You need to Pay AttentionI have a huge client that I have had for many years. I started providing MSP services to them in 2008 and have steadily grown with them as they have developed. In 2008 they had 95 desktops, and now they have 315. For the last several years I have also had an employee on site at their campus, and the client is worth over 50k a month to me.

I know this because I am preparing to meet with them at the beginning of the year to talk about our services, to talk about our relationship. We're having this meeting because we made a couple of stupid mistakes.My Spider senses were tinglingFor the last three months or so I have been telling my service manager and sales team that we need to get out to the customer and meet with the principles. We have been working with them so long that most of the conversations we have are with upper managers but not the partners in the business. I had this feeling; you know that little tingling in places you don't want tingling when you're talking about business. My spider senses were tingling and I didn't like it.

Sure enough, my phone rang, it was this client, and when they call me it's never good. They wanted to have a meeting with me to discuss a few things.. At the top of the list were agreements and billing.

Here is what happened. Over the years we had taken away their easy button.

In 2008 I presented to them an all-in approach to IT. They loved it and signed up right away. We signed two agreements that year with them. One for our managed services program and one for a BDR.How did we get here?In 2017, 9 years later we had no less than 7 agreements with them and when I pulled the last three months of invoices there was a stack over a 1/2 thick. We had our managed services agreement, our onsite employee or streamlined IT agreements, 3 BDR agreements, a MAC support agreement and a Remote DBA agreement. All with slightly different billing details, expiration dates, and pricing deals. To make matters worse because we never wanted to rock the boat all of these agreements were on our "old paper". The original version of our MSP contracts from 2008.

We had taken away their easy button.

As I started thinking about this, everything I touched seemed to come back to the lack of an easy button.

For example, a new marketing vendor we are using to help us with our overall marketing strategy just finished working with us to develop an 18-month marketing plan. This was a one-off project for $10,000.00 and the deliverable was the plan. They did a great job and overall we were very happy with the result so we decided to continue on with them, month to month, to help flesh out the plan and execute on it.

They sent me an EchoSign type agreement, you know the kind where you sign online, and in that simple one-page agreement was a link to their terms and conditions. If you clicked on the link you were taken to a webpage, and the terms and conditions were on a webpage. Think about it, who's to say that the "referenced" T&C's from today are the same ones listed on the website in the future if something became litigious.

So I asked them to include the terms and conditions in the EchoSign document, not to change a single word simply to include the T&C's in the document I was signing.

This started a series of requests for me to meet with the owner of their firm, and discuss the change, and get the reasoning behind the T&C's being online etc.

They took away my easy button

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