Allen Edwards
Good afternoon all. We’re all just kind of getting set up already. You are welcome to turn your mutes on mute them by default. This will be interactive. So feel free to chat or just put in with your mic anytime you like. And we’ll give it another minute before we get started.

How are you doing? Tracy?

Tracy Hardin
Good. How was your trip to New York City?

Allen Edwards
I was amazing. I stayed in Brooklyn, this time, which completely turned around right when I stayed in. Was it called lower? Lower Manhattan 20 years ago.

Tracy Hardin
Oh, wow. I like New York City. I find it very entertaining.

Allen Edwards
I found the same this time. This time.

Tracy Hardin
Well, we got back, had a good trip back. Ronnie ended up very sick, he’s still out.

Allen Edwards
figures,

Tracy Hardin
we call it I call him the California crud. I said take you and your crud and stay home.

Allen Edwards
For those just joining a tracer segment we went to a data con in San Diego last week. Personally, I just got back 10 hours ago by way of New York City. And as soon as we hit one after the hour, I will start the presentation big screen shared here. So let me get started. Just a couple minutes after here. You have reached the client onboarding presentation sponsored by it Doug or the it documentation users group. As I was cleaning up slides a few minutes ago, I realized I didn’t even have a slide really about it, except for the URL at the end. So I will start off with that. Tracy harden, who is the other one with the video play and she founded the it documentation users group just over a year ago. I think you started to help yourself, get some other feedback about it glue. We had some challenges, and she invited me to come co admin with her just under a year ago. And we opened it up to more than it glue. We found finding that a lot of our challenges are the same. Tracy, did you have some words?

Tracy Hardin
I was gonna say I found the group because I didn’t know what I was doing. And then I was joined by several hundred other people that didn’t know what they were doing. And then Alan, you join. So we’re happy you’re here.

Allen Edwards
We’ll see. We’ll see about that, though. I do believe we hit over 650 users in the last few weeks. I know the last announcement we had for walking, remember said about 13 folks, and we were going at iamcp and data con last week. So without further ado, the way I like to kick off the client onboarding presentation. As I get a little roleplay I’m gonna pretend everybody in the in this room today has a is an employee of one of your potential clients. So I walk in as the owner of Eureka process. Hey, everybody. Glad to meet you. I’m Allen Edwards, the owner of Eureka process. Your owner has asked us to come here today to take over your technology support needs. We usually bring a sweet treat. So if you look in the kitchen or whatever, you’ll find cakes, breakfast, whatever the case is be, we’d like to bring the things we want to start off on a good note with you guys. We do support differently. There are four ways to get a hold of us, you can call us email us. You can also see the link to our portal and our email address on your mouse pads in your desk. Today, we will actually have a technician coming by to every one of your guests to talk to you about your IT needs maybe something’s broken, maybe something slow, we want to hear about it. If we have a time, we will certainly try to fix it then and there. If we cannot we will put a ticket in with you and for you to show you how it’s done. Last would be cleaning up as we go and labeling computers so we can easily identify which machines you’re having problems with. So please enjoy your traits look for us in the hallways around your desk will be as non disruptive as possible. But I always like to caution you that you know we are making the changeover while we try to minimize any issues it could happen. Please just let us know we’ll be on as quickly as possible. And if I feel free to say hi to me while I walk around the building. I wonder how many of you guys have a onboarding process that looks remotely or sounds remotely like that? And that’s what today’s presentation is about it is about is how can we give that wow factor after the sale has been made? I do like interactive I realized that that many of us don’t like interactive when it comes to these presentations. You want to turn on your camera, get some work done, that’s okay as well. So with that in mind, though, feel free to interrupt at any time by unmuting your microphone and saying excuse me, I have a question or raise your hand and the participant windows hopefully Traci might help me see those I get pretty narrow minded sometimes when I’m trying to remember what I’m supposed to be saying next. Or you can hit the chat option as well. In your zoom, you might have to go to the little three dots that says more. and use that to find the chat option. If it’s hidden from your screen, it is on mine. So let’s talk about client onboarding. First, I always like to I hate talking about myself, but I like to say I have had some experience been around the block a while since 94. Jennings professionally. Yes, I know, it’s hard to do at the age of 29, to have experience with 94. But you can take that to the bank, I did on my own it firm. Oh, two 211 sold, it went to work for some others. And we had some great success success there. Which is why I founded Eureka process in 2017. Because I found that what gave us success at all of those businesses was the same thing, which was creating a culture of process. Sometimes it was the process that was hard. Sometimes it was the culture that was hard. But with those two things, we went far enough about me what I’ve seen most in the forums, not as much in it, Doug lately, but other Facebook forums as well, for our industry. What you see in the screen is pretty much your onboarding process, Hey, can I have a spreadsheet on how to collect this data. And this is what it looks like. And and this is great. This is absolutely necessary. However, for many this is this is the be all end all this is the ultimate part. This is all that happens. And and I think we can do better, because I think this is what every MSP can do. And we want to be better than every MSP. I see from one of our participants, Josh, he does, he also brings in lunch, for his onboarding, to show them the difference and those interviews. And Josh, I think you’re going to see a couple of similarities that are processed in your process here as well. And feel free to pitch in any time to add, yes, we’ve seen success of this, we do a different and this is why. First of all, the important thing is that all of this begins before the sale. It’s not just

it’s not just Hey, we got the contract sign we’re on boarded. At the same time, it’s not we get a check deposited, and the salesman’s not even done at this point. Because you want to make sure that you’re you have a proven process. And this is where you set your client up from the very beginning to understand that you do things a certain way. And that certain way guarantees predictably good results for your clients. And that’s why you do it. And you’re able to deliver a process. And this is the Eureka process. The words don’t matter as much. In this case, I recommend that most it firms have a similar process in that there is a linear approach to get them into a circle, and you want them in a circle from which they cannot escape, because they don’t want to escape. And so this is the proper process. Tracy is smiling, because while she and I talked about this months ago, she was the one who actually came out and design one for her company. And then with permission, I stole it and made the graphic work for my company as well. I think mine’s prettier, Tracy,

Tracy Hardin
if you say so.

Allen Edwards
Maybe it’s the logo. Definitely, this should be a part of your sales presentation, and something that you follow in your methodology going forward. Just to give you another example of a proven process, I didn’t wanna steal yours, Tracy, is, for example, EOS EOS worldwide, or the book traction by Gina Whitman. They always sell their services in a certain way, because this is the way that they’ve shown that it works. And this is the graphic that we have in every presentation regarding us meetings. Again, it’s a linear process into a circle, a couple of bullet points to allow your salesperson or yourself to go over make the sales pitch set expectations and show that you are an expert in your field because you have proven that this process works. I just realized that it looks funny you pointing me to my second monitor on the strings, it can be anywhere from anybody. So let’s jump into the onboarding project itself. And again, I am glad at any point to hear questions or what you’re doing or not doing related to this. You’re not saving for the end, it’ll be a very short presentation. I’m curious how many phases each of you guys has. Um, mine has four and there and I like the metaphor of of a launch of a rocket going on. It’s not the only metaphor you could use. So I have the pre launch phase, the night before phase, the launch day and post launch. I think, again, we all tend to focus on the launch day. And there’s certainly a lot to do there. And I’ll give you a little hint at how long they should work. But I think it’s super important that there is a concerted effort Before you begin, and in even other effort before you show up on site, because frankly, on site is expensive. And then there is a long process afterwards as well. So a couple of bullet points in the pre launch part. I like well timed introduction letters, it can depend on the size of organization, maybe all you need is one letter from us saying, Hey, thank you so much. We appreciate it. Here is what you had to look forward to. And guess what they have to look forward to the rest of your proven process. Tell them how client onboarding works. But you’re reinforcing that you know you’re doing and you do it the same way every time. As your organization gets larger, perhaps you have a service manager, let the service manager send a letter and it says things in it like, hey, if you ever have a service delivery issue, here’s my cell phone. We don’t want to lose you because you know, one mistake happened. We’re here to serve. Same career finance department, hey, if we ever make an invoicing mistake, this is how you get a hold of us. If you have questions. Here’s your first invoices do hopefully you’ve already gotten a CH letter permission slip signed at onboarding if sorry, at the sale, if not a great place to do it. Perhaps from the sales person or if you have a separate account manager. That would work as well.

Tracy Hardin
Yes. You imply the way you talk. you’re implying that this is like a handwritten letter where you handwriting it or emailing it. Turman who to give it to

Allen Edwards
all good questions. I do not handwrite mainly because mine are illegible. I, I don’t quite make it. It is a form letter. I firmly believe in customizing with anything that you may know personally about the client, but you have the basic principles to cover. For example, in my in my one of the service manager, I like to introduce the service team. Hey, these are who this is going to be who’s helping you. How long have you been with the company? make it personal minor and typed up? I will hand sign it. And you can certainly choose to email it. That’s okay. Yes, there’s impact and the mailing it. But sending it is also a huge step above your competitors just having it at all, even if it’s via email that answer your eight questions you asked one time. Thank you. And again, others feel free to ask questions at any time. Another piece I like to pre launch is I will frequently send a salesperson back in after signing to handle some pre launch tasks. We’ll talk about another one of those things, the salesperson is on to all their on site, we will even develop a probe PC, which is a PC, I frequently recommend the little $300 Intel nook. If you have a RMM agent, I put it on there. And I make sure this pro PC is as little dependent on their network as possible. At this stage, it might have to start out DHCP because I want a salesperson, no offense to our sales people in the room who may or may not be as technical. And I want them to get permission to plug it into the network so we can start seeing things before our launch day. The reason we came up with a pro PC concept years ago, is frankly Connect wise automate was a crashing servers in certain cases when the probe functionality was turned on through like any other separate PC. And then as we were improving this process, it came to Wow, is there any harm in not getting this installed ahead of time. So we actually have an idea what we’re walking into before we get there. So that’s what the pro PC is for and getting it in there early. While the salesperson is in there. We’d like to do data collection, that Excel spreadsheet, you saw on the previous slide on collecting passwords information such as send it to your client early, as soon as the agreement signed they after, etc. reference it in all your letters. At that point, you’ve now increased your odds of getting that data from zero percent to 5%. Which is still abysmal. Which is why when your salesperson goes on site, this is a chance to go hey, we haven’t gotten your data collection spreadsheet yet. Can I help you fill some of this out? Do you have any questions? Can we send this to your incumbent vendor and I realized sometimes you guys are doing hostile takeovers are not a great place to be in but at least through your client now instead of theirs. In that case, you collect what you can as best you can on that spreadsheet. You should have things like ISP data, you don’t necessarily have to have the incumbent for that, like who’s your telephone provider? How do we call them go through that and try to get that data in person. There’s bound to be a lot of blank still, but at least we’re starting the conversation we’re showing it’s important And they have a heads up on what they need before it’s too late when and we need it then, and there are lots of other phases in the early days, things to do. But those are the kind of the highlights and the uniques that I see is missing most often. And then we have the night before Faiz, Guess how long that last? You guessed it about a night. What we have found is that when we go on site, we were fighting some of the same problems every time and they were delaying us keeping our technicians on site far too long on the onboarding, not giving us enough face time the clients. And that was typically getting rid of the old incumbents, automation tools RMM install on your own. And same for the antivirus. So we started to do especially with that pro PC in place. And maybe you already have the domain admin credentials. If data collection went well, we can go ahead and that night, remove RMM remove any of ours install hours, possibly view that pro PC if not by other methods, and get a head start because now we developed a punch list of things, perhaps you’re maybe you have an RMM guy or somebody dedicated for that for this project. It’s like, Hey, I got these eight PCs, I can’t get the old stuff off of do it in person, as opposed to having to do all that while you’re on site. save yourself some time. Also, it’s very important that you have an internal team meeting.

Not only do you have to talk to the people who are going on site, you need to talk to your support personnel. This is go live day tomorrow. Your help desk needs to be prepared that hey, there’s more calls coming in. What is your process for this? Is it possible that you want them to refer them to the on site person? Or is the on site person when referring to the help desk? Do you need to staff up you need to make sure people aren’t out sick tomorrow and if so, where are the resources coming from? get everybody on the same page before you show up. Maybe there’s a dress code attire meeting place time carpooling parking, get that figured out before it’s too late. Everybody’s famous, his launch day, go live day on site day just got a lot of names. There’s a lot going on that day, I usually recommend taking a fairly large team. Obviously, you can’t stop working on it for everybody else. But if there’s anything you can put off for a day, let’s take care of problems before they come to your Help Desk on a constant basis. A good one is user interviews. This is where you as I mentioned him again, kind of my role playing initial speech, we’re going to go around to every computer, talk to the users. Yes, label the computer with a computer name. Teach them how to put in tickets, if they’re having issues, walk them through putting in the tickets, they know how, if you have time, take a first crack at it, maybe you can solve half of them really quick. The other half, let them know how helpdesk works and, and what to expect next. An easy one, clean the computer, take a wet wipe or a Clorox wipe or I’m sorry, alcohol wipe, clean the desk, lift up the keyboard, wipe the dust print away. It takes 30 extra seconds or so it makes a huge impact in how you treat the client how they feel about your company. And it’s that emotional bank account. That’s your attitude so that when things don’t always go perfect, they’re more likely to stick with you in the end, quick segue story. And again, I’m glad for feedback. I was in a conversation with a couple of it owners a few weeks back. And we found the most loyal clients are the ones who screwed up the first time and then did everything possible to make it right afterwards. Almost more loyal than those that went perfectly. I just thought I would share that tidbit. That is how you handle crisis goes a long way into relationship. Now and while your technicians are doing user interviews, your account manager or maybe your salesperson depending on how your setup should be doing an interview with the point of contact. This is once again going over that data collection sheet. Perhaps you also have security policies. And I hope you do we have a list of about eight pages of security policies with recommendations such as some that we say yeah, we’re just going to do these others we’re like we’re going to ask, and even others to go we don’t necessarily recommend turning these on unless you have a specific need. I only go over them with how this is going to impact users. So prime example. Hey, we require complex passwords. This is the disadvantage. This is the advantage and this is what we’re going to do. And it’s so important that you have to sign here releasing us responsible for responsibility denial of service letter. If a breach happens because this is not followed So that’s what’s happening in two different rooms, your technicians are scouring the hallways for users in your account manager is with your point of contact, going every day to collection security policies. Meanwhile, or perhaps later that day, you have another technician probably a higher level technician in the server room, doing what we like to do during onboarding. You want to take care of everything that you can’t do remotely while you’re there. And typically, this is a hub and spoke system so that if you can get items in the server room, you can get to everything else remotely, typically. So this is your chance to make sure your ILO, your off band management’s working. Do they have it? Is it enabled? Does it have an IP address? Is it plugged in? Can you get to it, make sure that happens today, because when you get a call late at night for something, and you’re still new to the client, this gives you options. And of course, there’s labeling the entire server room. So that end users can be remote hands if needed. And data collection writing down what swear lots of photographs, we’d have entire processes on what photographs to take where to store them. So that even the Help Desk residency there can say, oh, my goodness, you see the blinking light on this server, and they can describe to the end user where to describe that server at another neat idea, which I’ve seen nobody do yet, is putting a camera in the server room pointed at the servers, so you can see what’s going on remotely, at least should the network be up.

And the bane of my existence, or that I’ve seen is when people begin to master all of these standards. ajosh you mentioned you place one at all remote sites, so anything between them. So that’s cameras. So you are doing that I am curious how well that’s working. If you haven’t Mike would love to hear from you as well, Josh. Um, just interrupt anytime, on printers, those can be a pain in the butt to document and standardize on however I recommend for speed label each one per your printer naming naming standards, which you should have, print the information sheet for each one. Every now and you have one that you can’t print it from take a picture and write that label name on top. And then you can always input that later and save your on site time. And Josh mentions that for his cameras. It’s worked out great. He’s only ever had to use it once. But it was a lifesaver at the time, he might not use the word lifesaver. It also gives you a great security monitoring by having a camera in the server room so you can see who interesting comes at all times. And if you’re HIPAA, technically speaking, that door supposed to be locked. I know that doesn’t always happen, if ever. So most of you guys have a pretty good feel of what what should happen on site. Get your data, make the clients happy, get to know some people I try to send the same team is going to be working with remotely. But then you have the post launch phase. And I think the key to the post launch phase is you change is disruptive. I recommend when you’re on site only change what you have to change for example, as long as your password policy isn’t hideous. Can it wait another day? Can it wait another week? Before you change it, you don’t want to associate negative change behavior with your arrival on site. In this one case, what can be put off should be put off from the on site day moving into your post launch phase. For example, I mentioned that you might have standardization if you have security policies you standardize on or how maybe you rearrange Active Directory into certain folders so that anybody can find anything and properly set group securities in such great do those things are super important, they will make you more money. But wait, don’t do it. Day one, probably don’t do it week one, schedule these as little miniature projects. Make sure whoever’s handling that is communicating with your client that, hey, we’re about to make a change. We’re good at what we do. Nothing should happen. But we realize that nothing’s perfect. We don’t know your environment inside and out yet. That’s why we’re doing this. So please communicate with us and communicate with your team that changes happening as well. Again, you’ve really got to minimize your impact on changes. And don’t forget to keep checking in with your point of contact and your clients as this occurs. It you’ve set a high bar keep keep the bar going. And then my favorite are the post mortem meetings after every client onboarding. The first few client onboarding as we did as we as we started to develop this process that they took an hour or two. We had a lot of explaining to do and a lot of fixing to do. Those do get faster as the process gets gets better. I found this awesome graphic describing a post mortem looks like I completely stole littman loved it. You asked what didn’t go well. And I guarantee you, especially if you have a great culture, there’s a list already forming every one of your team members minds about what didn’t go well. use that to your advantage. Don’t forget to show appreciation for everybody that helped. So many of us as business owners, were quick to correct people. And it’s not even meant to be negative. It’s just we want to improve. But we don’t spend the time to take care of the things that are going well. Don’t forget to mention what went well, and show appreciation for those things. And then of course, generic ideas, how can we fix it? This is how the idea of putting the pro PC in early on came about is like, Oh, well, if this data can get done sooner, and it costs us nothing extra to have the salesperson attempt to plug into pro PC before we get there. These are great ideas. I’ve also seen some great ideas after analysis, we’ve decided you know what, the exact example. It’s too expensive to work any tickets while we’re on site. We didn’t see your return on that, or help desk is better clips are great. The winner on each desk taught them how to put in tickets, once that was established, that they didn’t work tickets. It certainly great face on the fix stuff while you’re there. But you know, we’re here to make a profit. And if you have a whole team standing by to do it, in a large workforce to get to so be it make those changes, learn from how things went before

Tracy Hardin
I got a question. Oh, my goodness. You’re talking like you’re only talking to your staff. Now? Wouldn’t you be doing some aspect of this with the customer as well?

Allen Edwards
In a way? Um, yes. And your point is well taken out, I will tell you the post mortem meetings that I’ve had in the past, were not with the the end users, the staff, sorry, the client, they probably should be not the same time. This, this did come up during our quarterly business reviews, which is, you know, come just typically three months after our onboarding. So we have gotten feedback to that extent, on top of the unintentional feedback, meaning going to a networking event running into a client who’s raving about Oh, yeah, these guys came in, or they, they brought us lunch. And I mean, just those wild factors, you get communicated out loud, even when you don’t ask. In fact, the ones you don’t ask about are probably the most, most impactful. But yeah, asking is certainly a good thing.

Unknown Speaker
You

Allen Edwards
if you ask, I’m totally off the cuff here with this information. Next. Be careful by asking too early. Sometimes they don’t see the whole, like, oh, you’re on site, you disrupted all of our people. But what they don’t realize is that you reduce ticket count by 30%. Because you came on site for a day. Right? That feedback is still good to know that that’s something you need to address early. Because if you set expectations, which is why in my original presentation, it was, hey, we’re here, we’re making some changes. We’re good at what we do. But things happen, let us know. Just to always set realistic expectations, or in the case of limbo always put the bar high enough that you can take care of it. Okay, good idea, Tracy. And then the fun part for you creative types. And I feel like most of us are creative in our own way in the IT field, branded this process. You’ve heard of a few. I hated when people mistake stuck my company name for the record process like New York, we are Eureka process. However, I realized that what we did was the Eureka process. So we branded that process. I’ve had another client who calls there’s the new client launch mission, which again, I love the rocket imagery. for that. I’m curious what you guys might have heard used, again, feel free to weigh in via microphone or chat. The client welcome initiative. noticed that, uh, nobody has used the word onboarding yet. Just like we don’t typically sell MSP in our marketing, I hope we’re not. Those are words that we use amongst us to talk about what we what we do. It’s a form of shorthand. But come up with a brand. And again, even if you want to post this and it, Doug, later in the week, if you have ideas on how to brand your client onboarding, do so. I’ll just call Tracy out because she’s been vocal. Have you branded yours yet?

Unknown Speaker
She’ll figure she’s muted.

Tracy Hardin
Yeah. I tried to mute because I have family in the house here. And animals. Yes, we have the pro care Pro. We’d do it because poker is our brand name for a managed service product. because like you said, nobody uses the word managed services.

Allen Edwards
One day that might change, but for now, it’s still like, what services are you managing again?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, yeah.

Allen Edwards
All right. And if you do have questions, we are running toward the end of our presentation. So please get those in here. We can answer them live. Tracy, let’s not forget the question you had at the beginning. Almost unrelated. But glad to discuss it. Well, we have everybody on board. And I’ll let you know it’s time for that. And I see Josh is also saying that his is also branded. If you’d like to share, please let us know we’ll bring it up. Alright, so just last points about the the onboarding process, get everybody involved. As Tracy mentioned, that includes the client. It includes your salesman, your account manager, your owners, includes everybody in the tech team, and I want to hear what Help Desk has to say, you know, just the little level one guys, you take tickets, how is onboarding impacting us and making your day impossible you appreciate In fact, we came up with onboarding, we made it a priority it No one’s come up with on boy, we made it a priority. Because helped us complain that we’re inundated. But tickets, we don’t know how to work after day one. So like, Oh, we need to get ahead of this. And that’s where we started really paying attention to the client onboarding process. Make it fun, I say that with caution. There is nothing wrong with breakfast, lunch, t shirt, cannons, confetti, ticker tape, parades. But make sure it fits your culture. 90% of my clients end up adding the words fun, somehow some way into their core values. And about half the time I talked about removing it. Because if they have to fake it, to have fun if they if they just think people want fun, it comes off as dissing genuine and then it’s no fun for anybody or, or as I like to say it puts the few in fun. So if fun is your thing, do it. You do need to be somewhat entertaining, do not bore them to death. That will not be done well. But you know, bring mouse pads, smile, food, almost everybody is capable of least writing a check for foods delivered. everybody enjoys that. And that will make fun. If that fits your culture best. Don’t be somebody you’re not be available. This is straightforward. In fact, Josh and I was in Albuquerque visiting Joshua, who’s on the call today. We were talking about just 1015 years ago. If you called Yellow Pages for any trade, including our field, he who answers gets the business because so many don’t answer. Same is true, even though you’ve already gotten the check sign in the positive, be available. That’s half the battle, just taking the call. Even if you’ve had a wonderful onboarding experience, make sure you remain available to them. This is a In fact, this directly segues into the next point, which is you set a high bar, you do have to maintain it now. So keep that in mind when it comes to your response times and the promises you’re making. If you first see a service challenge, tell them that say look I could possibly see based on your volume of levels. You know, it might take us a couple of hours to get to your tickets, is there some way I can help mitigate that have a conversation, the more genuine you are, the better your relationship with the client, the more you can survive mistakes, slower tickets. I’ve had a client who somebody quit it was a key position and they were a bit short staffed and behind tickets for a while. But by having that conversation the clients about what happened and what you’re doing to fix it and getting them involved in the process. Things were still fine. I wanted to leave you with a couple of resources you could possibly use to continue your education and ideas. One, of course, is it Doug? The it documentation users group that Tracy founded? Oh, so many year and a half ago. It’s now that we are approaching 700 700. Members, it is getting much more active. I would love to hear more questions and concerns out there, whether it’s details about documentation. I know I mentioned that the be announced this presentation and it was client onboarding. It’s like is it documentation? Is it not? I said it is love to hear your feedback on that. But you know, you have to document the client onboarding process. And then of course half the client onboarding process or more is documenting the client assets right.

So reach out there there’s a wealth of knowledge for people to look at dancer. I know Tracy and I are trying to weigh in just about every comment. with anything that we know or any connections we can help connect you to. Also, my website Eureka process, comm we just did an overhaul, there is now a member section you have to sign up for. But it has all of our processes, at least the ones we’ve had time to upload, which is most of them are available for your perusal. What I’ll do for you guys, if any of you guys will sign up for a trial, which is very limited access, I will just upgrade you to the paid membership, I just have to see the registration email across come across today. And I’ll upgrade you to the end of the month. So you can check it out browse, which is where you can get our client onboarding document all the details. Our quarterly business reviews our first year client visit plan. There’s a lot of stuff out there. I would love your feedback. There’s also discussion forums, and I caution you brand new site discussion forums currently has one post from me. And that’s it the whole forum. So it would love some participation there as well. Of course, you can contact me directly my contact info is there or find me in it, Doug, I’m freaking responding. Do we have any final questions or comments about client onboarding? And if time permits, and I have no idea what time it is, we can shift to Tracy’s question about clients employee onboarding. And there we have time.

Alan Miller asked, if we’re still looking for if I’m still looking on your wikipothesis account for initial feedback on my site, please, I always like feedback. Probably one of my selfish reasons for giving you guys are our stuff for free this month is because it’s new. I would love your feedback, you can drop them into the forum post there, there’s a improvement suggestions place or email me directly posted in it, Doug. Anything I can fix myself as an amateur, I’ll fix everything else I’m bringing to my developer who I’m meeting with tomorrow afternoon, would love to make some more improvement suggestions. Alright, so Tracy, would you like to reframe your question? And we’ll spend the next 20 minutes going over that?

Tracy Hardin
Okay, so my question was, do you have a process for onboarding new employees at a client? So it’s kind of a different type of onboarding? Do you have some type of process that the client must follow when they hire or let go and employee? Which of course they need to follow that to let us as msps know what’s going on?

Allen Edwards
The correct answer is I do not have one pre written and available on our website. That’s something I would love to write. And I can probably share with you what other clients have been doing with that. And I would love to hear Tracy ideas you have or anybody else who’s here today. what you guys are doing. First of all, it’s an agent’s security, right. So hopefully, during your onboarding process, you have a permission slip for who was allowed to request those changes, that permission slip is available on our website, not that it’s anything special, it’s just don’t forget to ask, here’s the form, fill it out. So that’s step one is verifying who has information. And of course, in this day and age, you might want to make sure that if they contact you, that you can verify they’re calling from the right place, or emailing from the right place, or you verify with them.

Tracy Hardin
For our clients in the financial sector, we actually have certain people that are approved, and they must open they must open a ticket to create user IDs or to disable them. So we have it in writing. So when auditors are all on site, we have a log.

Allen Edwards
Right? That is what we have done. You’re covered because you had written permission.

Tracy Hardin
Yeah. And but it also gives you a time date stamp and who made the request, and there’s only certain individuals at the client that have that power that you know, that we will actually act on.

Allen Edwards
Yeah, I got it. I got an Amen from Josh. So what about um, I cannot read chats at the same time. This is why I have an Allen, not this how many other Allen mentions that, you know, same for approval when there’s a password changes, is validating usually by a callback system, or in your onboarding process, documenting? Is that even allowed? Maybe, like maybe only so maybe only one person can do it? So you have to have those things to find ahead of time and we do have some of that online. What was your question? Your last comment, Tracy. I totally thought,

Unknown Speaker
Oh, gosh.

Tracy Hardin
Well, it was just about how we we’ve decided to use you mentioned Using a request form or having a form, and we just use our PSA, so I need to do it.

Allen Edwards
So how many people get the request, hey, I have an emergency, I need you to create a new user for me because I hired I started yesterday.

Tracy Hardin
With some clients where they don’t, we don’t even hear, we get a call, I just started work. And, you know, I need an account set up. And that’s how we find out. I have thankfully all handles clients.

Allen Edwards
Some people say that it’s all of the clients they have. But I definitely have folks who even have online forums, I know when using jot form, others using a website where they have to request a specific type of ticket to creator and a user and it has disclaimers on there, we need this much time to fulfill your request. Um, and the problem is, when those expectations aren’t met, we have entrepreneurs hate to tell them no still, because we’d like to make them happy. And we’ll do our best. We need to set expectations that hey, you interview this position. For the last eight weeks, you gave this guy an offer three weeks ago? He said yes. And gave two weeks notice. Is it unreasonable for us to get two days notice? And I would even take this a step further and say, Can you write your clients onboarding process or help them with it? Once you request passwords, when you request equipment that can take even longer? Yeah. For those of us using it, that could be a public document that you share. During your client onboarding, you can review those public documents with your point of contact, or the managers you might need while you’re on site.

I Josh shares his frustration to everyone in the chat that Yeah, we have the forums, but filling them out different stories from clients, I do hear that for most. No matter what expectations you set, no matter how often and early you communicate that they just don’t, it’s an afterthought. So it is what it is, which is a phrase I hate in business, we have to accept that in the end, we’re here to serve our clients. And all we can do is do our best to process around it and find the best client fits for us. These are also things to bring up into quarterly business reviews, or qbrs. Which is, hey, we can serve you better faster, you have less frustrations, if we get noticed on hires. I mean, total segue. But you know, as part of our qbr processes, interviewing your technicians, what drives you nuts about what’s Kalina about, they’re gonna see,

Tracy Hardin
we have a couple of clients that are constantly hiring, they just have quite a bit of turnover. So we always assume somebody new is coming on. We just don’t know who we’re where that will be.

Allen Edwards
We still know what what data to plug into the fields yet.

Tracy Hardin
Now we really don’t?

Allen Edwards
Do they give you that they give you enough notice?

Tracy Hardin
Um, well, they’re constantly I mean, they have positions posted all the time. And there’s just certain industries that are like that. They’re always hiring. In some of those situations, we have shared logins, which is not our favorite, but they turnover so much, they might have a person sticking around for just one or two or three days, and then they’re gone. And then the next person comes in. So in those situations, and that for that particular client, we had the machines locked down quite a bit, and actually moving them to Chromebooks and chromeboxes. To make it more secure, and of course, it

Allen Edwards
depends on the what security methodology you have to use, for example, you that’s not supposed to be acceptable, acceptable for medical records.

Tracy Hardin
No, this is not medical.

Allen Edwards
But I’ve seen the exception made that’s okay, on the PC, as long as they have individual login names to the EMR. Yeah. Yeah, again, not my favorite, cuz I want to know who’s doing what. And when it comes to manage services. Keep in mind that you guys have the ability to make that happen or not Meaning, if creating a user and removing a user is a pain in the butt for you, then it’s gonna be a pain in the butt for the client. But if you make it easy, like oh, yeah, we can do it in five minutes or live answer helped us have the process to create your users. Then maybe they like having it customized for the individual.

Tracy Hardin
And Joshua points out that I must have named users at all points including at the Active Directory, Mr. I can’t argue with him on that. That’s probably true. I would say for most medical smaller, established Don’t care. Fortunately,

Allen Edwards
I know some people on this list, many, at least one who just don’t do anybody covered by HIPAA because they’re tired of them not following it, they fell in essentially a lot potentially liable that, like, I don’t even wanna get involved. Yep.

Tracy Hardin
We do it because we’re already doing financial sector. So HIPAA is not quite as aggressive as financial sector, in a lot of the same tools and methodology applies. But yeah, it’s very, until they get into some kind of processes where they’re audited on a regular basis. They just wait to get caught, or something to happen. Yep.

Allen Edwards
Any other questions and comments from anywhere, before we do our wrap up?

Unknown Speaker
I was just gonna comment that you don’t have to write their entire onboarding or security policy, but if you can assist them with it, you can kind of nudge in, you have to be doing background checks. You have to be doing this. here’s, here’s the training that you want people to, to get or sign off on. And you can obviously put notification of you as part of that wherever you want. Yeah.

Allen Edwards
Excellent advice. Elena, actually, I just recorded a podcast that crawl palate shock about two hours before this meeting, because jet lag was not enough for today. Um, and one of the conversations that that came up, and hopefully you’ll, you’ll see that podcast on July 4, for those subscribe to small business thoughts. It is, it’s easier to edit something that exists or as he crosses in that in that interview, you can’t edit a blank page. Some by giving them something, they’re more likely to fix it. And the art to create it’s a great idea to get them started, especially for the selfish reasons of show them were were to interact with you bet, or how to prevent problems for you later. So we do is manage services. That’s actually what we’re managing. we’re managing the whole experience to make their business better, and therefore our businesses better and other comments. All right, well, well, thank you all for joining today. For those who are still with us sneak preview, on July 31, I think it is basically it’s the same day, the week meaning is the last Wednesday of the month, unofficial schedule we’ve been sticking to. We have and I don’t ever recall his name. I just booked this on the plane on the way here. But we’re going to be learning about Visio tips and tricks for documentation. The gentleman joining us wrote an entire software system for automating the process. I don’t think he’s gonna speak a whole lot about that part. But there’s so many things built into Visio. And I consider myself a Visio. Expert. And he proved me wrong and our 30 minute call to talk about that. So look for that invite coming out soon. And also look for potential feedback. And I will try to get this up on our website in the next day or two. So you can find this in our free section just to rewatch the video or share with friends. And the last reminder, if you go to wikipothesis.com sign up for a trial. If I see it come across my desk today, I will upgrade that to paid for the rest of the month. And any other parting words Tracy?

Tracy Hardin
No, I don’t have any at this time. Can’t wait to see the Visio one because I love Visio two, I’ve used it a long time. So I’m always looking for new

Allen Edwards
tips and tricks for that. And the next few days I will get that event created on it Doug and the webinar, link it all up there ready to go. All right. Well, thank you all for your participation in joining. I really appreciate it especially for the feedback. Alan Josh thanks again. And looking forward to seeing you on it Doug or elsewhere in the universe. You guys have a great day.

Unknown Speaker
My