Greek Phalanx
Peridocially, Jay and I like to hold an “all hands on deck” meeting with our team. We call it our State of the Arsenal address. It’s a chance to gather everyone for half an hour and ensure we’re all on the same page and marching in sync. With so much going on lately, we decided to hold one this morning. Read more…
We had a pretty good laugh at the lunch table last week about the companies that are calling home computer users telling them that their home computer has viruses or is running without important security updates. Everyone knows someone that this has happened to. My wife had this a few weeks back and walked me through the call. She knows me well so she played along with the call taking notes on their pitch. Even though she professed to work at an elite IT company that focuses on security, they said they were far better and there was no way anyone at our company knew what they knew. They insisted our home computer had issues. She then asked which computer (we have several). He said that’s not important – and repeated that we had issues. She asked for the computer name – he must know the name, right? – he again said that it wasn’t important – that our computers, data, and credit cards were at risk and we must quickly sign up for a program that would resolve all our computer problems. She then said she was going to conference in her computer security expert and the gentleman hung up.
Some of the other stories spoke of these Super Tech’s having a message on their screen regarding the issues with home computers or even people being told ‘I am looking at your computer screen right now and you have issues!’.
All great scare tactics and at the lunch table we found it quite funny…
BUT – then these super techs crossed a line – this weekend they called my Mother! Now, thankfully, my Mom has been schooled – over and over about the pop ups that warn of viruses and promises to speed up her computer….she knows they are BS….so she too successfully dodged the super tech’s assault. I high fived her and explained how her judgement was sound and why (she was so proud!)….but it made me concerned for all the people out there that would bite on these attacks….make sure you pass the word that these calls are happening and are a scam – even though you might know they are – about 1/5th of people will bite…see link:
http://www.securitynewsdaily.com/fake-tech-support-scams-dupe-thousands-0880/
Jason has a line that we like to repeat around the office as often as people will listen … ”trust is a difficult thing to build, and a really easy thing to lose.”
At IT Weapons we’ve cultivated a pretty valuable habit in our team; under-promise and over-deliver. In other words, never commit to more than we’re capable of, and always do a little more than what was expected. We are honest about deadlines, we are honest about costs, and so our team (I think) has become pretty good at managing client expectations accordingly. It takes work to find the balance that fits, but the result is priceless; we have loyal clients who trust us.
Brainstorm Immortalized
Years ago, when Jay and I began dreaming up a managed services practice (MSP), we set some goals: we would take on the accountability of our clients for the IT portion of their long and short-term business strategy. It seemed a natural extension from our growing consulting practice; which has always been rooted in delivering the best TCO and ROI-based solutions. We took seriously the idea that our projects had to enable our clients to make bolder and more confident business decisions; growing their own businesses becoming more profitable. Selfishly, this made great sense for the long term success of ITW too. As or clients grow, they would need more services from us! Win-win, right?
Well, after hacking around on various teams, we decided to put together an official IT Weapons hockey team for this winter season! We are very excited. We have mostly IT Weapons people (Wepz) on the team but several clients have joined us to ice a decent team this year with a 15 person roster. We have our first game tomorrow night and are chomping at the bit to dirty up the new jerseys.
Each Wep will be wearing their ITW#. If you didn’t know, each employee has a designated Weapon Number. They are generated in order of hire. We use them for everything; our phone extensions, our DIDs, our license plate numbers, and even in our XMAS drawing order. I will post brief game summary blogs here as the season progresses but won’t clog up LinkedIn or Twitter with this stuff. Let me know if you play in the True North Hockey League (Brampton).
Speaking of hockey, we are always looking to set up friendly games with clients or vendor teams … (we’ll even pick up the ice time bill and do wings and beverages after the game!). But I just can’t promise we’ll play ‘customer hockey’ 
It’s good to be Canadian, a Hockey fan, and a small business! Oh yeah, the current Wepz on our team roster are: me, Jay, Nuno, Brett, Chris C, David S, Gary, Kevin R, Mike E, Robert C, and Robert E.