My hope in sharing these insights is that other business owners, operators, and managers from any industry can find parallels in their own world that can be used to improve their businesses, those of their clients, and the lives of their partners and teams.
This article isn’t just an explanation of who we are as a company. It’s not a commercial for Wayfinder Helpdesk, although I think it probably will explain a little about why we’re so good at what we do (and not so good at what we don’t do).
This article, and the associated ones to follow, are a look at the concepts and principles behind creating a certain kind of company for a certain desired quality of life. Our goal was to create a company that employees enjoy working for, clients enjoy working with, and owners/managers find genuinely fulfilling to run.
This isn’t really IT stuff, but an overview of how and why to build a business that people enjoy working with and for. It’s also, in part, a testament to Values, and what relentless commitment to those values can do on both sides of the fence for clients and service providers of all kinds.
I’ve been fortunate to have conversations with lots of people over the past few years about these ideas as we’ve integrated them into our business model, and I know that while we run an IT services company these concepts can be translated at least in part to just about any business model or type out there.
I’m really proud of what we’ve done here at Wayfinder, but that’s not why I feel called to share all this here in this platform. I share it because the insights, lessons, and ideals we’ve instituted and built our business around have made the lives of our team and clients a lot better, and I know it can do the same for others.
I hope you’ll find this is the case for you and your business as well. If you do, feel free to share this article, and check back for more like it as we get in the groove of posting stuff like this regularly. Obviously there’s so much more to all of this, but we’ll save it for future articles, and zoom in on any specific areas your feedback directs us to.
In the meantime, thanks for stopping by! I hope you find something in here that can benefit you, your team, your clients, and your business. Best wishes!
Adam Nix
CEO
Wayfinder Helpdesk
CREATING THE PERFECTED (IT) COMPANY
The IT managed services industry has always been kind of a wild world to operate in. Most people don’t have a clue what IT people do, and most IT companies try to do more than they should without much transparency as to what’s actually being done. This fun little dynamic leads to all kinds of adventures and lessons for business operators everywhere.
IT Managed Services Providers (MSP’s) almost universally have a standard mode of operating in which they position themselves as the end-all-be-all for every client type, in every industry and business model. They take on more than they should, they thrive in obscurity, and they fail to build their company around values that mutually serve their clients businesses as well as their own.
IT MSP’s almost always want to handle as much as they can for their clients, even when it doesn’t really make sense for all parties. Their reasoning is a blend of greed, ego, and “stickiness”. Stickiness is created between clients and MSP’s when the MSP takes on everything they can in order to make it difficult for clients to leave and take their business elsewhere. Stickiness is one of the biggest, most overlooked factors at play in relationships between business owners and their IT service providers. And yeah, it’s as nasty and shady as it sounds, but it’s embedded in the mindset of 95% of IT companies.
As a result, clients (business operators) often find themselves perpetually dissatisfied, underserved, overpaying, and in the dark about what services they need and are receiving. On top of that, the IT teams that support these clients are often overworked and in a constant state of emergency, because the IT companies they work for are constantly over-promising and under-delivering.
Our management team has been working together since 2005, servicing clients in virtually every industry and region around the country. We’ve seen up close how common problems like this play out again and again for clients and providers alike. No one truly wins.
So we decided to build something entirely different, and build it around values and principles that specifically address the common concerns virtually no one else is addressing in the IT MSP world.
Just to name a few:
- A lot of clients don’t even know what their IT guys actually do, often due to intentional obscurity on the part of the IT provider
- IT companies are generally pretty daunting (or obnoxious) to deal with personally and professionally. Engineers and regular humans don’t always jive well, and IT companies usually operate in ways that are complicated and difficult to understand.
- IT Services & Pricing are confusing & way too variable.
- Clients lose control over their business because IT guys handle more than they need to or should. This makes them “sticky” and hard to replace
- Clients are regularly paying for work they shouldn’t need and equipment markup that’s not necessary.
- Clients’ businesses experience more IT-related downtime than they should.
Over the past half decade or so we started really drilling down on the problems and virtues we identified within the IT services industry, particularly monitoring, managing, and supporting small to midsize businesses (SMB’s).
We used our client base as a proving ground for new ideas on how to better serve SMB clients and refine our offering and business philosophies. We felt for a long time that it could be done better than it was being done (by us or anyone else), so we gave it a shot. It took a few years of analytics, a few more of careful testing and adjusting, and what we came up with is one of the coolest business models in the IT support and management space anywhere.
WHAT ARE WE EVEN DOING HERE?
The catalyst for all this was having to address the existential problem within our own organization, which was that we weren’t super happy with our quality of life. Profit margins and service demands were too variable between clients, our team was overworked, AR was a nightmare, our internal systems were bloated and unwieldy, and there always seemed to be more fires to put out than there needed to be, often due to decisions made by certain kinds of clients.
It became our goal to create a company that people wanted to work for and work with, and one where we didn’t have to act out of accordance with our personal values in the process of doing our jobs. Everything else we did would unfold pretty naturally from that simple vision, at least that was the hypothesis, and it turned out to be the case.
We wanted our team to be happy to come to work, be paid well for what they do, have the resources they needed to be as efficient as possible, and minimize unnecessary or unforeseeable service spikes that negatively impacted everyone’s quality of life. Of course this attention to quality of life within our organization would naturally spill over into quality of service for our clients, as long as we held strong to our values, and only partnered with clients who shared those values as well.
So we came up with the core values we felt were most important to us as humans that would also translate to our business in ways that best serve our team and clients.
Respect, Authenticity, Transparency, & Simplicity became the pillars of our new business and would underpin every decision we made in the formation of our operating model. If it doesn’t pass through all 4 gates, we don’t do it.
We knew before we started that we were going to be absolutely ideal for certain clients and not great for others. We ran analytics over our clients for a long time sample, and found clear patterns between clients that really appreciated us, were highly profitable, and who shared similar values to our own. From this we formed our Ideal Client Profile (ICP) and decided these were the only types of clients we wanted to work with.
If we built our entire business around our ideal client profile, addressed their most common concerns, and filtered every business decision through the lens of our 4 core values, we felt like everyone would win. Turns out we were right.
So that’s what we did, and in the process we’ve created not just a unique brand, but a refreshing outlook on sales, operations, & business partnership
WHAT IS THEIR PROBLEM
The next thing we needed to do was identify the problems faced by clients and potential clients in finding, on-boarding, and maintaining a healthy, happy relationship with IT support partners. It’s shocking to most business managers I’ve spoken with how widespread and unaddressed these key problems really are in the IT services industry, and yet no one is stepping outside the box to address them in their operations.
Here are the key problems we identified and resolved with our new model:
FEAR OF CHANGE
- Most businesses are unhappy with their IT partners to one degree or another, for various reasons, but they stick with them (sometimes for years) because they don’t have much hope of finding something better.
- Most IT companies hold all the keys to their clients’ IT systems and infrastructure. This makes them “sticky” and hard to get rid of. Good for the IT company, not great for their clients in the event service is consistently bad and a change is in order.
SEARCHING & VETTING PAINS
- Finding a website that makes you feel good regarding values, coverage, & overall fit
- Scheduling multiple meetings with different prospective partners
- Invasive discovery process
- Obtaining multiple quotes from different prospective partners
- Overcoming uncertainty and finding peace of mind regarding coverage & pricing
- Pulling the trigger and hoping for the best
TRANSITIONAL PAINS
- On-boarding and off-boarding a new IT partner/client can be a headache. We’ve built our business around making it simple and painless.
- We empower our clients with full documentation and knowledge base at all times so we’re not “sticky” like most other IT companies. If we don’t do a good job for you we’re actually really easy to get rid of and move on from.
PARTNERSHIP ROLES & EXPECTATIONS
Our unique Partnership Agreement provides a clear understanding, in clear wording, about coverage, pricing, and the nature of our partnership. Unlike most corporate contracts, our partnership is outlined in plain speech and fully transparent, so everyone is on the same page at all times.
Probably 80% of business operators we’ve spoken to over the years have been unhappy with their IT partner for some amount of time – often months or years. Still, they don’t want to switch because the common perception of IT support companies is that they’re more likely to suck than not, so most business managers will tolerate the intolerable as long as possible when it comes to poor IT service. The IT devil you know is rarely supplanted by the one you don’t.
But should a business operator decide to start the journey of looking for a new IT partner they find the headache starts pretty quickly.
To start with, an office manager using a search engine to look for IT support companies will find hundreds of websites in their results. Most IT company websites look more or less the same, filled with similar technical and business jargon, dozens of subpages, and very little real humanity, authenticity, transparency, or natural energy. This is of course a reflection of the corporate world many of us inhabit in our work lives.
The more complex the website, the more qualified and capable the IT company, right?
As professional service providers in the world of corporate America, we often feel the need to be the smartest people in the room, to be everything to everyone, to try and provide the broadest offering possible to our clients, even when it doesn’t align well with our natural values. We bend to accommodate out of a desire to help, or for money, or out of fear we’ll fail to justify our existence to paying clients.
We’ve been there, and we wanted to operate as differently from that as we could. So of course we wanted our website to feel different, and to make visitors and clients themselves feel differently than other IT company websites. We wanted to keep it simple, authentic, and transparent. We wanted it to feel good. These are super rare qualities in the corporate world, particularly in IT, and we knew they’d be like a breath of fresh air to a lot of people. Our kind of people.
One of the most interesting and powerful realities we’ve been aware of for years in the IT services world is that there isn’t/wasn’t a website we could find anywhere that listed pricing, at least not in any kind of simple, user-friendly way. That piece in particular became our Holy Grail. Pricing is such a major piece of the puzzle for any business manager looking for IT services, and we wanted to be the only guys out there to offer it up front without any headache, board meetings, or lengthy proposal process.
So we created our one-of-a-kind, custom Cost Calculator, and made it available on our site with no information gathering agenda. Anyone can visit our site, fill in the 4 data fields on the calculator, and get an immediate cost for both of our Service Plan options.
This is an unheard of level of pricing simplicity and transparency in the IT support world, where most companies believe our services and costs are too complex and dynamic to simplify into a formula like ours. That’s a fair stance for most business IT professionals and companies, because most IT companies work with clients of pretty much any kind of business, industry, or management style.
Our commitment to working only with certain client types reduces volatility and allows us to forecast costs and pricing. It also allows for automation in helpful ways to resolve simple, common issues.
Reduce variables > optimize processes > automate wherever possible = reduce service costs & downtime substantially
Everyone wins.
BRANDING
The next consideration we made was branding. We’re a team of outdoorsy people, so mountains, trees, rivers, and the color green were all important natural features to us personally. These also happen to be the kinds of natural features lacking almost entirely in the branding and environments of corporate technology companies. So expressing ourselves authentically as humans through our brand had the effect of giving our website a really different, more pleasant feel than websites of other IT companies.
There’s something about natural values and the authenticity that flows from them that puts good people at ease, particularly in the business world. We knew from our client base that lots of good people are out there managing companies we would work great with. Planting our flag in a natural branding theme then would set us apart, while attracting the right people and repelling others that may not share our overall vibe as an organization.
For us this helps in pre-qualifying clients. For clients it helps them identify quickly and intuitively if we are likely to be a good fit from a purely vibrational standpoint, reducing uncertainty and providing comfort and peace of mind. Not everyone appreciates nature or natural values, but we tend to work best with people and businesses that do.
Another feature of our website that’s a reflection of our values is that we make no attempt whatsoever to sell anyone on our services. We know what we do is great for 80% of SMB’s, we know our pricing is outstanding for the industry, and we know that the right people will come to that conclusion naturally and easily on their own.
We’ve spent enough time in sales to know that in most cases the harder you have to work selling a client on your services, the more time you’re likely to spend justifying your existence to them for the life of the relationship, or even worse, constantly having to hound people for money.
We feel like a good fit should be pretty self evident to both parties. That’s why we don’t make an effort to sell anyone on our services or value, we just answer questions in the event our website leaves them with any, and let our values & offerings speak for themselves. That’s why we don’t have sales people.
Once a prospective client has visited our website, seen the simplicity of our offering, and in seconds obtained the pricing they would’ve likely spent weeks gathering from other IT companies, they typically already know whether or not we are a good fit. From there it’s easy. We both know what to expect, we feel good about it, and we make it official. Then we get to work with the on-boarding process.
From there things get fun as regular operations take over and we start simplifying and fortifying your IT environment.
THE WRAP UP
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You get to pick out a spider ring from the glass counter! We could go on forever into the concepts and principles behind creating a great company and the mechanics of its operations, and we will later. For now, let’s wrap today’s rant up with some key takeaways and get back to our regularly scheduled programming.
- Identify your mission and values. If you want to make as much money as humanly possible, great. Build a business around that core value. If you want to help people, build around that. If you want to run the kind of company employees enjoy working at and clients enjoy working with, build around the values you feel will best accomplish that mission.
- Be selective. Don’t try to be everything to everyone, even if it makes you more money. Do what you do best, define your ideal client profile, and build your business to be hyper focused on the services and clients that align with your mission and values.
- Keep things as simple and transparent as possible. This provides peace of mind to your clients, and reduces the potential for confusion around your partnership roles, responsibilities, pricing, and more. It also sets your business apart from your competitors in most cases.
- Create a brand that reflects the spirit of your leadership team, supports your mission, and reflects your values. The more authentic your brand, the less energy is lost to friction between your leadership and the creative output of your business.
- Identify any common problems rampant in your industry and design a business model that solves them, even when others say they can’t be solved. For us the biggest example was formalizing IT pricing when everyone else said it couldn’t really be done. Some people have no imagination. Don’t listen to them. There is no problem rampant in any industry that can’t be solved with creative thinking and the willingness to try innovative solutions.
- Know yourself, know your leadership team, get the right people on the bus, and make sure everyone shares similar values and vision for the company. Misaligned values among leadership teams is one of the most toxic sources of creative and productive friction in any organization.
- Last, but super key: Remember to be a real human being. We’re all human, and we’re serving other humans. So be human! Think and act like a real human. Embrace your personal values, surround yourself with managers who share those values, and don’t lose sight of the fact that we’re here to make a difference in the quality of life of other human beings, whatever our industry.
As entrepreneurs, business owners, managers, etc., it’s easy to get caught up in the artificial constructs, values, and attitudes of the corporate or professional world. Just by being an authentic, considerate, sensible human being, we can separate ourselves and our businesses from the vast majority of others operating in the modern business world. And in the process, we can enjoy the experience of human connection that so many people are lacking these days.
Let’s make money. Let’s help people. Let’s enjoy our professional pursuits and operate our businesses in a way that fulfills us and enriches the lives of everyone involved. Those are the kinds of goals I appreciate, and I guarantee if you do it right, you’ll make plenty of money in the process, and enjoy every day running your business so much more.
Thanks for stopping by and taking this long, meandering journey with me. I hope you’ve found some insight here that’s helpful to your or someone you know. My fingers are tired and it’s past my bedtime. Wishing you all the best and looking forward to sharing more and hearing more from you soon!
Sending good vibes to you, your business, and your team!
Adam Nix
CEO
Wayfinder Helpdesk
