Command Control Power: Apple Tech Support & Business Talk

-Jerry & Joe talk about their monthly MSP offerings and the services it includes.

-Jerry uses Square for automated credit card payments and invoices.

-Joe talks about competing on quality as opposed to pricing.

-Offering a lower starting point without important services can put both you and the customer in a bad position.

-How do you handle consultants in your area that offer extremely low rates?

-The hosts speak to the benefits of monthly fees.

-Priority scheduling and unattended remote support are big selling points for Joe’s plan.

-We spoke with Tim Pearson on Patreon Episode 471 to discuss some great tips on managed services pricing.

-One of Jerry’s clients uses a Remote Desktop tool called NuoRDS.

-Jerry was able to remotely assist a customer while in an Uber in Belgium.

-The tool that Jerry uses to manage scheduled restarts is called Power Manager. 

Sam Valencia, Jerry Zigmont and Joe Saponare discuss working with Apple technology and clients. Drawn from their combined experience of over 20 years in the Apple Consultants Network, they discuss technical support issues both with the technology and working with clients.

Topics:

-This week we welcome back long time supporter of the show, Jon Brown.

-Jon is Vice President of Technology and Cybersecurity at Interlaced.io and owner of Grove Technologies.

-He recently completely a merger with Interlaced.

-Last time Jon was on the show, he was still evaluating options for his direction of growth.

-He discusses how difficult it was finding the right fit as some companies wanted to “acqui-hire” him.

-More emphasis was placed on his specific value rather than he company.

-As Tom Bridge told Jon, owner/operators tend to be bad employees.

-Jon is still running the day to day operations of Grove Technologies.

-Grove is acquisition #2 for Interlaced.

-Merging tools and systems is proving to be a challenge.

-Business models differ during acquistions as well, which can also complicate things.

-Jon speaks about the stages of a merger and compares his to varying stages of greif.

-Learning to work as a team means having to let go of some of you thoughts of how to get things done.

-As Jon joined Interlaced, he rediscovered his passion for the actual technology side of things. Some of that was lost in being an owner/operator of a business.

-Joe wants to know more about using Apple Business Chat.

-Grove uses a tool called Heymarket for business text messaging.

-Group SMS is a feature PsiMac is looking for as well.

-Sam has ongoing concerns about chat features creating more of an immediate response expectation.

-Jon talks about rules and auto responders to account for some of those concerns.

-Interlaced adds a 24/7 support team for after hours support of Grove customers.

-We debate the differences/similarities of Apple Business Messages and Slack.

-This week we welcome Dav James of DIJ Consulting.

-Dav originally started at Apple in a variety of roles and moved to corporate IT support.

-DIJ Consulting is a Monday.com partner and works a lot on the automation side of things.

-We get into using integrations with Monday and services like Zendesk for automatic creation of tickets.

-Joe does some reporting in Numbers but it is more of a manual process so automation peaks his interest.

-The basics of Monday is that it is a task management software.

-Some of the frustrations Sam is feeling is the need of many different portals to manage things. Monday can integrate with a variety of those services and provide a centralized portal.

-Something as simple as centralized alerts was a big reason why Sam moved to Monday.

-Moving large amounts of data used to be a weak link that has now seen a major improvement.

-Affordability is a big draw of Monday.

-Connecting all the dots between the various services and Monday.com may be an initial challenge. Dav is working on how to make that easier for consultancies.

-You can find Dav on YouTube and in MacAdmins Slack.

-Taking action on a show request, Dav started the Monday channel in MacAdmins Slack as well.

Topics:

-On today’s show, we welcome Adam Engst of TidBITS Content Network.

-We review key features of phishing emails, as discussed in a recent TCN article.

-One of the newer tricks is to send the entire email as an image.

-Will better grammar pose a challenge to users detecting spam emails?

-It takes just a beat longer to identify a spam email message.

-Legitimate training tools like KnowBe4 can be good to keep employees on their toes.

-We discuss the LastPass breach and how far reaching it was.

-Thieves are getting more clever by first capturing iPhone passcodes in public places, then stealing the device.

-A challenge to this is that the iPhone passcode can be used to reset an Apple ID password.

-This can also cause a company breach if an employee’s iPhone is stolen.

-Send out your own newsletters to customers that discuss this and more by using TidBITS Content Network.

-Jerry shares an odd printer story.

-Apple Mail was having an issue using a self signed certificate.

-“Don’t trust email”

-Joe describes emulation vs virtualization.

-Virtual Buddy & UTM are solid virtualization products.

-Joe uses the ability to virtualize other versions of macOS to support clients that use a different OS than he is currently running.

-Pro Tip: You cannot use an Apple ID with a virtual OS.

Sam Valencia, Jerry Zigmont and Joe Saponare discuss working with Apple technology and clients. Drawn from their combined experience of over 20 years in the Apple Consultants Network, they discuss technical support issues both with the technology and working with clients.

-We would like to thank new Patreon member Rolf Woodward, and thank Bruce Corson for increasing his pledge.

-Time Machine is hopelessly broken in Jerry’s recent dealings.

-He has been recommending Carbon Copy Cloner.

-Joe had a specific issue where the Contacts app database was extremely large and causing an issue with backups.

-Sam is very keen on company policies where local file data is not company responsibility.

-Jerry talks about supporting a customer who had some major issues after a computer migration.

-BackBlaze has a great service to ship a drive with backup data.

-Joe talks about important directories to be aware of when troubleshooting macOS.

THANK YOU TO OUR PATREON SPONSORS!

-Joe likes Apple Music playlists. Sam takes live notes. Some good recommnendations: Restorative Yoga Headspace

-Jerry can’t listen to music while working.

-He didn’t find Apple Fitness was working for him. Athlytic is an app that he highly recommends.

-Jerry is currently watching Skinwalker Ranch on Netflix.

-HomePod Mini should have a chargeable battery.

-Sam uses his HomePod as a speaker for his bedroom TV.

-Dark Reader is a great browser extension Sam uses with Safari to automatically enables dark mode for sites, even if they don’t support it.

-Sam’s latest gripe about 1Password is that it has a legit issue auto filling SonicWall pages.

-Why is 1Password 8 not in the App Store?

-Jerry doesn’t like DuckDuckGo.

-We get into browser preferences.

-Jerry and Sam both are independently testing Yubikey by Yubico for authentication.

-HCS wrote a guide for using security keys as a second factor with an Apple ID.

-Sam works with a client for a while before he asks the most basic of questions.

-Amazon DNS causes an issue with internet connectivity for one of Jerry’s clients.

-Sam had a work themed nightmare where he accidentally deleted a client’s data.

-Jerry had a real life situation like this years ago.

-Sometimes it’s difficult to fall asleep when your brain is still thinking about work problems and solutions.

-Sam hit a hard limit of two step authentication with Apple IDs.

-He set up and eSIM for the first time to get a second phone number on his iPhone.

-Jerry updates us on his new managed services plan. He feels there is more money to be made with residential clients on this plan.

-After off boarding an employee, a company owned computer showed back up in Watchman after months of being dormant.

-Joe is surprised when a client immediately signs up for his monthly plan.

-Do you specify priority support in your marketing materials?