feeling frustrated

[RoadRunner]

Just lost a good business customer today.
Never lost one before ;-)

They are running SBS2011 and a Terminal server and it was time for replacement. Quoted on Server 2016 and O365 but it wasn't cheap as they needed a Terminal Server with full blown SQL as well.
We always had a really good relationship and we did the usual quick weekend call that someone can't login and all the rest that goes with it. They never had a problem with the server over the last 5 years and we are only 5 min away from their office. They got an additional director a while back and we have been looking after him has well and his home PC and so on.
One of the directors came today and thanked me for our exceptional services with full page letter of how excellent we have been looking after them $200 x2 restaurant voucher and told me they decided to go with a local cloud provider and move everything from on site to their datacenter.
Apparently one of the directors business friends told him that's the way to go and he has done it for his business.
The other guys are the biggest ones around here and are a local ISP and run their own data center.
They did not even ask us for a hosted quote. Given they are in Realestate and have currently 700GB data with heaps of big promotional files and videos I did not think a Terminal Server would be the way to go.

Puts a bit of a dent in our budget as we did server maintenance, cloud backup and supplied all the hardware for 15 staff.
I know you win some and loose some but it's hard to come by clients that size.
Might have to check if there is enough beer in the fridge for tonight

Guess it's time to move on.....

 

[Mick]

Apparently one of the directors business friends told him that's the way to go

That. You just need to give up on people sometimes. Number of times I've heard this: "Oh, a friend of mine said..." nonsense. I mean - would you have a couple of teeth filled because a friend had had his done? Or start putting Diesel in your car instead of petrol because a friend told you about the terrific mpg he gets with his diesel? Of course not - but when it comes to IT, what 'a friend' said trumps what a professional advises every time. I just say: "When you see or hear the words 'The Cloud', just mentally change them to 'someone else's computer'. " Doesn't always work, but...

 

[coffee]

There is still a chance. Lets just sit back and see how the first service calls go when they have issues. I bet not as stellar as your service

 

[RoadRunner]

Thanks, that was what I was thinking. I did not even know the other guys are doing on site stuff. Thought they only do datacenter stuff. Last week one of their old computers packed it in. They rang at 10AM and I had a new machine there fully setup by 12PM.
Still can't get over it. But I only started with beer number 2 so early night here.
It does not kill us financially as we are doing really well you just don't want to loose any clients that size.

 

[Archon Prime]

lol something will blow up and they will come crawling back. I can hope for it. Unless that ISP has their **** straight, then who knows.

 

[lan101]

I'm surprised they didn't even consult you about it, or even a quick email asking your opinion of "cloud" etc.

 

[coffee]

This kinda stuff happens when you date the Owners daughter.

 

[nerd2u]

Wait for the cloud migration to not work out the way they want. Then when they come crawling back charge them double

Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk

 

[HCHTech]

Wait for the cloud migration to not work out the way they want. Then when they come crawling back charge them double

haha. Yes - 2 hours from phone call to new PC installed? That's some A-grade service right there. Like the others said. i would thank them for being a great client, thank them for the gift cards and wait. Take your wife out for a spare-no-expense dinner. Glad to hear you can survive the loss.

 

[fencepost]

Hah, try medical practice clients. We're down/will be down 6 so far this year, though the sale of one isn't going to close until around the end of the year and we're still doing some limited stuff for three others as they close things out or as local IT. 2 purchased or will be purchased by a major hospital network, one purchased by a large medical group (>750 docs, >100 locations), one purchased by a multistate oncology network, one closed up and the doc went to that same medical group, one closed up and the doc moved out of state for personal reasons (I've heard rumors...).

What really hurts is that these big groups are going after larger practices, so we're looking at more than a third of our total seats.

 

[timeshifter]

I would try to arrange an exit interview. If you can get it go into it with an open mind, just wanting to learn. Understand why they made that decision. Maybe later you can point out some pitfalls they may want to watch out for. You may also want to go back with a hard pitch and show them why your offering is better. Or maybe your offer isn't better and you need to be adapting to cloud based computing in similar situations.

Also, what about the 15 PCs you support? Even though their new server stuff may be in the cloud, they still have PCs to maintain, right?

 

[lan101]

Hah, try medical practice clients. We're down/will be down 6 so far this year, though the sale of one isn't going to close until around the end of the year and we're still doing some limited stuff for three others as they close things out or as local IT. 2 purchased or will be purchased by a major hospital network, one purchased by a large medical group (>750 docs, >100 locations), one purchased by a multistate oncology network, one closed up and the doc went to that same medical group, one closed up and the doc moved out of state for personal reasons (I've heard rumors...).

What really hurts is that these big groups are going after larger practices, so we're looking at more than a third of our total seats.

How does that work when a larger practice buys them out? Do they have that many employees in the IT department and just send them in to revamp things or a new bidding for local IT companies? Just wondered what the process was and how the larger firms think on that.

 

[HCHTech]

Hah, try medical practice clients. We're down/will be down 6 so far this year, though the sale of one isn't going to close until around the end of the year and we're still doing some limited stuff for three others as they close things out or as local IT.

I had a pretty-good rheumatology practice client back when I first started my business in 2004. 2 Docs, 18 staff, always paid on time. I dealt mostly with 1 of the docs, he was very pleasant, easy to deal with and always paid on time. The other doc was abrasive, mean to the staff, unreasonable to deal with and generally a problem. It worked because the 1st doc always insulated me from the 2nd. Anyway, after a few years, there was a parting of ways between the docs and ultimately the practice dissolved. Fast forward to a couple of years ago. The abrasive doc had started a new practice and called to ask for a quote. Server(s) workstations, the works - setting up a brand new office. I decided I would quote them, but would make it worth my while. So we worked back and forth, I did a couple of walkthrus, and ultimately sent out a high-but-fair quote for a virtualized server with 3 guests, 12 workstations, firewall, switch, subbed-out wiring, offsite backup, monitoring - a complete package.

Never got any questions on the quote, I followed up a few times, and ultimately found out they went with a cloud-based solution. Don't know how they were maintaining the onsite equipment. I never even tried to find out - I was sorry almost as soon as I sent out the quote because I knew I would have to deal with Mrs. Crankypants on a weekly basis. I think I dodged a bullet, that's for sure.

 

[DMC Unlimited]

Hah, try medical practice clients. We're down/will be down 6 so far this year

A similar thing happened in our area about 2 years ago. We had serviced most of the independent doctor's offices in the area for many years, but a large out-of-town hospital bought up our local hospital and absorbed almost all of the small practices along with it (they really didn't leave the doctors much of a choice). We lost about 8 good accounts in a short period of time. We were fortunate enough to have plenty of revenue without these clients and have gradually added new clients to make up for the loss. I mostly miss the people we had relationships with all those years (and they miss us now that they have to deal with a corporate helpdesk).

 

[fencepost]

How does that work when a larger practice buys them out?

Well, for the one that's closed so far for a hospital network, the hospital network said "We want all old/existing IT equipment out by Saturday, and our people will be installing the new systems on Monday while the staff is at offsite training." They'd come in over the few weeks previous and put in completely new wiring, etc. going to a new location for a rack, switches, etc. I'll still be helping the doctors out with that one, because they're doing "Accounts Receivable Rundown" so we're going to host a couple of VMs for them for a year or so (also doing data export for them, pediatric practice but the buyers only took records/patients seen in the past 3 years so the docs are on the hook to keep data available for another 15 years or so). That practice was using a cloud-based EMR (via RDP), but the cloud vendor gives a 90% discount for A/R rundown and won't host it during that so it gets moved to own-hosting.

The second practice being bought by them (closing end of the year) uses entirely cloud EMR/PM (browser), we're not quite sure what's going to happen there yet.

For the one purchased by a medical group, that group spun off its internal IT and business services into a subsidiary that provides business and IT services to medical practices - that subsidiary reportedly covers practices (including the parent company) with 7,000+ doctors. As far as systems, etc. they do something very similar (though they're using Chromebooks for Epic instead of Windows workstations), though they still have us doing a little bit of work since they kept art of the legacy system in place while they work on data migration - I suspect that'll be fully done and equipment gone by the end of this month. I really wish they'd done the same thing as Advocate, because I'd have been quite pleased to be told "Take all these Thinkpads and get rid of them, with certification of cleaning."

Of the two that closed up shop, both were pretty sudden. I found out about one of them when I called the practice manager to check if everything was OK because none of the systems came up Monday morning. Apparently the practice actually closed in early June, but all the PCs were left on until the doctor actually shut everything down while having the office cleaned out. Oh, and she was the now former practice manager. The other involved a move prior to a new lease being finalized, a new landlord who was pushing for a very long lease and wanted to play hardball, a doctor finding out that his former employee physician was now a Director in the local hospital's Cardiology department, and reportedly some personal family issues for the doc. I wrote some about that one back in February/March.

We've picked up a couple of small clients, but 5-person offices don't compare to 40-person offices and I'm a little concerned about what sort of additional consolidation we may see.

 

[lan101]

Well, for the one that's closed so far for a hospital network, the hospital network said "We want all old/existing IT equipment out by Saturday, and our people will be installing the new systems on Monday while the staff is at offsite training." They'd come in over the few weeks previous and put in completely new wiring, etc. going to a new location for a rack, switches, etc. I'll still be helping the doctors out with that one, because they're doing "Accounts Receivable Rundown" so we're going to host a couple of VMs for them for a year or so (also doing data export for them, pediatric practice but the buyers only took records/patients seen in the past 3 years so the docs are on the hook to keep data available for another 15 years or so). That practice was using a cloud-based EMR (via RDP), but the cloud vendor gives a 90% discount for A/R rundown and won't host it during that so it gets moved to own-hosting.

The second practice being bought by them (closing end of the year) uses entirely cloud EMR/PM (browser), we're not quite sure what's going to happen there yet.

For the one purchased by a medical group, that group spun off its internal IT and business services into a subsidiary that provides business and IT services to medical practices - that subsidiary reportedly covers practices (including the parent company) with 7,000+ doctors. As far as systems, etc. they do something very similar (though they're using Chromebooks for Epic instead of Windows workstations), though they still have us doing a little bit of work since they kept art of the legacy system in place while they work on data migration - I suspect that'll be fully done and equipment gone by the end of this month. I really wish they'd done the same thing as Advocate, because I'd have been quite pleased to be told "Take all these Thinkpads and get rid of them, with certification of cleaning."

Of the two that closed up shop, both were pretty sudden. I found out about one of them when I called the practice manager to check if everything was OK because none of the systems came up Monday morning. Apparently the practice actually closed in early June, but all the PCs were left on until the doctor actually shut everything down while having the office cleaned out. Oh, and she was the now former practice manager. The other involved a move prior to a new lease being finalized, a new landlord who was pushing for a very long lease and wanted to play hardball, a doctor finding out that his former employee physician was now a Director in the local hospital's Cardiology department, and reportedly some personal family issues for the doc. I wrote some about that one back in February/March.

We've picked up a couple of small clients, but 5-person offices don't compare to 40-person offices and I'm a little concerned about what sort of additional consolidation we may see.

Thanks for taking the time to explain it. Yeah no doubt a 5 person office isn't going to bring in much compared to 40. Sorry to hear, hopefully some new revenue streams come in soon. Seems like serverless architecture is definitely the future like ole Eli talked about a while back.

 

[callthatgirl]

Honestly, when folks call me for Outlook help and I hear they are on an old server, I ask them "Why hasn't your IT company moved you to the cloud yet" and they say this back almost all the time "We have been asking them to do that but they..."

All it takes is one person outside the circle to change their mind and quickly. For those doing on-prem, might be time to think of doing what that other company is doing, just incase and have a game plan ready. I just gave my MSP referral a 20 endpoint last week. Small but a good contract. Their last IT company had them on Exchange 2003!

 

[RoadRunner]

Back again,

whole thing is over and done.
Now I got some more details during the handover. Turns out the directors surname is the same as one of the cloud company's directors. Some facebook and linkedin later turns out they are brothers.
They got the job handed without knowing anything. Didn't know what servers or infrastructure they had, nothing. How could they have quoted on a job without any details.
It get's better. I obviously quoted on a new server with server 2016 and terminal server with SQL licenses as that's what they need. Was cheap when we supplied the old server as SBS and premium licenses covered it all. Now all these guys are doing is taking the SBS virtual machine and the Terminal Server (2008R2) and move the vhdx files to their datacenter setup VPN and say here you go.
We supplied OEM licenses back in the day and as far as I know you are not allowed to move them to new hardware.
Of course what they do is cheaper. No O365 emails and no new server/licenses. Certainly not a setup I would have suggested as I don't think it's future proof to continue running SBS2011.
There are 3 directors. 2 never said anything to me and the 3rd guy is the one with the brother. I think they handballed it all to him and said we don't want anything to do with it.

At least it makes me feel a bit better.