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welcome to computer repair podcast episode number 320 white-label hardware services is our live show where we discuss the ins and outs of running your computer repair business our show today is brought to you by instant house-call remote support that it's easy for you and your customers to use this must-have tool with features like on-demand for your break fix customers and unattended for managed services you can do automatic repairs with the auto repair built in software it will save you time and money when you're supporting your customers check it out for a free trial at instant house call com use the offer code pod nuts in by busy bench the all-in-one management tool simplifying IT for the computer repair business with a clean and simple interface spend more time running your business instead of learning your management software for a free 14-day trial just go too busy bench comm use the offer code pod nuts for 30% off the life of your account and also buy untangle next-generation firewall the best solution for bringing powerful network security to your clients in an easy to manage and cost effective package on tangos Partnership Program helps repair shops add cyber security to their services and get up and running quickly get started today at untangle comm forward slash pod nuts let me introduce the co-hosts with me this week we have Anthony Remus from Remus computer solutions Anthony how you doing good man happy Sunday a relaxing day today awesome good to have you man it also somebody who has not been with us in a long time and I'm excited to have him back because he's from where I was born and that excites me plus I know it's a lot warmer there that is Brad Tory from T TCS Computer Services Brad how you doing doing good Jeff you know I looked at the weather between us it's only like like 10 degrees warmer maybe it's it's we're about to get some rain and stuff so yeah I take a little personal time and you know now I'm back to shaking hands kissing babies getting work done that's odd man good to have you excited to have you guys on the show today and John is a way for the weekend he took the weekend off so we will see him uh I believe next week yeah he told him I was gonna be on the show he said I'm out all right so I'm gonna throw this I didn't talk to you guys before about this so hopefully we'll just run with it and we'll be real good and so I'm gonna throw it over to Brad since you're more of a veteran and been around for a very long time and that is what is a tip or story that we could learn from so I've got like a story that will evolve into a tip as usual I think you called it a torii at one point basically I just got done with I have a restaurant client that has ten locations and so we had to do a PCI audit as they change their credit card processor and now it's going to be a regular requirement these this correct this processor actually does that so it was pretty the biggest audit I've had to do and I told them I'm like right off if they're gonna do this you're gonna get fails for your camera like you have camera ports open and those are just going to show up as fails because DVRs are running on junk on updatable software all the time and that's just gonna happen so we may have to just close those ports off we might have to upgrade those I don't know we'll have to figure that out but the biggest surprise to me was it's kind of new from what I've gathered I got fails on like five locations because the firewall was so stealth that they just couldn't they didn't get a ping response or any response and so in the error the fail error in the log is host not detected and it's like yeah that was the point like that's how we do it if you don't know it if you can't log in then you don't get in and you don't even know that we're there that was that's my design and so anyway it was about a lot of back and forth it turns out I just needed to dispute it and know the exact wording for the dispute because the first time I disputed it they like sent me a link to a support article and stuff and then I found the phrasing and it's basically do the extent of this is by design but you have to say we're not using any IPS to specifically block your scans and just we're just into Delta mode we have can.oh and you have to say you've confirmed the IP addresses are correct and we are online it's just that we're wearing stuff up and then they're like okay that's like ah that took like a week Wow yeah because of the back-and-forth and and they don't answer the phone all the time and it was a mess but ultimately at the end of the day what I I kind of what I was playing with all this my little tip would be aside from just that if you run into that knowing how to dispute those I started playing with the N map again and that's fun like you can just find the public IP address of some place and do a full nmap scan on it and see everything that's open about it it's good to do on your own networks I think if you just like the firewall and you want if you think it's secure like running an app scan against your IP and see what you come back with and you you know you might be pat on the back nothing comes back and you might be surprised what you'll find so good times that's good that's a very good tip yeah I agree with you we need to run that stuff on our own networks so we know what's going on and it it makes us better in knowing what we're doing when we're out at a customer so that's a great advice there okay Anthony you are up and do you have a tip or story for us this week yeah I think it's like a 1.5 tip like a tip and a half the the thing I always tried to do in the beginning was planned to scale and along the lines of planning to scale is make friends with other people that you know are in the industry I mean kind of like what pod nuts that you know is about so that if you have a growth in your business you're not scrambling for vetting people or whatnot which is kind of what we're doing right now we're going to be growing and bringing on a builder and because I knew people in the industry I already knew who to go to for my first guy and thankfully he's willing to move to Nevada so but yeah yeah that's plan to scale that's kind of the plan I guess awesome that's good good advice there all right my tip is I actually stole this from Darren Hardy in Darren's daily tips if you're not subscribed that's a short little podcast he does I think there's five tips a week and then he has a Aaron Haley video also that you can be you can subscribe to him subscribe to both and he is the author of the compound effect book we talked about probably a year or so ago if you haven't read that book definitely check it out it really tells you on the best way to compound your time in your business because I think the number one thing we're always looking for is time and that's where we're we're missing a lot of just in our lives all right so the he talked about on this particular podcast I was talking about Andrew Carnegie the steel guy and so he was talking about how Andrew Carnegie short story I basically did this in a secret Facebook group and kind of gave the long version but he basically Andrew Carnegie had brought in somebody now this is in the 1800s to basically help him in his group figure out how to scale kind of what Anthony was talking about how to be more productive and one of the things the guy did he sat down with Andrew and he sat down with all of the managers and and people that were part of the business and had a talk with them and basically told them to take their to-do lists and we talked about this in the past take that to-do list and you're gonna take the six top things off that list and you're going to it after at the end of the day you're gonna schedule that for the next day so you're gonna get rid of those six things and even if you don't get through the six let's say you only get through three you'll take the three you didn't get done and you move that to the next day and the guy went through the company did this Andrews like well how much you're gonna charge me the guys like I'm not gonna charge you anything unless this works and we'll give it a three-month trial and see what happens well basically at the end of three months the company was moving so fast and furious that everybody was more productive things were getting done and the company was growing Carnegie wrote a $25,000 check to this guy that here you go now $25,000 back then in the 1800's was worth about $400,000 today dang yeah that's a nice little check-in because it's him it's important but what I got out of it is and we've taught there's many different systems out there but a lot of times if you dump the things off of your brain onto a pad of paper or some note-taking device on your computer tablet phone etc or something that can sync between all of them here's the thing if you're doing this part-time maybe you don't have six tasks that you do every day maybe you only do one which is kind of what I'm doing I'm doing one to two tasks a day then I'm gonna move to the next day so what's nice is at the end of the day I look at my calendar because everything else is in my calendar and I can see what blocks of time do I have open or what do I have going on so therefore I can pick the tasks that need to be done here's now there's urgent tasks obviously but urgent tasks really are probably daily things that are put in your calendar anyways but the stuff that you want to get done the stuff that is gonna make you more productive in your business those are the things you go yes I know I need to get done yes I've got it down and my to-do list I need to handle it but what point are you gonna handle it because what ends up happening is all you deal with is putting out the fires for the day so anyways that's my bit of advice go out there create a just a brain dump of all the things you want to do in your business have it an ongoing list but then don't get don't worry about that list just concern yourself with the info of things that you pull off there on a daily basis and this is where I'd always heard that you set your goals in the morning and you know it's it's hard do that sometimes depending on your schedule but this is the first time that I've heard this where he was like set your goals or your tasks do you want to get done the next day at night or after the close of business that makes perfect sense because like I said I can look at my calendar and so there's many different ways to do things and I'm excited about being able to knock things off my list even if it's only one task a day that's seven tasks a week done compared to the maybe one or two that I was getting off of my list and as I was adding other things to it so that's my tip for you is go out there and try to do something if you find something that works for you tell us about it if this has helped you let us know because that's what we're here for is to give you one little nugget of information that may help you in moving your business your personal life or alright and with that being said we're gonna take our first break before we get into our main topic which I'm excited to hear about and that is we're gonna talk about that's right Techcon unplugged bringing the IT community together kind of what we do here join like-minded business owners for a weekend packed with resources to help your IT business thrive hear from experts and get one-on-one time with peers facing the same challenges walk away with concrete action items to take your business to the next level September 20th through the 22nd 2019 in Grand Rapids Michigan go to tech con on plug com be there or be square right so going into our main topic how do you sell white Lael white labeled yeah I can't speak white label hardware services or other white label services now Anthony brought this subject to me and he had mentioned that we we done it a while back and we probably that I think was back on I don't know episode 140 something I looked it up and I forgot anyways or 117 or something like that anyway it's Chris growers and I had talked about his white label service at the time and the different things that he was doing and we've had Anthony on the show before and we've talked about kind of what he does in his business but he's kind of going through these these changes his business is growing and so we're gonna talk about some of those things today so Anthony I'm gonna kick it off to you and just give us a little bit of background on kind of where why this topic came up and give us an overview of what you've been doing lately sure and and this is something I'm still trying to sort out in in my brain like but I'll give the quick history I started the business in about 2015 well not about it was 2015 building custom computers and I thought the focus was gonna be gaming computers because like you know I don't really know anyone in the workstation field but slowly really early on I just kept getting hits for workstation builds whether that's I mean stuff like deep learning video editing just all I mean all kinds of stuff so within the first year the path was clearly I was out selling more workstation than gaming gaming systems and so much so that even niche down into the architecture space building computers primarily for those guys along the road last year I started collaborating with who I it technically considered a competitor of mine and we've kind of teamed up where I've been white-label building their workstations and more recently another a software company wanted to start bundling computers for their software but they wanted it branded and I like their own system and you know these are small number sales where Dells not going to touch them you know so that started about a month and a half ago two months ago and I just built the first one that's I think supposed to be like a demo system they'll ship out to people to try their software and Paco LeBron actually recently a couple weeks ago sent me a lead and I might be doing a full on completely branded custom-designed chassis for another software company who's trying to bundle hardware with their software so their users have a good experience so I've kind of just recently realized man there's not just a market for high-end computers or workstations there's even a market that I'm just realizing for white label hardware services and that's kind of what I'm trying to sort out like how does how do I grow that but also supporting that like I mean why label services I'm currently shopping for our you know IT while able perhaps to offload the customer support aspect of it so I could focus on manufacturing just I mean that's kind of I guess the background and the direction but I'm still doing one-off custom builds and you know primarily workstations but you know the real money comes in when you start doing like multiples for business owners and stuff like that now Anthony let me ask you a question did you think back in the day back in 2015 when you started this thing up did you think it was gonna be something that was going to grow and that you're gonna be able to make a living at that was always the dream but really when you tell anyone that knows anything about computers it's very like well that'd be a good hobby but you're not gonna make any money I mean and I mean last year I did 130 computers which like I mean that's a comfortable income right there and through the white label I'm current building four they're getting picked up by a reseller so now a corporate reseller is gonna start selling them and I could turn into I don't know yet because it hasn't started it'll be more like June when they'll start selling we're gonna train their salespeople in May but that could be a 2 to 400 computer like workstation like build out a month just for that one client and that completely changes everything now it's like do we need like a legitimate like warehouse that like supply chain issues could come up when you're trying to buy that many CPUs I mean all kinds of stuff like that so I thought it was just this was always a goal I just didn't know how far it could go really and then four years I mean that's pretty awesome well the reason I bring that up is because a lot of people out there and it's a people make fun of me all the time because I I kind of rail on the the the words that we use in the industry the things like MSP all right managed service provider and all these different things because I feel there's a lot of people out in this industry that basically say hey this is man you got it you got to move from break fix to MSP and this is the way you're gonna be that that's the way you're gonna make it or you're gonna die I just heard on a podcast today and I'm sorry this guy I'm not gonna call him an idiot but he's an idiot and he basically said that basically you're not going to be able to make it unless you're making you know 2 to 2.5 million gross revenue a year in your business well I'm here to tell you that is a bunch of malarkey and that is not the reality of life in and that's why I'm very interested in what Anthony has done because he's doing something that he enjoys doing he's very good at and he was able to take his passion and turn it into a business so what I'm telling everybody out there right now is you can take your passion like the things you like to do now let's be honest it's not always gonna be fun do you have fun building computers every time I do until it's something like this where 17 get paid for all at once and I'm like I could have used some of that work like you know last week or the week before but um and and when you're building a product you're building the same thing over and over again so I'd love it but there's definitely days where it's like same thing again it's monotonous it right that's it it's the ebbs and flows of the business it's the the highs and the lows now I want to move over to Brad Brad you in Anthony quickly became friends and kind of give us a background story of how that happened with what Anthony was doing when he started building these custom machines way back when well we we definitely met because Anthony heard me on pot nuts and and could tell that we lived like in the same county and so you know he just reached out and he was just kind of he'd been building pcs but he he was just getting started trying to make it a business and so he's like hey you know let's be friends in like okay let's go get coffee and so we did that and we had he got picked up as as the Builder for an architect and they were looking for a network support you know IT guy and so he referred me and then we worked together on that client and so whenever whenever anything comes up we shoot each other like hey do you wanna do you want me to do a referral for you on this one and you know he wanted do you want that so we're and and we we pong out we've had at dinner we've had coffee where we are friends but uh I just respect the heck out of his builds you know and his expertise and if anyone's got a project you know the the software the hot you time an architectural software or engineering software or gaming or you know whatever this stuff evolves at the speed of light and people are like okay well what should I be building or what do I need and I go I don't know I let's ask the person who actually knows this and so I refer to Anthony on a lot of things and on the on the on the topic of like when you when we brought up this topic of white-label hardware stuff what what I thought of was in all aspects I try to think of like this one core philosophy and that is the right person for the job should be doing the job could I build a computer sure no problem I could walk into you know a computer store and like just pick off the shelf and I and I could build a functioning computer no problem would it be the best computer for the money that I spent I don't know I might get lucky Anthony lives in the world and he does it so well and his his work is better than mine could ever be even actually if I were to dedicate everything to it but that's the thing I'm best at doing the network support and doing that Anthony is exceptionally good and the best at building computers I've seen a lot of you know you walk into a client office and they've got a PC that was definitely custom built and the person who built it tried to like brand it you know they like customized the case in some way so it was like you know a Rick's PC guy build you know whatever it was or whatever their brand name is but you can tell that it was just a home built computer and I'm sure it was adequately built but if you look at the branding kind of potential of working with someone who's that's like their job I you Anthony you should definitely include in the links a couple of your Instagram photos or some of your co branded machines if you if you're allowed to I know that there's one from like at least I think it was more than a year ago it's from I I can't say it but you know what I'm talking about it's from a major a major corporate brand that asked you to build two one for a promo and one for yeah if you could throw that in the show notes that thing was was glorious and it's like okay so anything's possible if you know how to do it and Anthony knows how to do it and if you you know what I mean like hey yeah that was a Bud Light get away computer that's what I'm talking about it was really cool-looking and the you know and they liked the internals and the out the the customizations to the case like it got painted and branded and everything glorious if I was looking for I do a lot of restaurants now so I don't get to build you know sell computers very much anymore I just support the POS systems but like if I wanted to get into the like selling pcs we just have Anthony build them and I would bring them with my my logos and stuff and and and shave a little bit on my margin for the building but the result would be so much better I agree I'll tell ya if anybody has ever watched Anthony build a computer anything I believe you have some YouTube videos out there that show you building machines correct okay and I've sat there and watched some of his videos now he instructed me on the things that I should buy and we talked about what I kind of wanted to do for my latest build and that worked out really good but I'm gonna tell you the time and energy well number one he saved me a lot of time in here's the here's the two different versions you could get and maybe here's kind of where you want it where you want to go so I was able to make a decision on what I wanted to buy fairly simply and once I did it probably took me all weekend like all of Saturday I I swear it was proud it was at least 16 hours and I've seen him do these builds in like you know two hours it's ridiculous so now does mine look as good as his absolutely not it's close but it's not as good as his and I did a good job it's uh it's I like it because the things that he taught me in his videos on cable routing all I kind of stopped this thing is there's no wire showing anywhere I'm like going I'm so giddy because there's no there's no spinning hard drives I got two hard drives hiding in the back and I got one hiding underneath the motherboard it beautiful machine the biggest thing in there is the the freakin video card and that thing's huge but everything's cool on his system it runs he helped me overclock this five gigahertz I've been running at five years old I'm minute it runs flawlessly no issues whatsoever able to do these live streams I'm able to play the video games I want now what I'm discovering lately is that video games some of them are written very poorly but that has nothing to do with the machine so Anthony now when you started thinking about expanding your business and growing and you kind of started working with Brad a little bit I and you started doing the white label stuff what was your initial thought when somebody said hey I want you to build a computer for this white label or you know as a white label service because we're gonna brand it with our brain and we're gonna sell them I mean what was your thought process at the time it was a it was rather interesting really quickly I'll touch like brad in corporation like meeting that was such a huge deal because I knew what I did good and I knew I didn't do like you know IT services weren't my thing so that was kind of like an example of like outsourcing and yeah we think became great friends through that regarding the the first experience I had doing the white label it was interesting because we met through a mutual contact in the industry like as an auto - trainer and consultant he got us together and my first thought was I completely knew who they were like you know they were one of the two people that I thought I was directly competing against and rather than being prideful about it I'm like this could be a good opportunity for both of us actually I mean I don't they're their company name is on the box not mine but I'm basically gonna slowly get incorporated into their business and I'll still be allowed to do my own but I guess to answer the question there were a lot of challenges that came afterwards but it was actually I just saw it as a good opportunity they do they have tons of contacts and so it's like they're great at sales because they know everyone in the industry and I'm great at building computers so it was a good fit for each other when that's another thing I want to bring up because you look at a lot of times we talked about people are talking about how do I get business how do I get business how do I get business and a lot of it really has to do I mean let's face it life is about who you know to a certain extent but here's the thing that supersedes that sometimes is your reputation for doing things will proceed a lot of things that you do in life so when somebody sees the gorgeous build you have and they're like hey yeah man I've seen this thing and it looks awesome and we want you to do this frost that's kind of how these things work out you've just got to be really you know again and the other thing too in everybody can see that Anthony is very humble in in what he does and he watches videos he's very informative helpful but never boastful or I've got the best thing and he's just not that way so he's someone great to work with and I'm sure there's I'm sure there's people at those companies that you work for Anthony from time to time they're no they're probably a little bit I don't know oh man I know like way up here and I got a perfect example of that man and it was the first time I've actually kind of experienced it for my business we through the white label service we were all on a conference call with a huge company like a national company and they built a computer and we sent them a demo system and but the one they built was so much more highly spec than what they asked for so I I was sharing the benchmark results for something that was just like hey Bill and we were like 10 seconds faster on like their score was like 96 seconds and we were in the 80s so it ten seconds was a pretty big deal I forget what the percentage was but their IT guy was like well you know how many times did you have to run the benchmark to get that score and you could tell like he was confrontational like a little jealous because we had the same CPUs they technically had faster RAM than I did there was they definitely had a because of the RAM and the way the software responds to ram they technically had an advantage so it's like I almost felt like it was calling me a liar that our benchmark scores weren't real but yeah the egos are out there and you just got a you know you don't want to get into a boxing match over it like you know the numbers speak for themselves sometimes but I try to share what I do because at the end of the day like you say all the time on the show Jeff what there's playing a business for all of us but because of the white-label service there's I'm careful about maybe being as specific as I used to be but I'm still very very like open book because anyone could buy this and see exactly what I just did anyways but so process flies on the overclocking cuz that's other thing every one of these workstations are overclock so I'm always giving a lot of tips but I don't necessarily share my exact formula like I might have before but I'll still give people all the direction in the world you know what I mean oh yeah definitely well that's that's the funny thing you can run when you think about benchmarks and there's people out there that will basically freeze their chips under video cards they're their CPUs and and run these crazy crazy benchmarks and I have to run over and over and over again well I can tell you right now I ran a 3d mark on this particular machine and basically it doesn't really matter it runs great it does what I needed to do and ing to 3d mark I I'm you know ninety seven percent better than all the other computers out there that's right it's like but I will never catch up to what the other three percent is it just it doesn't matter so I you're able to do what you what you do in I know you build functioning machines so when you're building up you're just running the benchmark like you would do a hey brain you're built I'm gonna burn this in I'm going to test it and here's the numbers but it's not like you have to sit there and go yeah those tests take a long time how much yeah I'm gonna sit there and go I'm gonna tweak this oh I'm gonna tweak that just to get every little ounce no because in the end of the day you need a functioning computer not one that does a benchmark just one time yeah the huge thing was repeatability and scaling the computer so there are some specs I would have maybe even gone higher on like RAM specifically but the market fluctuates all the time with RAM so we've scaled back Ram to something that's always available it's still well over what you could get like at Dell or HP and even a lot of gaming companies but there's certain things you have to dial back and look if I want to build a benchmark Queen I can and but it's like when you're scaling a product you got to make sure you can actually get the parts and and because we did the homework now going into this reseller deal it's like okay well we have a product that can scale but you know the worry I have right now is actually Intel CPUs being able to buy as many as we need yeah I know like as Drock told me specifically like you may need to start selling AMD because I don't know if you'll be able to get that many Intel's CPUs so I just so easy yeah Intel supposed to be relieving their shortages by the end of the year so I think we'll be okay but I've never purchased 200 CPUs a month so I don't know what difficulties we might face with that but in that 8086 that I bought I basically if it failed on me 38 days after I had it and it wasn't it oh I mean it wasn't deleted or anything no it was yeah I mean it I didn't do any I mean I I don't even I don't even think I had overclocked it yet I was just running it and it just was running like garbage so and that took actually I got that back fairly quickly it cost me another 25 bucks but I was able to get it back in a couple days but when I remember we're not contacting them they're like going oh we don't know if we haven't hit he's on the Shelf I'm like seriously so and then I've started in you know I was talking to Anthony during his time and it was a shortage so yet this stuff fluctuates and you definitely have to pre-plan so that's one good thing bread now I want it when you were working with Anthony and kind of when you think about what let's put it this way when you think about white label services or hardware services how did it benefit you to have somebody in your corner that basically could do that stuff and how did it make your life easier running your business um well I always find that time is obviously everybody knows like time is the most precious resource unit tasking doesn't work for me I don't so sitting and building a computer is actually something that's kind of excruciating for me to do because that's the only thing that I can be doing right now and that drives me crazy so having just being able to go here and you want the best computer that you've ever used this is what you want being able to just have someone to bounce off of like what that is knowledgeable about you know the product and and also when when something comes up that's that might be an issue not have not having to call let's say a call center in another country just be able to like shoot the text or jump on the phone and get an immediate like oh yeah this is this is what you should try first and whatever it's it saved me a tremendous amount of time and stress and and just ultimately delivered better results to my customers I mean they there's there's one in particular a CPA you know she so she counts every every dollar and cent and I had to convince her that she needed to spend some money on her on her computer she's like well all I did was run QuickBooks and I'm like yeah yeah you run QuickBooks and you run word and you run outlook and you run Excel and you run 20 or 30 tabs of Chrome all at the same time and and whatever else maybe maybe you spend a little bit on a better machine I guarantee you look here's the deal Anthony had a demo and I was like can I let's just put the demo on her desk one week free trial just try it I said I cloned over her stuff so she's like yeah you can't have this back like I'm just gonna buy this computer from you like we just he like he lost his demo but we sold it's at the you know full price so I was like okay so that's the thing like she just she's like okay you were right this is the way to go like I'm not gonna buy the the off-the-shelf saying this was the this was the the answer to all of my problems right so it just allowed me to be happier in my work and make my customers happier and just deliver better products I'm trying to think of other cuz Anthony's on the show he's obviously top of mind but I'm trying to think of other ways that I've kind of done that with and you know I mean clip disco lipsticks is kind of that way like you're getting a firewall you're kind of reselling the service and then you've got this back support group kind of backing you as you go you knows you need to support people it's it's kind of related so also the POS systems that you know you've kind of become a resource to that company you were yeah yeah yeah I have a kind of a friendly partnership with with the local big big boys that do restaurant support and so like the when when that something comes up that they don't really have the resources to resolve they refer them to me and it's pretty cool relationship well that's good because I think again it's it's nice to niche down in your business to a certain extent and it's it's easy because we're all fixers to a certain extent that we want to be the jack of all trades master of none but before we move on I want to take a quick break and then we'll continue on with this topic because it's definitely fascinating and just it gives your mind something to think about our show today is brought to you by busy bench remember when running your business was simple busy venture does would it be nice to quickly create a repair ticket generate an invoice with a single click and manage thousands of customers completely free of charge busy Ben's thinks you will enjoy adding an unlimited number of customers invoices estimates in inventory items so much you might forget we have paid features too but don't worry when your business grows and you need things like SLA alerts payment processing and recurring subscriptions busy bench will be with you every step of the way turn to taken into an invoice with a single click if 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instruments all that stuff and he's still doing handwritten tickets I mean that's he's he's he's taking over the shop now for his father and he's like what do I do to like you know do a computer right like something he doesn't even know he's like I just computers please and and I've been looking into it and I I think I'm gonna refer him to busy bench and help him set that up and see how that works but it's it looks like it'll work for like even just a you know a repair shop that's not a computer repair shop yeah absolutely I think they you know that they can't is always towards can't see a auntie is always towards the IT service business but a lot of that stuff again repairs repair yeah relate so and if it works it's a it's a nice situation alright so Anthony so what types of things when you brought this subject to us what types of things did you want to talk about you kind of where you at in the in the growth spurt right now of some of the things you're thinking about when it comes to the white label hardware services and where do we go from here really uh my main goal was actually just a brainstorm out loud in a way to see maybe how the community responds to you too because I I think this crosses boundaries into even computer repair I think it's it's been on the show before where someone partnered up with the local iPhone repair company so they kind of even though they'd get dropped off at their computer shop he had a local partnership so this I want to kind of share that this this can be a topic for just anybody not just like hey I'm building computers and but right now the focus has been like the people I need to hire like like kind of find like people that are good but outsourcing like how do we compete with Dell who has like you know you know response where they could be at your business the next day or two we've had previously incentives for people to have like our system if you buy 10 you get you know a backup one and and as long as you don't deploy it you don't need to pay for it but now that we have the reseller deal coming in it's kind of like well we need to kind of get on on you know field technicians I got how does Dell do it and I know there's white level services that I've been on the show so looking at that do we want to keep how much of the service aspect do we want to keep in-house the repair I'd love to keep in-house but can we keep up in the first few months so well I have to send repairs out to people I trust so that's we don't really know because the expectation is maybe they'll do 40 to 80 right out the gate and I'm like okay that's not bad but if it turns into the 200 or 400 that they think it could be that's like all right we're gonna have to probably outsource a lot immediately and so we could rein everything back in but um so you know someone I kind of looked for was Chris Carruthers and uh you know I'd noticed he's not you know I think he's has a you know he was working at it was in his own business on LinkedIn but he did help point me in the right direction had some software customization questions he helped me sort out and I've just been reaching in on my contacts book kind of asking people are they available to build computers you know are they willing to travel kind of stuff like that and these are all people that I've been cultivating relationships with for the past four years so I'm not necessarily having to meet someone new I'm kind of willing to bring people in like dude if we're doing 200 a month we could afford to fly someone in and put them in an Airbnb or something you know I mean like because we need to get the orders done so I don't want to drown an opportunity so there's there's been kind of Plan B's and C's just finding people that are competent so so one of the things that just came to my mind is we're sitting here talking having this conversation is that what about you could actually if you think about this business and you a lot of this stuff you ship off anyways you could actually ship parts or have parts shipped to a person at their home or business or whatever might be they could build that machine and then ship it back out and that takes all you know that takes a lot of the logistics off of it because you can ship anywhere in the United States for about the same amount of money no matter where you're shipping to really yeah if it's ground it's pretty affordable that was a key aspect when we were standardizing the workstations is we needed to get them down and we need to get them small while these are full ATX motherboards the the chassis is like you know it's just under 15 inches tall so the shipping box is eighteen by eighteen by eleven which dude that's a godsend when you're shipping I mean it could be an 18 cord dual video card system that could fit in there you know so they're the the biggest problem we have is that because all of our workstations are overclocked there's such a necessity for a lot of like stress testing and stuff so it would be easier to probably bring people to us but the service aspect if the repairs has been the thing I've been considering like alright well it's already been built I mean if it's like a motherboard replacement I there's people I know locally that I could send these directly to that could do the repair I could give it the quality assurance checkbox and then ship them back out but I mean if I could have my way what literally I would only do is just R&D I love the experimenting part still I want to build the support staff around me that I could just kind of oversee manufacturing oversee you know the actual service aspect so I mean there's guys like you and and Brad that know so much more about Windows than I do so I know Brad won't leave California but mean stuff like nope this do we need our art like let's say we hire somebody do they need a live-in Cal in Nevada not really if they're just doing support so there's a lot of things we're kind of thinking about you know it's still very much a brainstorm because planning for 40 or 200 is such a wild difference we can't like hire three people based on like hey we might do two to four hundred I'm a month like so the first few months are gonna be real scary and interesting well I think the biggest thing is and I know you probably already have a lot of this in place is make sure that you have your processes in place oh yeah so that you can basically because I when I think about even a stress testing and stuff like that I mean let's let's be honest you do a beautiful job at building machines and I'm sure you do a great job at supporting machines and I'm not saying that any monkey could basically build a machine but you could teach a lot of people how to build a machine the way that you do it to stress test it and do the things like that or like I said if they're bringing in it if they're bringing it in for a support call maybe they're local they go pick it up and they go yeah this is what's wrong with it they at least have somebody they can confer with you and go hey this is what's going on you yeah I think it's this because I know I when I approached you on the the CPU I'm like dude I've it's been dang it's been probably almost 20 years since I've had a CPU fail and so I'm like going this is so weird and it the only thing you can do and this is what sucks with CPUs I went and bought a core i3 threw it in yep that was my problem you know all the problems went away I was able to actually did one of the shows with that core i3 and it ran fine for what it was it's a 150 dollar processor or whatever and it was fine whatever in then I was able to get the other one returned so I wasn't down but yes stuff like that's hard to hard to diagnose but when it comes to a motherboard they're usually either on or off maybe there's portions of it that are failing but generally it's they're either working or they're not one thing I'm trying to sort out in my head right now is because like literally if there is an issue you know I'm available for these service calls it's what level of phone support do we want to offer before we just ship the system back and even on-site like that was the word I was searching for earlier even on site like how much on-site do I really want to happen and then all and then thirdly since we're very standardized maybe we ship out a loaner that they just dropped their m2 into and you know there's a lot of things I'm thinking about and this could eventually turn into a massive thing where hey you're not literally buying the computer you're leasing it from us so if it fails you're just getting another one and it doesn't have to be new because it's like a it's a reoccurrence like you know you might get upgraded every two years I mean there's so much potential for the direction this could all go a logic in while he's taking a break with his child right so I want I want your two cents on this too I want you to weigh in in what what are some of the things that you think about when Anthony's talking about scaling this white-label hardware service well it's a lot it's very related to you know I've been asked if I can work out of out of my area because I've gone to great lengths in in the last few years to like shrink shrink my service area down and try to keep the same level of business going so that might you know I can I can respond faster and I don't have to drive I hate I hate driving far it sucks in Southern California and a lot of other places oh it's uh where yeah you know I just I want to be able to just you know I want to know that I can get some somewhere in ten minutes or less g-word I hear that before it's like the mother's grocery store Brad that's like the closest you could go in ten minutes where you live dude yeah and that's like around the corner practically well I have a trafficker I have yeah but I have there's no traffic in Henderson man I'm just telling you when you get a beach and the weather that comes with it you call me with the lake all of Nevada's a beach isn't it without the water yeah even like meat is man-made I don't really I think the MGM has a beach or one other oh they do one of them does yeah anyway so yeah but people ask me if I can like oh can you service San Diego can you service Ohio like we want to do that you know something and I'm like well yeah I could find a way but I got to find someone I can trust and I can partner with and it may be someone I've never even met face to face it's it's a difficult challenge and it's it doesn't like Adele has solved this by just having like Dell certified people that they contract with in some way but their challenge is different because their hardware is all very customized and they have a very standard thing I mean you get a Dell box there's only so many variations you know it's all very standardized so you don't really have to have someone who can think outside of the box you know when you're building totally custom pcs even though you have a lot of standardizations that you've been working on it's just it's not that plug-and-play like you know large car manufacturer large PC manufacturer kind of like setup so but that's fine you just charge more for support and finding better people but when you say that's fine you're like yeah but that's the rub that's the chip that's over talking about how do you find those people that's I'm sorry guys I was gonna say I think that's I mean when you look at communities like ours and everybody coming together I think you can meet a lot of good people all over the world really is where this podcast goes out to but it's specially people here in the US there's a lot of people who listen to this and and there's a lot of people that that might be good at one aspect or another and this is kind of where relationships are built kind of like what you guys did back in the day coming together and using each other's strengths and weaknesses to come together and make a whole unit that's really what I feel this industry is kind of moving towards the days of you being able to do everything because there's many many ways to do a business you can in the beginning maybe you do everything and then you hire employees but at the same time your employees are only gonna be so good I don't care who you high you're gonna hit you're gonna have a couple jams and a rest of them are gonna be you're gonna be okay it'd be fine but they're not gonna be they're not gonna have the same interest so when you talk about collaboration and coming together in taking someone's passion and being able to build that in your business there's a lot to be said for that and I think a lot of people miss that they go again it comes back to we got to do it this way and I'm here to say no you don't and I like that I like the ideas they're going around in your head Anthony of man you've got some great ideas leasing loners all these different things that you can do to make this work and let's be honest even Dell support now when I was learning how to fix machines back in the day back in 1999 I basically would call Dell support in Texas where they were actually based where their call center was actually at and I'd wait till about two or three o'clock in the morning and talk to somebody that was bored wasn't I don't think it's two or three with probably yeah I was probably two or three o'clock there time and I would get all kinds information because man they were just like going yeah just do this and do this command and that was all Windows 98 days and it was fun it was cool but nowadays even with the you know the for our support the 24 hour turnaround I've heard all kinds of stories where that it's it's close but that's not exactly what it is so you definitely have to build in some of these old factors if something doesn't work out right and maybe somebody does just if it's not a simple fix maybe somebody does send the computer back do you Anthony and you fix it or like you said it may be the best scenario is you send that loaner computer out and they put the other computer back in the box and send it back to you or I really your lease idea is probably my favorite where you basically then they computer out they can swap the m-dot to there's any again anybody can pretty much do that it's that hard if you teach them and they can swap that out or you can have somebody go there and swap it out and then they can send the other computer back and you fixed that one and then you get that ready and that can be sent out to somebody else yeah and and I'm worried that I'm falling into I don't want to be a control freak because then I don't know whatever they say perfectionist don't make money in business but the consideration of even making is despite there being MDOT - is built into the motherboards I might start using an adapter that's a PCI Express adapter so that the swapping out process is even that much more simpler because I really think the key to a good service experience like they don't care they just want to be up and running if a loaner shows up next day that has the same hardware so literally their MDOT you drive can plug right in and it's good to go the the you know alright windows might not be activated but it'll get them through a week or so or whatever I think that might be the way I'm leaning which is completely different to what IT people are used to they're used to having Dell show up they take care of it and the other thing - I've noticed I like professional IT departments I feel like they treat these computers like it's like a three-wheeled car or something like they don't know what to do with them when they show up and I'm like dude it's just a computer it's just the fast one like a Ferrari has four wheels a Ford does so we've had a lot of our support issues our IT departments using their same image from a couple years ago that has the wrong chipset drivers and everything and we tell them like dude you got to build a new image out and then the problems go away so thankfully the the percentage of broken systems are extremely low but I want to get ahead of that jump because I could quickly become an issue if we don't plan for it when we're dealing in high numbers so that's kind of you know and the other problems huge f1 comes when computers get shipped back to us most customers throw away the box that came in even though it's a small box so you mentioned something that I thought of words I hey if we're sending a loner out they have a box to ship it back in already we have a Pelican case we we know fits our system and it's actually pretty small for a Pelican case so there's that idea or just using brown boxes and replacing them all the time but yeah there's just a lot of stuff I've never had I mean I'd never thought I'd be in this position even though this is where I've wanted to be it's and it's making me look to the community like how can I get help in the community because you guys are all out there doing stuff that I'm gonna need maybe I don't need a hire people immediately kind of thing you know what I mean so well and when you when you do kind of figure out how to find support people like local you you don't have to be everywhere you know where the bulk of your computers have been shipped to so like you go okay well we've sent a bunch of computers to Seattle so we got to finding some someone in Seattle to help out and kind of we haven't sent anything to Austin Texas so we can wait until we do so it kind of narrows the scope of the search also you were talking my Adel support I do remember like one I I knew that I had a hard drive failure it was kind of a new customer they had the business support so they had the next day a you know check on site I've diagnosed that this is a hard drive failure and now I have to call Dell support and they made me do some stuff that if they didn't have an IT person like if they cut if it was just a business owner that had called then they had me like pulling parts out of other computers and putting them into this computer to do the diagnostic and I'm like I can do that and that's fine but how about you just send the guy out because that's what we're paying for you know so even the the the ones like Dell support isn't always all that it's cracked up to be they did eventually show up but then they showed up and they swap the hard drive out they didn't bother to do anything else and it's like okay well now this computer doesn't have any of the software on it do they have their office discs and all that kind of stuff this is just a out of the box computer good to go no it's not they can't do anything on this computer now I'm still gonna have to spend an hour or two like getting a reset up so even though they did show up and replace the hardware and it was a relatively short down time it still wasn't just like magic it took a lot of of a professional IT person's time to to make sure that that process went as smoothly as it did so it's good yeah there is there's a lot of things out there that a lot of people want to believe but the reality is you have to look at some of those things and under get it you gotta see what's going on in the industry and what's really happening and listening to stories where people tell you yeah everything is not is hunky-dory as you'd like to like to imagine let's take another quick break and we will talk a little bit more about this subject and our show today is brought to you by untangle next-generation firewall design and provide your small to medium business customers with the easiest most cost-effective solution or network security untangle is a fast way to add cyber security to your service offerings we've taken enterprise-grade security and put it into a platform that makes it easy to get started risk-free there's no steep learning curve with untangle instead you'll get a browser-based dashboard it lets you see the status of your manage networks at a glance you will enjoy on the box reporting included at no 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untangle comm forward slash pod nuts today to get a free no obligation trial of ng firewall and save 15% on any purchase with promo code PUD nuts we want to thank untangle for being a sponsor of today's show all right going back to you Anthony is there any other things that we haven't talked about as of yet that you want to bring up in this particular episode when it talks about doing a white label hardware service really the the biggest thing right now is just say how do I find these people that are needing because right now it's kind of just been you know either well Paco's referral or the other client saw me on a webpage the chassis manufacturer I use they were using some of our builds for you know marketing and that's how he found me so I'm like how do I seek these customers because this could potentially be a whole nother my Remus computer solutions could remain doing white-label and then I could offer a more custom tailored experience to my original collaboration we're probably gonna have to do something more like salary eventually but I don't know it's like it's kind of just brainstorming really right now and and I think it could hopefully help people figure out how can they you know send out some other work so I'm even the coffee shops don't how many coffee shops roast their own beans like they're outsourcing that process if you look at it that way too so I don't know that's good in bread what's your what's your thoughts on anything we've talked about or any of your thoughts on the whole white label hardware service that maybe we haven't touched on as of yet no I mean I think we've as far as like finding uh finding the support that's just I don't know like I think you just got to start doing research maybe even target an area and maybe start looking at Yelp or something and I mean really the pod nuts community needs to start moving westward because you this this network is actually and it's pretty saturated in like the mid west and and East Coast areas not a lot of people over here come on people and start participating because this is a great network like this is where you're a participant in this community uh you know I've met a lot of you guys at Chicago in whatever I haven't met anyone who I wouldn't want to associate with you know what I mean so this is the kind of network that you got to tap into but uh you know I you know and an