In today’s video, Peter talks about tips on how to prepare yourself and your company when you decide to let go of your IT guy.
Transcription:
Hey. What’s up, guys? Pete Moriarty here. In today’s video, I’m covering a question from Michelle, which is, how do I break up with my IT guy? This is one we get all the time. Great question. Thanks for asking, Michelle. I’m going to title this one, how do you divorce your IT guy because it’s usually not just a breakup. It’s usually a divorce. What I mean by that is it’s usually pretty darn messy. It takes time sometimes. It even costs money to get it done, so I’m going to walk you through the process and how do you actually do that.
Number one, why does it feel like you sometimes need to divorce your IT guy? How do we get to that situation? Well, like a bad relationship, IT guys can sometimes get to be a little bit controlling, right? What I mean by that is they end up with your domain registrations. They end up with the administrator keys to all of your stuff. They have maybe your accounts all down under lock and key. Maybe you’re not even an admin of your Microsoft account or of your server if you’ve got local infrastructure, so we have sometimes customers coming to us saying, “Hey, I’ve got to divorce this guy, but I don’t know how to have the conversation. I’m too scared to because I don’t know if they’re going to react or they’re going to retaliate.”
At a minimum, most business owners just don’t have control of their passwords, of their domain registrations, and of all of their critical business information. That, I don’t agree with. I think it’s super important. Just like you manage your own car registration, just like you manage your own business registration, just like when you’re signing off on your tax documents with your accountant, it’s super important, in my opinion, that you as a business owner know what’s going on with your IT as well and have those keys where you can at least see them and know where they are, and you have control of them. You should never be beholden to somebody else because that ends up with the kind of thinking where you get a recommendation from your IT consultant, and you just take their recommendation because you’re a little bit scared of how they’d react if you don’t say yes to what they’re proposing. That’s how business owners end up spending lots and lots of money on IT.
Anyway, that’s the bad stuff. How do we actually turn around and get to the good stuff? Well, for starters, my philosophy is that as I just shared with you, business owners should have a bit more control and a bit more management of their technology so that you’re not basically at the behest of somebody else with all of your tools. That means the way that we do business is we make sure that if you’re a business owner, you have control over your domain name, you have control over your DNS. Thanks, Dennis. Great to have you joining us.
We want to make sure that you have, if you’ve got a G Suite account with us, at any time if you want, you can discouple from our billing, and you can go back to billing direct with Google if you really want to. Not many companies do that ever, but if you want to, the option’s absolutely there. That’s because our philosophy is not to keep you a customer through control and through fear and through, in some cases, intimidation. We want to keep you a customer because we will hopefully deliver so well to you that you will stay a customer of ours. That’s our philosophy, right? At any point, you can leave, you can break up with us. We don’t mind. Consider it an open relationship, but we hope that we will compel you to continue doing business with us and continue choosing to do business with us by the way that we deliver.
If right now, you’re in a situation where you need to divorce your IT guy, here’s how you do it. This is different to what I would give you in personal relationship advice. In IT guy breakup land advice, I would recommend you have a lifeboat. I’d recommend you have somewhere else that you can go to. It’s kind of like if you need to leave a bad marriage, you’ll probably call your friends and say, “Hey, can I crash on your couch for a couple of weeks just in case things go pear shaped here?” That’s the kind of thing that you want to do. You need to have somewhere to go, and you need to have some of your ducks in line.
Even though we’ve managed hundreds of businesses’ breakups with their existing IT consultants and starting to do business with itGenius, we’ve not seen many businesses go through malicious damage from the IT consultant. It does happen every now and again, but I mean that’s the fear. If I break up with this IT guy, is he going to lock me out and get rid of everything? What’s more likely to happen is you have a IT consultant who disappears and goes on holidays to India or a sabbatical or to find themselves, and they disappear with all of your logins or your website or your DNS details or whatever. That’s number one. Make sure that you have somewhere to go, the equivalent of a friend’s couch to crash on, so you can actually make the jump and know where you’re going after that.
Secondly, you want to make sure that you educate yourself on these different tools and these different bits of information you’ve got inside your business. That is your domain name registration, where is your DNS hosting? Is that with Cloudflare or is that somewhere else? Number three, where is your email hosting? Number four, where are all of your files stored, and where are they backed up as well? Do you have any backup software or anything like that?
Our business is all about helping you as the business owner to learn more about the basics of these technologies. I don’t expect you to go in and change your own MX records or A records or text records and your DNS settings. That’s not important information for you to know, but what is important for you to know is where is your domain registered? Who has the DNS hosting? Where is your website hosted as well? That’s important information that you should know as a business owner.
If you need to do the breakup, make sure that you’ve got somewhere to go, and number two, make sure you’re educating yourself so you’re not completely beholden to your IT consultant. Of course, if you need any help, you can get in touch with our team. Head along to itgenius.com or you can send our business page a message on Facebook, but if you have any questions or you know someone who’s stuck in a bad IT relationship, then please go ahead and send them our way. Till next time. Take care.
