I Don't Want Your Money - Here's Why

The company is growing a lot right now and we're thankful. I'll tell you though, it's not due to thousands a month of advertising spend or a fleet of sales guys making cold calls. The growth, as I’m told by customers is because we do IT the right way. The way that things should be done.

Because of this, we do not cut corners out of complacency. It's literally one of our core values.

As a result, we are often more expensive than whatever someone might be paying for IT and cyber security today. We hire and retain the best technicians and engineers around. Frankly, this causes us to occasionally lose contracts to cheaper competitors. You might hear that and think it sounds like a bug but it’s actually a feature. When a business calls us in to begin discovery on a potential partnership, they're vetting us. They're looking under every rock and around every corner to get a glimpse into the true nature and ethos of the business. To be completely honest, I'm doing the same thing. Within the first 10 minutes, I can tell if a business is fit to be a customer of ours.

This is my checklist:

IT Strategy

An idea of an IT strategy aligns with the business goals and offers a clear vision for using technology to meet those goals. They don't need to have it fully fleshed out, that's where we come in but they need to know that tech can level them up. Let's say we take Company X. They're a manufacturing business that's been successful in traditional methods for decades. We present them an automation process in Office 365 to cut down on mistakes and double entry for new customer onboarding. They're initially hesitant because it's a new way of working, but they're willing to see how it pans out. Months later, they are operating more efficiently than ever. The investment in technology helped them to get rid of repetitive tasks, freeing up their employees to work on more valuable aspects. We helped them see that a well-crafted IT strategy is not an expense but a growth catalyst.

Current IT spend

Let's not confuse "more expensive" with "wasteful" because I've definitely seen that as well. It's true, we often cost more, but that's because we provide drastically more value in the long run. Take Company Y as an example. They were working with a cut-rate IT company that provided them with basic hourly IT support. However, when a critical software failure occurred, the budget provider couldn't address it quickly, leading to days of lost productivity. After switching to us, the same issues were resolved in a fraction of the time, reducing downtime drastically. We also proceeded to prevent that problem from ever happening again. That's the value of an optimized IT spend - not just how much you spend, but how wisely you spend it.

Goals of the biz

Every business is unique, with its specific set of goals. The thing I'm looking for is the WANT to grow. Reason being is that static companies optimize for different things. Often these things are not what we provide. Sometimes they are, if they want to simply protect what they currently have, we also do that, but I digress.

Open-mindedness

It's a critical trait for our customers. Consider a mid-size company, let's call it Company A. When we proposed switching to a cloud-based infrastructure, they were skeptical. The concept of storing data off-site made them uncomfortable. They were used to being able to touch the hardware that housed their data. But, they were open to the idea, gave us the green light, and we guided them through the transition. Today, their data is more secure, and they've seen substantial efficiencies and improvements created by being able to expand their workforce. That's what being open-minded can get you – tangible benefits that are hard to see when you're stuck in old ways of thinking.

Listening well

Pretty self-explanatory but no one knows your business better than you do. We need you to be experts in your field, just like you need us to be experts in ours. Listening well is not a passive act; it's an active process that helps drive growth. We do it and hope that our customers do as well.

With all of this said, what I’m really trying to say is if we get to the price part of the conversation and that’s one of the sticking points, I don’t want your business. The sole reason for this is that if you're thinking about technology in your business as a cost center and a necessary evil, you are not going to be a good customer of ours.

Now you might be saying, "Hunter don’t you guys want to grow and get as many customers as you can, and make as much money as y’all can?" My answer is a resounding no. I want the highest quality customers we can find because those customers understand that we do things the right way and make recommendations that keep their business and their goals in mind. We don’t think about IT as a cost center for us or for any of our business customers we think of it as a value driver. Companies that don’t have that mindset are not customers of ours.