Managed IT Services in Traverse City: What It Costs, How Fast We Respond, and Why Local Matters

Clients and people named in the recording are left out of this transcript.

Why hire a Traverse City IT company

Hey, this recording is for talking about why you need to get an IT service that is based out of Traverse City and why you should hire a Traverse City IT company. So, what goes wrong when you hire an out-of-state or a down-state company versus having a company that is based here in Traverse City? Well, the first thing that goes wrong is you’re often going to get a help desk that is not local. They don’t know what’s going on. They don’t know the weather. They don’t know the area they’re going to dispatch to you that they don’t know how long it’s going to really take when there’s six inches of snow on the ground.

So, your first layer of issue you’re going to run into is the help desk. Then it gets worse. When you deal with your engineers and on-site issues, you’re getting whatever you can get that’s in the area or you’re waiting for a long time to get a good engineer. Traverse City is a town and it’s good to support the local companies. These are the companies that are supporting your business. I was born here, raised here, raised my kids here, and we are committed to the community.

I’ve been in business for a long time here and I know what it takes to survive in the North. So, having a large corporation or a down-state company providing your IT services, you’re truly just moving that money away from the community to people who don’t support, who don’t work in our community, who don’t have kids in the community. Go to the restaurants and use the services. So, yeah, when you’re working with us, you are truly working with people who are embedded in the community, people who live here.

My engineer has been here for 40 years. I’ve lived here for 50 years. My technician, Ian, is in his 20s and was born and raised here. His dad worked there forever. I think he’s retired now. So, we know the community and we will get on site quicker.

We’ve been born here, raised here. We know how to drive in the snow. If you need somebody to get on site, we’re not afraid of the snow falling. It’s just for us, just another part of the day. I’ve often said that if you… build your day around the weather here in Traverse City, you’ll never get anything done.

You can’t not do something just because there’s some ice on the roads or snow on the roads.

Albert Steed, President

Hi, I’m Albert Steed, President of Advanced Computer Solutions. I help my Traverse City clients by doing strategic meetings, technology business reviews, occasional on-site visits to fix equipment and replace equipment, and just generally meeting with the clients to make sure that their IT system is working as they expect.

How long we’ve been here and who we work with

All right, let’s talk about how long we’ve been doing work here in Traverse City. My oldest client in my system dates back to, well, this is when we got the system, but this was actually way prior to that. We started our business in the year 2000, 2001, and we still have clients that date back that far, 2006 area. know what one is a trucking company and the other one’s a title company and the title company has severe and extreme security needs and the trucking company doesn’t. So yeah, we’ve got big clients here in town.

great companies, great people to work with, you know, the Grand Traverse community is full of wonderful companies, wonderful business owners who are so committed to the town and, you know, those three, We We don’t screw around here at ACS. We’ve got a bill for approximately 60-plus businesses a month that we have under contract. And all kinds of sizes. Some are newer. We just brought on Single MOMM.

And some are older, like I say, 10 to 15 up to 20 years. And we truly love everybody we work with. through just to always have a good time with these folks. Let’s see, what else should we be looking for here? Yeah, so Advanced Computer Solutions itself was formed, I believe in 2001, 2002. I started a company called Iron Keep Technologies in 2000, 2001. I bought Advanced Computer Solutions in 2010, transitioned from Iron Keep to Advanced Computer Solutions.

So that’s how things have progressed over the years. Our biggest clients are 50, 60 devices. Smallest clients are all the way down to one to two devices. So it’s a great business. We love being in Traverse City, living by the bay. And hopefully that helps answer the question of how long we’ve been here and who we work with.

So those are kind of our retail client list. But again, manufacturing, retail, lots of lawyers. So I hope that answers the questions.

What happens when a server goes down at 9 a.m.

So what happens when someone calls at 9 a.m. with a downed server? Well, let’s start with nobody ever calls us at 9 a.m. with a downed server because by 9 o’clock in two minutes, we already know the server is downed. Our alerting lets us know that right away and it creates the ticket. It rings the bells of our dispatcher and our service coordinator and they will be talking with the customer. So, you know, I guess if a call came in at 9, we would have known by 845 and we would have already reached out.

So the premise of the question actually is not all that great because we will already have known it. We’re monitoring those servers like a hawk. The first thing that will have happened in a situation like that is our automation, our AI, will have looked at the situation, determined generally what’s going on. Is it an internet failure? Is it a tool failure? Are there other devices that are down?

It will then, when the ticket comes through, feed that information into the ticket so the techs know exactly what’s going on right away. Typically, with a server down, you know, if the AI determines it’s real and it gives the information into the ticket, letting the techs know what’s going on, that will go to Ian, potentially, first. If we just determine that it could possibly be something as simple as internet being down or reporting tool, reporting something that shows a server being down but it’s really something else, that does happen. DNS service go down or the tool itself can fail. In reporting, that’s usually within 15 minutes, so the way our service level works is within 15 minutes, if it affects the whole business, that’s how quickly we will be on top of getting an engineer.

So we will pull people off of other things if we have to, and you always get the right engineer or the right technician for the right issue. So it’s not a triage situation. It won’t go straight to a level one who will then go, to a level two, and then level three. We go straight to who is the right person to fix the problem that we see. And that’s within 15 minutes. He will then reach out to the customer, letting them know what’s going on, that we’re on it,

that the timeline for repair or for getting things back online, and then begin working on it. It’s very rare that we have to actually go on site, but when we do, we have two on-site techs, Ian and I, and we will be on site typically with a server outage, depending on drive time. We’ll have somebody dispatched within 30 minutes, less than an hour for sure. So you’ll be working with a technician or an engineer within 15, and within less than an hour, we’ll have somebody on site or coming on site. Like I said, if it’s just down the road or down the hall, which is the case here, where our offices are, we’ll have you on site within minutes.

If it’s out in Frankfort or in Petoskey or whatever, it could be an hour or two of driving. So within two hours, we’ll have somebody there. We do have spare servers that we would bring on site if needed. And so, yeah, we do come on site. We do dispatch rather quickly on an extreme situation.

And we’re going to have somebody looking at it really fast. You know, our average for a critical failure is less than five minutes before we have somebody looking at it.

Switching from your current IT provider

So, switching from a current provider, so you decided that you need to get better IT, and you decided that with the brilliant decision to go with Advanced Computer Solutions, what does it look like? What does the takeover look like? What happens with your IT system during a transition? Well, we have a very comprehensive, what we call onboarding, both process and standard that we implement. And the number one rule here at Advanced Computer Solutions when it comes to anything that we do is no downtime.

So, we work very hard to make it so that your staff is not going to be interrupted in any way in what we call downtime during a transition. We will start with working with the current provider, try to get as much documentation from them as possible. Then we will come on site, and we will document everything else, the gaps that come from the old provider, get that into our system. Then we will begin the process of transitioning the tools. So, those are your remote monitoring tools and your security tools, changing any passwords that you need to use.

Those need to be changed on any administrative functions such as your firewall or your server. None of that will result in downtime or interruption with your team. We do a lot of work during the night time. So, things like installing of new tools, installing of security happens outside of business hours. We are unique among MSPs in that we give you the option.

We do it during the day, and it could be interruptions, and it will get done more quickly. It will be usually cheaper, but that’s for project work. But in an onboarding, we usually build that into the price of how much it’s going to cost, and we usually do it after hours. We don’t normally include during the day just because we don’t want to get everything off to the wrong – we don’t want to have it go off poorly in the beginning. Because that’s very important that your team be comfortable with the new IT company.

And the last thing we want to do is upset your whole team by having a poor onboarding that interrupts things and breaks things. What is your responsibility? Well, there’s definitely a responsibility there. You’ve got to communicate with us and the old IT provider letting them know what’s going on. We will be hitting you for documentation. Probably the most important documentation that we want.

Getting to know your team, who’s responsible for what, that takes a lot of work. Often the old IT provider never really had that conversation with you. We will. And then, you know, passwords. If the old team, the old provider isn’t getting those to us, any line of business or special software that you’re running, we need to get familiarized. You do have to add us to a lot of vendors.

So your internet. If you’re a service provider, your phone company. If you’re working with some big software company, CRM or ERP or MRP, we want, typically we want us added as a vendor relationship so that we can call and get support if needed. So that’s quite a bit of work there. So adding us to those accounts. But it’s all stuff that, at the end of the day, when you have an issue, you’re not having to call the vendor.

We do that for you. So that makes your life a whole lot better down the road. Let’s see, is there anything else? Yeah. I would say that there’s never been a situation where we have not been able to successfully onboard a client, have them in a better position than they were prior to the transition, and do it without interrupting your team. So it’s 25 years of track record there. We’ll get it done.

What a flat-rate agreement covers and what it costs

Alright, let’s talk about pricing here in Traverse City in Northern Michigan for your managed IT service. So, what is the realistic range you should expect to find here in Northern Michigan? So, in Traverse City, there is a tremendous amount of competition from all over and you can find a huge range. I would say that for an all-in for your support to secure a device and your network, keep it all functioning, you’re going to look at anywhere from $50 to $150 per device for managed IT and that’s a broad range.

So, why is that range so big? Well, it depends a lot on the size of the network and the security requirements. Also, it depends on the level of service commitment that you’re going to get from the MSP. I find that for a lot of companies here in Traverse City, they do a lot of, they often have an on-site expert that can bridge a lot of gaps and this happens because we have to wear a lot of hats up here.

Our businesses are not quite as big as what you might find in a big metro area and so specialization is less. So, we have a lot of generalists at the company. So, at the low end, you might have a company with a generalist IT person there absorbing a lot of the work. And you might spend $50 per device and that will get you a, probably a two-hour service level expectation where within two hours you’ll be communicating with somebody at the company. That $50 would include support. It would include, you know, basic monitoring maintenance of the device.

It would include your antivirus and your managed endpoint detection. Typically not, it’d be rare if any managed contract at all ever included projects. Usually those are quoted. As well as professional services. So, if you’ve got $50, you might get one meeting a year with a client accountant. A client account manager or maybe zero meetings a year.

You might just get updates from the MSP in a form of an email or a portal. And then, so as you move up to the $150, well, that might include user security, email scanning and virus scanning. Employee training and security. Looking at your email system to make sure that you don’t have impossible log-ins. So, a log is in from, you know, Traverse City one minute and Bangladesh the next reporting and alerting on that. You might get a full-blown client account manager with real skill.

Somebody who knows how to help guide you in a strategic method, strategic way. Instead of just the tactics of we need, you know, new computers. And our, our, you know. We’re going to, you know, provide a help desk. But, hey, we’re looking at growing or we’re looking at this new piece of equipment or we’re looking at this new software. So, having somebody who can help you through that.

So, that’s, that’s going to get into the $100 to $150 range of your managed IT spectrum. All right. Some questions here. Let’s see. We already answered that. How does this compare to hiring in-house versus. So, if you’ve got a guy in-house. He’s doing everything. I would say that you’re going to actually save money at the end of the day.

Because, you know, let’s say you’re a, you’re a 100, 100 user, 100 device network. And you’ve got Joe, the IT guy. You’re paying him anywhere from 60 to $150,000 a year. Well, for what Joe’s providing. He’s not giving you the tech, the strategic. Because he’s, he’s just an IT guy.

So, he can’t give you the strategic level. He’s going to be slowly reacting to tickets. So, your team’s going to be waiting longer for service. And there’s no way he could be on top of all of the security, all of the maintenance and everything. So, with what that means is it’s either got to live with having an insecure network or you’re going to be outsourcing to a managed security provider.

So, let’s, let’s just put at a $52 or $50 at the low end times 100. Well, that’s 50 times 100 times 12. I’m going to pull up some calculator here because I want to give you the ratings. So, 100 users or 100 devices. We don’t, we’re not counting users at this point. We’re just going to stick with one because users do actually play a role in this.

At least they do in our, our system. So, 100 users times 12 is 60 grand. So, at $60,000, you can get a full-blown MSP. All your software for securing all your devices, all the maintenance, all the monitoring could include backup. That $50 might include backup. For, so all the support of your team, all the tactical things that your guy is doing now for 60 grand.

You’re going to get faster service. More in-depth knowledge of, of the IT world. All the software for, for securing the device. And here’s where it really shines. He goes on vacation. What are you doing?

He gets hit by a bus. What are you doing? Having an MSP with all the documentation in a portal that you can access. All of the knowledge spread across a whole team. So, yeah. In the end. At the end of the day, you’re going to save money and you’re going to get a better service. And there’s no reason to ever have an in-house guy if you’re, if you’ve got less than 3,000 computers.

In even 3,000, there’s MSPs that can do a better job than a, having an in-house team. It’s just because of the knowledge. All right. How much does it cost, managed IT cost? I think we’ve answered that. How long is an agreement with Advanced Computer Solutions? Well, we typically start at, at a year.

You can lock in your rates, though, if you like what you’re paying. And you want to hold it for two years or three years. We’ll go up to three years at the same price. If you want out, well, you got to pay. What does that cost? I don’t know what other MSPs do.

But we usually go to the end of the contract. So, you just pay the difference between what you’ve used and what’s left. Are there an onboarding fee? Yes. Most MSPs, most good MSPs are going to charge you an onboarding fee. Because that is going to be one of the biggest projects that you’re going to do with them.

It’s easier to replace a server than it is to onboard a good client. So, if they’re not charging, they’re either not going to be around very long or they’re not doing enough. And what you’re going to end up doing is paying for that onboarding fee down the road in poor service, lack of knowledge, lack of standardized network, things like that. What does the first 30 days look like? Well, typically in a managed service environment, the first 30 days is us getting familiar with your team, your team getting familiar with us, lots of documentation.

There will be a cutover date for support in the middle of that 30 days. Usually, we are done with the old service provider. Very rarely are we not done with the old service provider within the first week or two. So, 30 days is well beyond where we would still have to be talking with the service provider. A full onboarding, though, does take more than 30 days.

It’s probably more like a 90-day process because we’re going to be doing all the standardization, documentation, familiarization, getting to know each other. How do you do tickets? How do you submit tickets? How do tickets flow? What’s the billing look like? How do you get paid? All that happens very quickly. And then we’re going to fill out a full budget and roadmap for you.

That will show you what you’ve got, what we think you should have in place, and then what that gap is, and what it’s going to cost to get there. And even have the discussion of where should you be, right? Do you plan on doing CMMC work? Do you plan on doing work for the federal government? Well, if you’re not there yet, you can’t do it, well, what’s it going to cost to get you there?

Or, hey, you’ve got a lot of old equipment, and it couldn’t be as tactical as that. We’ve got old equipment. We’ve got to start to replace it. So, let’s build a plan. We’re going to do two a quarter, or one a year, or ten a month. Whatever works for you. And that all comes out in the onboarding and that business, we call it a technology business review, and within that is a budget and a roadmap.

Working alongside your in-house IT person

So one of the things we enjoy the most is having a co-managed relationship with a company. So you have a guy or gal, you have a person or even team that you have in-house that is doing a great job. But they’ve got something that either they don’t want to do because they figure they can do things, other things that have more value, or they don’t know how to do and the investment in learning is greater than they want to invest into. Or there’s just some skill gap that they don’t have. They just aren’t capable of doing it for whatever reason.

Maybe it’s security, maybe it’s help desk, maybe it’s, oh, I don’t know, strategic planning. So we love working with other technicians, engineers, leaders of teams because we do such a good job. We can make them look good. We can make them look good and make them more comfortable in providing the services they need to provide for the company. And then we can bolster what’s there.

So, for example, having a team for your help desk is way better than having one person or two people. So it just means that your employees get faster response. And then we have a great asset in that we have an on-site platform. We have a person who knows the systems inside and out. And when we come across something that maybe requires changes or updates or we need guidance, we always have a very solid person to work with.

Saves us from having to bring lots of engineering team and engineering time to a customer. And it allows us to grow in areas that we find easy to grow, which is help desk, which is what we’re really good at. Same thing with security. We manage hundreds and hundreds of customers. We manage hundreds and hundreds of computers with dozens and dozens of sites. We’re going to have a more profound understanding of what’s happening in the security landscape than a single team or a single person could have.

So we can help really close security gaps really efficiently and effectively. Yeah. So can we work alongside your current team or your current person? Absolutely. And at the end of the day, they will love us. Because we will make their life so much better.

Seasonal staffing and multiple locations

All right. Let’s talk about seasonal and multi-site businesses. Well, having been born, raised, and lived here in Traverse City, I know what seasonality is all about. I know that in the summer, things are a little bit different than they are in the winter. Can we handle that? Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny. People ask me if my business is seasonal and it’s not.

It’s never been. There’s never been a high-season or low-season people always say oh well Christmas it must be more busy or summer must be more busy No, we find that the workload is the same all throughout the year and that’s because we have Such a broad diverse group of clients that we work with which is kind of necessary here in in the north here in Traverse City Do we support multiple locations? Absolutely, do we support remote workers a hundred percent? We’ve got clients in Chicago area. We’ve got clients in Florida. We’ve got so we span almost the whole eastern length of the United States and we’re very good at it.

We do have actually have team teammates in the Chicago area because we’ve grown so much there. So between Chicago and the Grand Traverse region especially we’re very strong but we’ve got remote workers all the way to California with some of our clients and we’ve had people overseas, we have people travel, we can support all of that. So yeah, summer swings, summer staffing, not a problem. You’ve got multiple sites, Traverse City, Petoskey, Frankfort, Alpena, we don’t care. We aren’t afraid of snow, we’re not afraid to travel, we know the north so we can help you no matter where you are.