivirus was McAfee pre-installed from Walmart. Yeah, that bad.
All of there findings were simplified in a report to the client so that the elected officials could look it over and realize they were in some deep doo-doo with their current setup in not meeting certain state regulations, little to no security, etc. I also don't go into technical fixes in my reports to avoid using anything resembling steps to fix something to prevent them from doing it themselves or getting the nearest high school kid to do it on the cheap.
Well, this evening this potential client had reached back out after over a month and half of 'radio silence' since our last discussion. The marketing person was reaching out asking for help because they had "decided to do the Exchange migration themselves" and were "having issues migrating mailboxes after changing their MX records".
At this point, I haven't responded back as the they reached out after hours, aren't signed to any service I have, and have stalled around any T&M work I have quoted them to address certain security issues first.
This is definitely a first where a client is attempting their Exchange migration on their own and reaching out after they've started it and have issues.
I'm wondering if I shouldn't double my hourly rate at this point if they are in over their heads, or simply walk away and not take on any liability from this... from a client that wants help, but also wants to do it their own way too.