So I went to one of their offices today to do a check--
They have 8 machines at this location that need to be 'tuned up'. Some have problems like they're slow when browsing. Some need to be connected to a printer. Pretty simple stuff. I offered to do a full cleanup/tuneup for all, which would include:
Total thats $255 for each computer...
Which equals $2040 for just the computer tuneups.
That's a great price... If you only want one shot at supporting them. I can't imagine they'd want much to do with your services after they got a $2040 bill just to "tune up" some computers.
But, is it worth it, knowing that 8 computers are going to feel and work like brand new, totally in sync with printers, online backup, and remote support?
In my opinion, no. And the reason I say that is unless you do something that prevents them from being able to change anything (eg microsoft steadystate) on their machines the "brand new" feel you mention will be very short lived and they'll remember that $2040 bill a lot longer than how smoothly their machines ran.
Should I cut them a deal because of the amount of work I'm getting? What kind of thing would you do in this situation.
In a word yes. But not because of the amount of work you're getting initially but because of the partnership (ie service contracts) you have the potential to develop.
Also, I offered and recommended that I take the machines home, say 2 at a time, and come back each day. They have employees on their computers doing stuff all the time so I figured it would be easier.
I'm not a fan of removing business machines from their locations to work on them. Sometimes you have to but in general I'd rather do the work onsite at their location. It's a pain in the butt with three employees and their boss standing over your shoulder, but in my experience it beats the incessant phone calls you get with things like:
- "Is my computer ready yet?" (an hour after you left the site)
- "Is there any way you can bring Bob's computer in first thing in the morning, he really needs it!" (10 minutes before you're wrapping up for the day and "Bob's" computer is scheduled to be worked on late the next morning.
-"I forgot blah, blah, blah document on my computer and I need it for a meeting in 20 minutes..." (of course they have no idea what it's called or even what location it's in nor can they explain why it's saved to the local drive and not the network share)
Should I run scans and stuff behind their work? (Accounting stuff).
Not sure what you mean with this.
If I did this job for a quoted price, than Id sort of have to play a different game when they ask me to 'fix something' on a computer.. could drag out to a lot of hours.
The initial time investment to get a company's computer systems up and purring is can be significant. Particularly if they haven't kept up with it in the past. For work I go in and take over small to medium sized businesses (3 to 100 desktops not including servers, printers, and networking) and it can be painful. My boss is happy to break even on the initial services, but he hooks them on the work and a maintenance contract once we show our value to them.
For example last week we took over an office with 12 machines and an exchange server. It took about 3 hours on each desktop and another 5 hours on the exchange server to get them "optimized" for a total of 41 billable hours. If we had charged full price it would have been $5125 ($125*41) but he charged about half of that ($2500 to be exact) and got them to agree to a 12 month service contract. We
are available to provide 6 hours of service a week (2 hours on site, 4 hours remote) for $3500 a month. Regardless if they use their allotted time they still pay for it. Kind of like insurance.
Obviously they get more than just peace of mind for $3500 a month;each system was imaged, we're pushing two backups of all their critical data - one to a local nas sitting on their network and one to a nas on our network twice a day, and we've setup 24/7 monitoring with alerts using nagios and spiceworks. It's pretty standard with all our clients. All of that is automated, and initial setup took less than 30 minutes (nagios, spiceworks and the backups) excluding imaging the drives.
Or, I could go in and work on an hourly wage, one computer at a time, and cycle through. But this seems inconvenient, especially with scans and stuff. I don't think that Spyware is a big problem on their computers, just wanted to make it part of the process, because you never know.
I'd go with a firm quote. Be fair but be willing to cut them some slack in the interest of getting a service contract. If you don't believe you can get them on a contract then that changes the majority of my answer, but if you can I'd work everything towards that one goal.
Couple questions:
-For the above job, what would you price. (8 business computer tuneups)
Hard to say without actually seeing them, but I'd probably do everything you mentioned for $1500 on the condition that they agree to a service contract of 12 months. Actual cost per month depends on how many hours you agree to, systems you'd be working on, and how available you need to be (24/7/365 availability is a lot more expensive than 9 to 5). If they aren't willing to do a service contract I'd still give them a bit of a discount, but not much.
-What is your hourly wage? (if you dont mind)
We charge $125 an hour for service during normal business hours, $225 an hour after hours/weekends/holidays.
-For time slots, how many blocks of hours and how much for that?
If the best you can get out of them is prepaying for blocks of hours then I'd say go with your normal rates for the first 40 hours then start discounting from there. Maybe 2 to 3% discount for every 15 hours over 40 they buy.
