Lessons Learned - Easing Into Break/Fix

Episode 06: Easing Into Break/Fix

(See the index to the Lessons Learned Series on the Lessons Learned Page.)

I was very lucky to have a great boss for the last fulltime consulting job I had. He allowed me to move from five days a week to four, three, two, and one over time. This allowed me to prove to him that there would be a smooth transition and that other folks could take over my duties.

It also put me on a strict timeframe. I had a countdown to getting additional clients. After all, I had a family to feed! I'm sure everyone reading this knows what that feels like. So, here's what I did.

First, because it was the 1990's I committed myself to getting businesses connected to this new fangled thing called the Internet. I was so committed to this path that I listed my business in the Yellow Pages as "Internet Consulting by KPEnterprises." I thought I was super clever. There were no other "Internet" listings. So, if someone called the operator (that was a thing) and asked for the Internet, they'd get ME.

Result: For all the time I had that listing, I never got a legitimate client. I did get several calls from confused people who wanted to know what their password was. Of course, I had no idea. And they were not businesses, but merely the first generation to get lost on the inter-webs.

Second, I went to a local print shop and ordered the cheapest business cards they had. It turns out, these had some kind of raised ink. I'm not sure what the process was, but it made them shiny and slightly 3D. I liked the feel, and actually got a lot of comments over the years. I bought enough to last a couple years. Maybe 1,000.

Third, I put a put an ad in the local Business Journal. It was about one inch in a column and didn't say much except computers, the business name, and my phone number. That DID get me a few small jobs. So now I had people who paid my going rate (more on this in the next episode). And, I determined to call each of them once a month just to check in and see if they needed anything. It was irregular, but it was money.

Fourth, I used the listings from the Business Journal articles to find names of businesses. For example, they listed the fastest growing businesses in the county, the youngest business owners, the top suppliers of something or other. Whatever the list, I got a person's name and a business name. I looked up the address in the phone book, and sent them a letter and a business card. The letter was super basic and just bragged a bit about my recent experience. I promised amazing service and asked them to keep me in mind.

Fifth, I joined the local Chamber of Commerce. I refer to it now as the big business chamber of commerce. I've since learned that the Sacramento, CA area has local chambers for several surrounding towns, plus the Asian Chamber, the Black Chamber, the Hispanic Chamber, and more. At the time, there was also a Small Business Chamber, which was eventually consumed by the big business chamber.

Anyway, I met someone at the Chamber new member breakfast who invited me to drop by her office and talk to the folks there. They became my first good-sized client. I'll call them Peabody Insurance. They sold primarily group health insurance plans for small businesses.

With this early win at the Chamber, I was sure I'd hit a gold mine. I was a member for five more years and never got so much as a nibble out of them again. Oh well. Peabody Insurance was a client of mine for more than fifteen years.

Their situation turned out to be a very common scenario. They had spent a huge amount of money (like $30,000 in 1997 currency) on a network, a server, and all the software it took to get them all connected. AND they had a huge customized DBase IV database that needed updating. We forget today, but that was very common in the pre-Internet era. 

They also had the experience that the folks who sold them all of that completed the job, cashed the check, and disappeared. They could use everything, and had passwords for most of it. But there was no documentation. Most of the paperwork that shipped with equipment and software was gone. What little they had was stored in the box that the server motherboard shipped in. 

A few scraps of paper. That's it. No warranties. No password lists. No explanation of how anything worked. No documentation.

BUT I was steeped in TCP/IP, Novell IPX/SPX, and network architecture. So I told them I could document everything. And I'm sorry they have to pay to have everything documented as it should have been from the beginning, but I can't work for free. 

They bought a block of ten hours at $100 per hour and I was officially launched with my first real client. After renewing the block of hours several times, they signed a contract for ongoing services. I think I got the outline of the first contract from a general contractor book. It was not a great fit for IT services, but $500 at an attorney made me feel like my personal finances were safe from any bad stuff that might happen.

And just for a kicker . . . Their backup was failing every single day, and they did not know it. The backup system they had was the old-school standard at the time. It used three tapes in rotation. This was called a grandfather-father-son backup. Every night, it was supposed to do a complete backup. And the tapes got switched. So you always had last night's backup and the two previous nights. 

I was slightly horrified as the backup I managed at the HP plant had a 365-day rotation. It included a full backup every night, and the tapes went offsite for 364 days. Tapes were not reused endlessly, and a full restore to any day in the last year was possible.

Unfortunately for the folks at Peabody, their backup required a complete, full, successful backup. Only then did the script complete and schedule the job for the next evening. At some point, for some reason, a backup had not completed. They had been switching tapes and never getting a backup ever again after that. Of course they had no way of knowing this. We'll return to this topic in Episode Eight.

Thus, my first real client in the new business arrangement was a model for future endeavors for many years to come:

1) They needed a specific thing. I fixed that and they learned I was a good guy to work with, and competent.

2) Nothing was documented and there was little or no paper trail. So I documented everything. Thus begins my obsession with documentation. I'd always done it. Now it was from a very different angle.

3) If they had a backup, there was a 50% chance it was not working. I fixed and documented it.

4) After selling a few projects/blocks of time, I signed a contract. With each client and each request for little changes, the contract got better over time. Eventually, I ended up budgeting about $1,000 per year to have the attorney review my "standard" contract a few times.

And all of that became the basis for my regularly monthly maintenance, which I'll describe in a future episode. Recall that I started by calling clients every month to see if they needed anything. Now, I scheduled monthly visits (often just one hour) to take care of some needed maintenance. I billed them for at least an hour. And then I asked if they needed anything else.

Peabody would buy a great deal of database programming and additional services from us. They were one of the models for my maintenance-based approach to monthly services. Over the years, they paid us well over two million dollars. It was a truly great relationship and I was lucky to have such good people as an early client.

One More Early Client Story

Another early client was HiTech-Z. They had been listed in the Business Journal for some high-tech fast growing list and I sent them my standard letter.

The guy who actually contacted me and asked me to come in was Jeff, the network administrator. He was a super duper Novell network administrator who was struggling to move to Windows and TCP/IP. But this was a very serious high-tech company that employed a warehouse full of programmers and did manufacturing for the control boards they sold. Their systems we an integral part of the NASA shuttle program.

Jeff called me it to see how much I knew, and how quickly I could help him fix some specific problems. As long as he paid the bill, I was happy to share all my knowledge and teach him the gospel of Microsoft networking along the way. So we got along well.

They did have some big, complicated, confusing problems. But many of their problems were related to a reliance on old protocols, old processes, and the limitations of certain old hardware. Time and time again, the solution was to sell them new stuff. A lot of it, they didn't buy from me because I couldn't get a competitive price. But I got to design the new systems and implement things whenever Jeff hit the wall. 

One of the coolest things I learned from that company was that Michael (the Best Boss Ever from episode five) was not alone. There are good bosses in all kinds of businesses.

One day, after Jeff and I had worked on several issues, we were just hanging out and talking when all the lights flashed off and on - in a huge manufacturing and production building with a hundred employees. I asked if something is going on and Jeff calmly explained. "It's five o'clock and we like to remind people that they should go home and spend time with their families."

In a world where some bosses treat employees like machinery that gets old and abused, and then replaced when it wears out, it was really great to see a company that built systems around work/life balance. It gave me a flashback to my last real job and how horrible work can be for some people. It was heart-lifting to see that some bosses actually believe that their employees will be more awesome in the long-run when you treat them well day after day.

. . . Oh . . . and Jeff became one of my first employees when it was time to grow my business. But that's another story.

Next time . . .  Common Sense Calculations - That are 100% Wrong.

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