r/SmallMSP

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.

Just looking for map friendly recommendations for digital signage that have a decent partner program, white labeling if possible. I've been asked about this about 3 times in 2 weeks now so think it's worth looking at.

Thanks in advance

We have a decent size law firm and we continuously have OneDrive sync issues? What are you all using for your clients like this. They have roughly 4TB of data. ABout 1.75 TB that is synced using the OneDrive / SharePoint shortcut.

Open to ideas here. Want to know if I need to change some settings or if OneDrive is not the answer here.

I have been a one man shop for over 20 years. I have a client I have been doing all their IT admin for over 17 years and they were recently acquired by an investment firm. Current management is adamant about keeping me in my role as I know all the ins and outs of the business being involved from the start. The problem is that the new investors cant get over the 'hit by a bus' scenario and want me to have some sort of backup in place for emergencies in the event I am unavailable/incapacitated. Thoughts?

I've been in IT close to 9 years and right now we're supporting a ~520 employee company across finance, ops and customer support. We have a decent setup, good budget, modern tools, nothing is fundamentally broken but day to day work has slowly turned into something I don't recognize anymore.

Most of our time is spent on:

Clearing ticket queues (120-150 per week)

Fixing the same recurring issues across departments.

Chasing access requests and permission mismatches.

Responding to alerts that don't really tell us what's wrong

We still talk about bigger projects in meetings, improving infrastructure, tightening security, optimizing workflows… but no one actually has time to execute, even our strongest engineers are stuck doing repetitive support work just to keep things moving. One of my teammates said last week "I didn't get into IT to reset passwords and chase tickets all day" and honestly that hit. It's not the hours that are killing motivation, it's the lack of meaningful work.

For those in larger orgs, how do you actually free up your team to focus on real engineering again?

Hello. I have been a One Man band IT business since 1991. I would consider myself a hybrid MSP in some ways but certainly not a MSP purist. For 25 years I was fortunate enough to partner with another one man band and we backed each other up and build a nice relationship. Now he is ill and is retiring and I took over all his customers along with mine.

Does anyone know of any online resources such as this sub to reach out to other IT business owners to potentially forge a business relationship based on mutual trust and support? There was a spiceworks group for WNY but it is dead now. And honestly the rest of the market in my town is saturated with MSPs based on MRR and that is not how I run my business so it is hard to find like minded people who operate as a true IT consultant. Maybe I am looking for a unicorn.

Someone posted about a backup in this sub for such a situation and I am in the same boat.

Thanks

Hello,

I’ve been a one man shop for a while and I’d like to pick up a few more clients in the area. I already got flyers and brochures in the event I go in person to a potential lead site. I was wondering if any of you are doing any sort of cold calling. If so, how’s your success rate? Also, do you have a cold calling script you’d be willing to share?