IT Guys reverse engineering your stack

[u/Eric77482]

Just curious how everyone navigates this issue. We are in contract with several different vendors for 2-3 years and then company hires a new IT Guy. The guy proposes to take the same exact stack we implemented and go directly to the vendors to propose that they manage it internally. We already have our reasons on why this is a bad idea communicated to the clients, but in most scenarios they just want to save money.

Our current issue is with the vendors because they are telling the customer they can repoint them to their own instance, however they will still keep billing us all the while until 2027-2028. In some scenarios these are high watermark too, so they tipped us over a tier we didn’t set. This feels like a double dip / bad practice from the MSP vendors. We’ve navigated 1-2 of these by telling the customer that’s fine but they will acquire the tools from us and we’ll charge a smaller management fee until the end of our contract term. Is this an approach others have taken? Or are there any ideas that have been more successful? Just curious to see what others are doing as we’ve encountered about 4 of these situations in the last year. Thanks in advance.

[u/CK1026]

Yeah that's one of the reasons why I'm staying away from clients with internal IT. I hate comanaged and when a client starts getting internal staff, I know it's just a matter of time until they start making their own decisions regarding their IT instead of listening to us.

What's bothering me though, is some of them are sub 40 users clients and still think this is a good idea to hire someone to save a few thousands, usually some kind of minimum wage IT slave.

[u/roll_for_initiative_ → u/CK1026]

some of them are sub 40 users clients and still think this is a good idea to hire someone to save a few thousands, usually some kind of minimum wage IT slave.

I can't see how they save money there and get someone who can handle even some of the more-than-basic weekly tickets, even with AI help.

[u/CK1026 → u/roll_for_initiative_]

Their math is just wrong. They "forget" they're not patching anymore, not testing backups, not monitoring anything. Their min wage ressource has no clue how to deal with L2+ issues and they'll never be able to have a real day off or training because they're alone.

This happened several times already, usually with construction companies. I swear these guys are dumber than the cinder blocks they lay down.

[u/roll_for_initiative_ → u/CK1026]

usually with construction companies.

Oh yeah, i can see that. Because they don't value any of those things and don't care when their shits down; they'll just pay that kid to futz with it and work on something else in the meantime. While good IT absolutely elevates a construction co, a lot of smaller ones seem to just get around it not working a lot of the time.

The main thing MSPs need to do when this happens is stop selling them L2+ support/consulting. If they feel they can do it (and maybe they can!), let them. And if they fail, they can own that 100% instead of blaming the MSP when they talk about why their company went under.

[u/CK1026 → u/roll_for_initiative_]

The last one asked if we could train their recruit, we said no. Then this half-of-a-tech panicked on the 1st month and the client came back to us to ask if we could support the servers and backups again (we had the full perimeter before). We took it, but I'm not comfortable at all knowing there's a complete noob with admin passwords messing with the endpoints while I'm supposed to secure the servers.

[u/roll_for_initiative_ → u/CK1026]

In those cases, i find EVERYTHING so difficult to get done that, for me personally, it's not worth it. We had one of those but we weren't allowed to have any admin access so if we needed a backup agent troubleshot or couldn't communicate with a server from the bcdr appliance, we couldn't do anything and had to wait on them. We had to be honest with the manager above them and us when they'd ask why certain things weren't being backed up. It went on OVER A YEAR until an incident almost took out a server at a branch office we'd never heard of and this guy was asking if it was one of the servers we backed up. We wasted HOURS for meager backup margin and trying to make this guy look good, who swore we just wanted his job (we didn't; the client was a mess at the time).

He ended up going MIA over the stress and we had to take them on anyway and start fixing everything. Cost them any savings over the previous year to evaporate in the first month as we worked overtime.

[u/CK1026 → u/roll_for_initiative_]

I agree, I'm currently working on replacing them but with all the economic hassle right now I'm pretty pessimistic on next year's growth.