I can run my business solely on the Managed Services revenue... the question is, are you charging a fair price to you and the client, or are you charging a fair price for the client only?

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: boudj

Based on your answer/question boudj, I would say we are charging a fair price for the client only. Do you currently provide a help desk type feature for those clients under your program? Do you have a dedicated person managing Kaseya? I see a major problem in the future regarding our billable hour dilemma.

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: ITRTech

My two cents worth as a new Kaseya user. It is extremely difficult to just go out there and get the people to accept your Managed Services option as the best thing ever. Most of my clients are happy with the concepts and the installation and running etc, but it is clear that most do want to still have the human touch. That in itself means that the Kaseya will not cover all my costs. I am not unhappy with the program, but I am a bit concerned that most support desk queries do not really solve the real world issues every time and also that one is left to develop most of the backend at great expense in terms of time and effort. We are small and it is going to be a long while before we break even on the use of Kaseya. That being said, I do believe that it does add great value in the normal day to day managment processes, but as you have said, at a loss if you spend a lot of time being careful.

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: massador

I charge one price each month that is a mostly all in price. I do charge for KES and BUDR separately. I have 2 helpdesk persons, 1 helpdesk Mgr, 3 field engs, 1 noc/project person, 1 sales, 1 CTO (me), and 1 service manager (I also have 2 guys dedicated to a job site full time and 1 accting person). NOC, after it you catch it up is performed as follows:

-> Patches are checked monthly (and approved as needed).
-> Event logs are monitored for specific event sets (and for errors) on servers
-> KES is monitored daily (the client pays for this when they get KES)
-> Backups are checked daily by the Helpdesk Mgr (not too bad once you setup alerting)
-> Reports are scheduled for employees and clients.

Considering I support 1800 + agents, I do not find I need someone fulltime to support my K server.

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: boudj

Thanks Boudj, Your information is very insightful. I realize our biggest problem is as folllows:
-> the price per agent (workstation/server) doesnt reflect our actual cost of doing business
-> we dont charge for extras
-> we give away to many services "as part of the agent price"

Does your one price option include repairs done remotely to servers/workstations such resolving errors in the event logs, exhange issues, AD? I am assuming all onsite visits are billable depending on the situation.

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: ITRTech

Our Managed Services cost are all inclusive for server and workstations. There isn't much that's not included except software costs, hardware costs (purchases), etc. Now if the client decides we need to upgrade all of his systems, I'll have him sign a 2-yr agreement or pay a project price (and I have this happen from time to time). If you want more info, feel free to PM me.

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: boudj

Here is my 2 cents canadian, we are a small company 3 techs all out doing work at different sites. We had differculties getting existing customers to sign on for managed servers at a price where we could hire someone fulltime in the office for the help desk. We had to customize our offerings about a million times to to get a balance of what we can perform for the customer, and we make a profit. We did not want to get in a place where we had to have a full time person managing a limited number of customers and not having the revenue for his wage. We have been very successfull with offering the backup, KES and patching only to existing and new clients. Once setup this requires very limited resources day to day due to the alerting that we have, and everything else that we do onsite for the customers are chargeable. The customer gets the 3 things that they want, we make a profit using Kaseya, and we still have 3 techs doing onsite calls at the regular billing.

Grant

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: gdoubinin

Here is what I have been using. I brand it ConstantCare.

www.yourconstantcare.com

I am changing the service to allow the Gold level to include offsite backups. Originally it was designed to give support to Line Of Business applications, but I've found either they have support already for it, or I don't want to support it.

I'm going to offsite images using the BUDR offsite replication feature between two sites.

Otherwise Silver gets them a local backup.

All remote support is included in the price.

Onsite support non MSA related is price reduced %25 for MSA customers.

Onsite Restoration for HD or system failure I am not billing for as it feels weird to bill for, and it's only happened twice.

I'm using Cloud Services Depot for my K licensing, and it's not onerous.. yet.

I have a couple trusted sub contractors I use for remote when I need them.

Usually I use LogMeIn Free as a secondary login, and just give the contractors a sub account for the day or two they need to fix the problem.

CSD has a service desk and NOC addon that I am considering. Server pricing is $80/mo which I have to think about.

Desktop support is $8/mo which may be a little easier to swallow.. but I have to do the math. I don't have a lot of people calling me for problems, once we get them patched and cleaned.

I can tell you that I am making a truck load more cash using this than soaking clients with Break/Fix work.

You have to price correctly and stop giving things away. I've done a bit of research for this pricing and feel it's pretty solid. Some folks say I'm low, some say it's high.

The only issue that's starting to come up is larger amounts of data being replicated for the flat Server Gold price. Some clients are 50 gigs. Some 500.

Haven't decided on putting a surcharge after a certain amount, or just letting it ride and making it up on the spread.

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: FarVision

Is unlimited Remote Support provided with your Bronze Level (L1) or just monitoring?

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: billmccl

Thanks for the information Farvision.

Since migrating all our clients to a Managed Service package, we have developed a hole in our budget. The unlimited remote help desk is eating up 90% of all workstation problems where as before we would charge for either remote or onsite work.

We monitor the logs on the server and send the client a "Request for Service" email/quote outlining ongoing problems on the server/network. It would include a estimate number of hours to resolve. This helps but subject to the clients approval.

Volume is our only course. Signing up new clients doesnt seem to be the problem, we just need a truck load of them break even.

Is the desktop support an additional service you offer for $8 on top of the Managed service package?

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: ITRTech

billmccl

Is unlimited Remote Support provided with your Bronze Level (L1) or just monitoring?

Just monitoring. I am building out a 'What You Get' sheet, but for now just tell them face to face. I've never actually had anyone go for Bronze. I just use it as a lowest tier showing.

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: FarVision

ITRTech

Thanks for the information Farvision.

Since migrating all our clients to a Managed Service package, we have developed a hole in our budget. The unlimited remote help desk is eating up 90% of all workstation problems where as before we would charge for either remote or onsite work.

We monitor the logs on the server and send the client a "Request for Service" email/quote outlining ongoing problems on the server/network. It would include a estimate number of hours to resolve. This helps but subject to the clients approval.

Volume is our only course. Signing up new clients doesnt seem to be the problem, we just need a truck load of them break even.

Is the desktop support an additional service you offer for $8 on top of the Managed service package?

The $8 per workstation is the CSD remote remediation support service I would pay for, then submit ticket to them, from my users. For now my techs can use LogMeIn sub accounts to access client machines as I give and remove access. I have not yet had any trouble clients that eat up all my time. Usually we get minor email and web issues that are solved in 30 minutes or less.

I used to give them time blocks per workstation but it was too cumbersome to track (getting a CRM solution in place now) so I just told anyone to call with any problems, and the calls just magically stopped.

Weird psychological thing. Tell someone they are metered and they call all day long to use up the time. Tell them they are non-metered and you never hear from them.

Using the standard patch, KES and Backup solutions here solves about 99 of the problems. They get that monthly exec report and sleep happy.

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: FarVision

I edited but it didn't show up.

To answer your specific question, the $8 I would pay on single workstations if the user was tying up my techs with stupid crap.

This hasn't happened in a while, but usually ccing the office manager on support tickets stops the small stuff.

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: FarVision

I am really struggling with finding the right amount to ask for my service like all in managed services.

Are you people counting by users or workstation / servers?
If you are counting by workstations / servers, how do you solve the following:
Customer has 1 terminal server and 20 thin clients. The thinclients don't need any maintenance.

I am a bit scared to ask to much for the service, but then again if i ask not enough it will only cost me money. If i ask to much it will cost me money too, because the customers like the way it all goes right now.

The problem is also that i don't have any references what to do about pricing. So please keep replying this topic and hopefully i finally can find the right path to my solution.

Legacy Forum Name: General Discussion,
Legacy Posted By Username: RemcoVi