Agree with this method 100%. Rarely can you hop in a fix something with little info. Spending time to learn about the customer and not just their current needs goes a long way toward creating a good business relationship. Both parties end up happier.
On Nov 12, 2017 10:53 PM, "Justin Wilson" <li...@mtin.net> wrote: Speaking from a consultant side it can be a little tricky with a new client. I have been burned more than once thinking I was going to “hop in and fix it real quick”. Anymore, I want to build relationships with my clients. One of the last ones was a guy calls me at midnight having a traffic issue. He has two upstream pipes he wants to try and utilize and needs some BGP help. It’s an emergency situation because he is maxing out one pipe and the other is barely being used. So, I talk with him for 45 minutes on his drive home before he can give me remote access. I then spend the next hour or so writing out diagrams on paper trying to learn his network as quickly as I can. I then make some BGP changes and see traffic change and watch it for another 15 minutes or so. By this time his prime time is starting to wind down a little so I can’t tell if it’s normal traffic utilization or I actually fixed it. I tell client I made changes, spent 15 minutes typing up said changes, and say I *think* I fixed it but don’t really know enough about the network to say I did. Send client invoice and say let me know and we can look again at no charge. Three days later I get a nasty e-mail saying I didn’t fix it, goes on and on how he can prove I didn’t fix it blah blah. Oh, and by the way his normal consultant logged in and fixed it. Well yeah because the normal guy knows a whole lot more about the network than I did. Another off the street client had me look at some drop out issues. Again, same story. I have never touched the network and he calls me saying traffic just randomly stops for a second or two at a time. Start looking at things, start from the easiest things to look at. Spend 3 hours or so making sure configs are correct, etc. Bill client and say get back to me. Sends me a nasty gram 3 months later saying it was the switch the routers were hooked into and they had buffer issues. Why did I not tell him to replace the switch within the first hour?!?!?! These are just a few examples. Us WISP consultants are a small bunch and we all know each other. My advice is you need to find a consultant you can build a relationship with that works for BOTH of you. My regular clients know I pick up the phone in a pinch and am fair with them. However, they have taken the time and effort to build the relationship on their side too. Anyone new who calls me that is looking for someone to answer the phone in that pinch automatically starts out with a 3-5 network evaluation. I don’t go as far as labbing everything up, but I make sure the documentation is spot on. I still do the small break fixes, etc. but I am much more cautious about things. We all have our own way of doing stuff. Some people and I don’t click. Some do. I am sure that is the same with any other consultant. Justin Wilson j...@mtin.net j2sw.com www.mtin.net www.midwest-ix.com On Nov 9, 2017, at 1:10 PM, Sterling Jacobson <sterl...@avative.net> wrote: Similar case with me which I kind of already pointed out. They couldn’t figure out a BGP issue and wanted to virtualize and put in a lab and spend hours on top of hours analyzing. I stopped them right there and said no thanks to that. Then I called Dennis and he took a few minutes, found out it likely wasn’t my problem, and worked with my upstream provider to fix it. And it was fixed after some emails back and forth between all of us. I asked IPArchitechs to refund me since they had charged me hundreds of dollars to get nowhere. One of their sales guys made out a personal check to me for some reason, claiming his reputation was on the line or something like that. I think it was a shady play at emotions, but I don’t have many emotions, so it didn’t work with me, lol! I took whatever little money they could refund me, however they wanted to refund and ‘play’ that. Then they gave me credit which I still have, to use. Likely I’ll not be doing BGP stuff with them, but maybe they will do something more benign, like standard server work. *From:* Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com <af-boun...@afmug.com>] *On Behalf Of *can...@believewireless.net *Sent:* Thursday, November 9, 2017 10:01 AM *To:* af@afmug.com *Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] IPArchitechs We used them once and we weren't happy. I wanted to give them a try to see how they compared to others. What I thought was a simple BGP issue that could have been handled with a 15-30 minute phone call ended up taking over two weeks. They "needed" to get our router configs and virtualize them in their network. Then figure out which interfaces were backhaul links, etc. They then came up with a crazy network design that, to me, made no sense. After them burning a lot of hours on that, a simple call at the end of that process amounted to just creating a single EoIP tunnel to fix the issue. So my thought is they want to burn hours whenever they can. On Thu, Nov 9, 2017 at 10:04 AM, Paul McCall <pa...@pdmnet.net> wrote: So, IPArchitechs.... is there a current consensus on whether they are worth investing time with? We are looking to layer BGP within (or upon) our OSPF network to better control traffic between towers, subnets, etc. IPA talked a good game, but we didn't roll out with them. Any thoughts? Paul -----Original Message----- From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Dennis Burgess Sent: Tuesday, August 8, 2017 1:47 PM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] IPArchitechs We are always here :) Dennis Burgess - Network Solution Engineer - Consultant MikroTik Certified Trainer/Consultant - MTCNA, MTCRE, MTCWE, MTCTCE, MTCINE For Wireless Hardware/Routers visit www.linktechs.net Radio Frequency Coverages: www.towercoverage.com Office: 314-735-0270 E-Mail: dmburg...@linktechs.net -----Original Message----- From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Sterling Jacobson Sent: Tuesday, August 8, 2017 12:45 PM To: 'af@afmug.com' <af@afmug.com> Subject: [AFMUG] IPArchitechs That company was a bust. So I'm looking again for a professional team/company that can professionally handle my network contracting needs in a reasonable time frame. Dennis, I'll be asking for your help again in the meantime as soon as I get refunded from IPArchitechs.
