Some I.T. Professional Business Pearls

Here are some thoughts on the many aspects of running an I.T. business in today’s world that have been garnered over my 13 years in business so far.

• Never reveal business operations
• Financial
• Client’s names (don’t ever reveal clients supported to others)
• Projects, Purchases, or other such products and services WE provide
• Never volunteer _any_ information
• Always keep scheduling information time related
• I’m running behind, I’ll call in 15
• I’m working on something that went sideways, let’s delay to tomorrow please
• Always call, text, reach out in-person versus e-mail
• If calling follow-up with an e-mail “thanks for allowing us to delay by a day” or some such note
• We keep a priority band that our clients are aware of
• Priority 1: Business Critical Outage
• Priority 2: User down or problematic app
• Priority 3: App updates, changes and such
• Priority 4: All of the other stuff
• Never, ever, give a customer poop for leaving
• I learned this one the hard way
• Business is business no matter how the termination was handled by the now former client
• Never, ever, take things personally
• Respect their decision and acquiesce with grace and integrity
• Be silent
• Resist the urge to be defensive - shut this one right down
• Cooperate with the next I.T. company if need be
• Give over the keys to the kingdom with ease
• Always, and everywhere, do everything in writing
• “Yes, Ms. Customer, I’d be more than happy to help you do X and it’ll be done on Y” via e-mail after a conversation
• Always confirm project add-ons and scope creep with an e-mail indicating back charges and extras as they fall out of scope
• Keep an extensive set of audit notes for each client
• Keep an extensive change log for all clients
• Snip everything, name them accordingly, and keep them forever
• Be disciplined and document everything
• Use a time keeper
• Outlook Tasks or CRM with due dates and reminders
• OneNote notebook with Surface 4/Pro and pen close at hand
• Note keeper pocket notebook and mechanical pencils
• Write all requests down and transfer what needs to be to Outlook or CRM

The above is the culmination of my 13 years running our I.T. company. I hope it helps! :)

Philip Elder
Microsoft Cluster MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Fujitsu ScanSnap N1800 Caveat - Keep that Admin Username and Password

We just updated our ScanSnap N1800 network based scanner to the newest available OS.

Since it has been a while since the admin portal on the unit had been accessed no one had the admin name and password memorized.

In the network audit notes there did not seem to be anything indicating what that may be so we called into Fujitsu support to find out if we could hard reset the unit.

It turned out that we could not. They asked us to ship the unit to them so they could reset it to factory with a cost of $150 to do so plus shipping both ways.

Oh ...

After digging around our documentation a bit deeper it turned out that the line that held the admin name and password was not easily seen and thus missed.

So, fortunately we were able to move on without incurring the costs and downtime for the scanner.

Moral of the story?

Make sure to note down the admin name and password for the scanner!

Philip Elder
Microsoft Cluster MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
Third Tier: Enterprise Solutions for Small Business

Microsoft Downloads: TechNet Libraries PDF Downloads Search List

This link opens the Microsoft Downloads site:

• TechNet Library - Search Results - Microsoft Download Center

Note the third one listed in the search results (sorted by newest publish date) is the _entire_ Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012 RTM TechNet Library Documentation! It weighs in at a paltry 110MB in PDF form too.

An example of how great it is to have one searchable document is in the search results _within_ the document for the search term "RDMA".

Try searching for Windows Server and RDMA and come up with a Microsoft product focused set of search results on any search engine.

Philip Elder
Microsoft MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
Third Tier: Enterprise Solutions for Small Business