Case Study: A company’s network goes down yet again. Their next decision gets them back in business—for good
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Door Automation is a Long Island-based company that sells and services automatic and manual, swing, sliding, and revolving doors for commercial, industrial, and apartment buildings. They’ve done installations for customers like The Whitney Museum, the Apple Store, the Microsoft Store, Home Depot, several airports, and many more. Their roots date back to 1970.
The problem
Part of Door Automation’s network had gone down yet again. Josh Gatoff, President of Door Automation, was fed up. He’d had many IT consultants over his time running Door Automation and he was super frustrated because none of them were very good.
He says, “They were constantly doing temporary patches to get things to work, rather than actually fixing things. As soon as they fixed something, it worked for a couple days and then something else would happen. It was just like, continuous remote access, onsite access to fix things and just constant billing.” They all charged for every minute they worked.
Josh and his staff were incredibly frustrated at constantly having to call the IT consultant back to fix issues the company had claimed they had already fixed, and this incident was the final nail in the coffin. He wanted a company that would fix IT issues once and for all.
The decision that changed their business
In mid-2015, he asked his personal network for referrals to an IT firm that would fix issues permanently and give his company the attention they deserved. No one would put their name behind their IT consultant. All of them had the same complaints of continuous “Band-Aid” fixes that didn’t last.
Finally, he asked his brother-in-law, a successful beverage industry entrepreneur with whom we’d been working for several months. He wholeheartedly recommended us and Josh called us to discuss his IT needs.
We then put Door Automation on our managed services plan where we proactively monitor and maintain his IT systems. This was something Josh had never done before so it was a big mindset shift for him. But once he became comfortable with the idea, this single shift became a godsend. He says, “You're always out there looking to prevent something from happening [to our network].”
Permanent fixes
Josh is incredibly happy that he’s found an IT firm that doesn’t apply temporary, “Band-Aid,” fixes that either break other things or stop working after some time. He says, “There have been much less problems when you walk in in the morning that things don't work, where in the past every day we'd walk in and there was someone having a problem.”
He continues, “We're placing much less service calls today to get things working, where before there was always a problem and something needed to be done to get us back working. So some of the things are being done for us without us having to call you.”
Predictable costs
Josh had never been exposed to the flat-fee managed services model of IT before. He was initially reluctant because he thought the costs would be higher than simply calling an hourly-based IT consultant instead.
But Josh says, “I think it's very close to being parallel [to the hourly model he was used to]. … Instead of getting big bills and small bills all throughout the year, it's just a flat monthly fee. … It's part of your budget. You know what it's going to be every month and you know what you're supposed to get for it. … It's like making your car payment. … The main monthly invoice doesn't need to be reviewed. It can just get paid. ”
Less stress and downtime
With previous IT consultants, computers would get viruses or suddenly stop working and Josh’s staff would literally be in his office doorway screaming that they couldn’t work. Computers going down made an already demanding work environment far more stressful. Josh says, “[My staff are] not IT people. They should get there and their computer should work.”
With InstanTek’s managed services, Josh says, “[People] aren’t standing in front of my office causing stress, preventing me from working.”
Based on InstanTek’s reports that are generated from our 24x7x365 monitoring, we have kept Door Automation’s network uptime at over 99.9%, or reduced Door Automation’s downtime to less than .1%.
More peace of mind
With our proactive managed services, we’re constantly looking out for new ways to secure our clients’ networks and keep their IT systems running better.
Josh says, “you're constantly doing updates and watching out for issues that are going on that we can't see and doing little fixes without us knowing it.”
“[The biggest surprise] has been that there was a service to monitor us and to be checking and trying to fix things before we notice them and constantly be looking for bugs and not having to have my staff be involved in it, was the biggest surprise. Good surprise.”
Increased revenue
For Josh and his staff, time is money. “[When my computer doesn’t work], I can't do any work. I can't get my estimates out, that means I can’t get a new job, and I can't send bills out so I can't collect any money. … I have less of that now.”
The reduce downtime and increased productivity has directly impacted Door Automation’s bottom line, which was an unexpected “side” benefit of engaging with InstanTek.
Conclusion
Josh didn’t realize and was incredibly happy to learn that “there was a service to monitor us and to be checking and trying to fix things before we notice them and constantly be looking for bugs and not having to have my staff be involved in it, was the biggest surprise. Good surprise.”
Josh and his staff now have far more peace of mind, they have far fewer IT issues, office morale has gone up and people are no longer stressed out and panicking when their computers go down, and their IT costs have stabilized.
Want these same results for your business? Get in touch today and let’s chat!