Good morning everybody. This is rance Turley with Tsi, Turley solutions and innovations. Today I’d like to talk about IT Services Bartlesville. So when some, when you hear procurement, you think of, oh, they’re buying things. Yeah, yeah. There’s, there’s a little more of a process involved. But um, for as an MSP and providing it services, I feel that procurement is a, is a good offering to have because, well, I mean we’ll take care of the ordering of the equipment, make sure it gets here. And then from there it enters another process of, uh, just basically testing, vetting the software or hardware, a software, whatever it is, whatever the we, uh, whatever we, um, was whatever was agreed upon. And if there’s any, any issues with it, we, uh, we’ll send it back, get a replacement and lets you let the client know what, you know, what’s going on with it.
And just owning the process from beginning to end. We create a quote, we bring you the quote and we’d kind of described y or w, well, I’m sorry. Well, let’s take a step back. So we come and we get an understanding of the environment. We take that understanding and we find out and we find a missing pieces. We identify those missing pieces and we create it. And if necessary, we find the proper, what we feel it would be proper, um, proper pieces for that. And if there’s purchasing involved, we’ll create a quote, we’ll handle the purchasing a, we get you to quote, you approve the quote, you pay for it and then we purchase it and uh, get it ordered, have it sent to us. We test it, verify everything’s working. If it’s working, we coordinate with you for a time to come and implement it and solid whatever we configure it before you get it.
And keep in mind sometimes configuration needs to happen onsite. Uh, if it, for whatever reason, it doesn’t work when we receive it, then we, uh, RMA, we get a reply. We get their replacement process going. Uh, we notify you. Oh, we’ll notify you. Well, yeah, we’ll notify you after it. If there’s an issue, if there’s no issue than the next communication we’ll be, when do we do this? When, what, what day and time makes sense. Um, otherwise we send it back. We get the replacement, we verify that the replacement works and that it is in fact the same thing. I don’t, I haven’t experienced this too often where you send something back and they send the wrong item to you. I, we’re, hopefully we’re past those days, but I know it does happen. But any case, we take care of the procurement process so that you don’t have to spend time chasing down, okay, I got this piece of equipment, it’s bad.
Who Do I contact? What do I do with it? We, we take care of that process for you. Um, plus potentially, I’m not gonna say it’s gonna happen all the time, but potentially we can get better pricing depending on the agreement we have with the client too. We may pass that onto them. It’s just one of those things that, you know, we spend time on the process. So there’s obviously mark up involved in, I know that’s been a common uh, conversation had I frequent Reddit’s a MSP sub reddit and a lot of people kind of ask for ways to justify the markups that they charge and if the markups within reason, I know that margin and markup are different and it’s kind of a, uh, I didn’t realize that for a little bit, but I did some research and figured it out. So a 43% markup, we’ll give you a 30% margin and I think 30% is about where people tend to shoot for as far as being profitable.
But anywhere, I think anywhere from 20 to 30% is kind of the goldilocks zone as far as margin goes. Um, Mark Up, I think 20 30% market. Let’s say we have $100 30% markup, 130 so $30 divided by 100 is the cost. So I don’t know, I’d have to look that up. I don’t know it off the top of my head, but I do know that 43% is it 30% margin. In any case, we spent time determining the need, uh, explaining why we need that and ordering a configure and testing and then configuration and installation is separate. So or configuring and installing are separate but up to the IT Services Bartlesville procurement process. Yes. That, you know, that’s time spent on getting the device. So yeah, you’ll probably find it cheaper somewhere else, but we, you know, we spent time getting this information to you, so just be mindful of that.
Um, it’s if you, if you start doing that, well as a business owner, if you, a lot of MSPS, we’ll actually kind of work it into their contract that if they provide you with specs, then if they don’t order it, then they have no way of guaranteeing that you ordered the correct product and then they’ll charge you probably more than likely they’ll charge you extra for having to, having to deal with it. So better just work with your provider, work with the provider, let them order the equipment, trust them there. They’re professionals most of the time. If there’s any kind of cause for concern there, then by all means look for a new one. Um, in any case, uh, we, we own that process for you so that you don’t have to deal with it because it can be a hassle depending on if you purchase it from the wrong location or you don’t quite get what was specked out in what was needed.
And that’s a whole other process of sending it back, paying for shipping potentially. And it just, it can be a tremendous headache, but feel that, let the, uh, if you like for instance, feel that if we come out and we’ve determined the need, we kind of lay out the reasons why you need this and then quoted out, let us take care of it from that point on because it’s, it’s just easier it owning the process from beginning to end is it, it’s helpful in making sure in, in, in verifying the level of service that you’re getting. I have expectations for myself and for anybody. I will potentially higher down the road that we engage you and we’ll let you know why, why we suggest this. And then we, we make it right from the beginning to the end. We want you to, we want your involvement to be okay.
Here’s why, and here’s an explanation. Did you ask questions? That’s we, we, uh, we love questions, we love answering questions about these things. It helps us demonstrate, uh, the value that we bring with our expertise in, it demonstrates your interests in what we’re doing and then yes or no on the quote. If, if not, then we’ll, you know, we’ll try to figure out an alternative if one exists. Otherwise we probably just move on. But in any case, um, yes. And then that’s it. Then we schedule once it’s, once it gets here and it’s, and then we can install it, configure it, and you’re up and running. So it’s, uh, it’s nice to own the procurement process because we, we work with a lot of vendors in that can help us and we have access to more resources for, uh, w if it’s support with the, if for whatever reason, you know, so like say you get a server and you get a lot grading system and for whatever reason, one piece doesn’t seem to work really well.
We have access to our vendors support so we can talk to them, say, Hey, this is what we’re experiencing. Have you seen this before? What are, what’s going on? Um, and they can point us in the right direction for a business owner that, that isn’t an MSP, um, that then it’s, that is a very time intensive process. So it just makes sense for us to take care of that for the individual. Excuse me. Uh, aside from that, just managing expectations and helping them to understand and take care of the problem of procurement, of getting the software or hardware from beginning to end. Um, it also helps us to document any kind of changes or configurations, specific configurations that are necessary for your environment and helps us to be more IT Services Bartlesville knowledgeable about how it was implemented and why and what needs to happen with it so that we can in turn turn that over to you, the client, if that, if that’s necessary and it can help, um, expedite any potential issues that may come up that involved this solution that we provided you.
So it’s a win win for everybody. You pay a little bit more for that, well you pay more for it, but it’s, it saves you in the long run as opposed to US spending an hour trying to figure out how it’s configured. You know, we know an hour of billable time on how it’s configured. We, we know how it was configured to begin with and we have it and we can say, okay, I have an idea, let’s jump in, I’ll jump in and I’ll look, okay, we’ll figure it out. You’re good to go. It’s just not, it makes sense from all standpoints. I know some, some people like to haggle on price and try and get as much as they can. Uh, if you’re not comfortable with somebody haggling for your, um, your price than ours, you do that. Somebody else, I know that’s, I’m probably talking to a very small percentage of people, so, um, and they probably won’t even listen to me, so that’s fine.
I’m okay with that. Um, so just being in procurement, um, it’s nice also for, uh, inventory, keeping track of the inventory or asset management for your, for the client, for your environment. We look at is an MSP. We also include that. It’s just, it’s just a part of what we do. Um, and if we, we know exactly the specs that date and time and purchase date and the install date, all of that, we can document all of that. No. Okay. We’ve had this piece of hardware for two and a half years. Uh, we’ve got a warranty on it still. And that’s another aspect that we handle this warranty management on these items. We keep track of the warranty. We, uh, we engage the vendor if there are issues that fall within the realm of the warranty and it gets, it gets resolved. [inaudible] what’s what we do.
We work with them until the issue was resolved, a new hardware getting shipped, whatever. It’s just very time intensive process and keeping track of these items. And, and that’s just assuming that there are no issues, which is a pretty bad assumption. 95% of the time. Sometimes the solutions work great. Um, but you know, environments are different and different pieces attached can cause issues which make it look like it’s that. So you know, somebody who’s looking at this, this certain like say it’s a new server, but it’s this vendor piece of hardware or software that just doesn’t play, it is having an issue with it or that is experiencing starting to experiencing some sort of failure. But it looks like the servers, the issue, well, you know, with our documentation we come in and say, okay, well let’s, we know what to look at as far as what the server’s doing.
But it’s doing everything it can. It’s not getting anything from this other piece. So like I said, it helps with a remediation and also helps with, uh, asset management and keeping track. Um, I’m sure businesses will keep track of depreciation and all that, but we can keep track of the actual specs that warranty, uh, uh, support that con, uh, support number and um, just the overall specs and know where we are as far as how long that warranty has. Ha Ha. Did we get any bad ones initially? Um, you know, just some, some things are just nice to know, but for the most part it’s, it’s very, it saves time for the business owners, for us to keep all of that documentation, uh, from an asset, from it services standpoint, with asset management pieces, various, um, it saves time for everybody involved and with us ordering the price or suggest a quoting, determining the needs, quoting the product or this solution and then purchasing the solution.
We know we have more information on it then if you were to, if we were to just spec it out and you go by yourself done, that’s not ideal for most situations sometimes, if that makes sense. But if we on the process for you, then we can control the quality of your interactions with, uh, you wouldn’t ever have to really talk to the vendor, but we would most certainly be that go between and let you know what’s going on and taking care of that because that’s one of the aspects of our services is to own that process. So I hope everybody has come out of this with a better understanding of the procurement process and kind of why it’s a good idea to let your it consultant it services company or MSP, to have this, uh, to let them do this. And you do pay a little extra. But it’s for that peace of mind that, hey, they’re giving me what I need and they will handle any issues that come up with it. So I hope everybody has a good day. And thank you for listening.