When I was hired, I was given the title “Business Networking Consultant.” We were obviously doing a lot of the same things that Nordic does now, but the tone was different. We were hired to consult and help deploy technology for your business. Maintenance was part of it, but really, the consulting was the big piece. We did have contract options, but they weren’t set up like ours are now. They were designed to give businesses discounts and VIP priority in our support queue, but there was an hourly rate tied to them.

What makes a “Managed Service” different is that we are more responsible for the day-to-day operation of whatever we are hired to manage for you. To succeed in that role, we need more autonomy with the configuration of your devices. Whereas a consultant might say, “I recommend you adjust this setting in your firewall, and I can do that for you for $100,” a managed service administrator will just make the change. It allows us to be prompt and to fix things before their effect is noticed by your employees. A lot of what we do is behind the scenes, tweaking configurations, making sure things are being updated, etc.

If you add hardware and collaborative tools to the “IT Managed Service,” you get the Nordic IT Solution. A lot of companies bundle in collaborative tools to their networking solutions, but the hardware is where I think that Nordic really delivers a complete solution.

I read a piece on LinkedIn from another MSP the other day about how he was deploying Ubuntu systems for clients so that they wouldn’t have to upgrade their PC hardware because of the Windows 11 system requirements. He was championing how folks could still use their dual-core CPUs with low memory and sluggish storage by just totally transforming the environment that their employees worked in. Training employees to run Office in Chromium, or worse, switching to LibreOffice or a similar clone.

While I can totally understand (as a business owner) the need to keep the expense line down on my P&L, I also recognize that my employees’ time is my most valuable commodity. Anything that I can do to help them be more efficient, productive, and just happy at their work produces way more value than the cost of a new desktop every five years. If we looked at the cost of even an entry level employee, we’re talking about over $250k over 5 years. A new PC would be less than half of one percent of that employee’s total cost.

While that should be enough, I can understand when times get tough, and businesses need to tighten up their purses. This is why I calculate our hardware into the total picture for a client when we’re designing their Solution. Other MSPs are probably missing this opportunity, by either over-charging for off-the-shelf PC’s or keeping their monthly support fees too high, eating up their clients’ IT budgets. We have found that a 5-year replacement schedule is doable with quality equipment and low monthly fees. What’s more, we do this internally as well. All our PCs are running Windows 11 and have plenty of performance for us to all keep as many tabs open in Edge as we like.

-Nate