Through EO I sit in rooms with owners from construction, manufacturing, food service, finance, and professional services. Comparing notes with them changed how I see my own industry. I am biased, but I believe I.T. is one of the few industries where the large majority of owners will open their doors to a competitor.
The one place friction shows up is between a salesperson and a prospect. That is where it ends. Outside of that, this industry behaves like a trade guild. When a company gets hit by a compromise, or loses a building to a fire or a flood, other I.T. owners show up. They send engineers. They lend hardware. They jump in at 2 a.m. for a call from someone they have never met. The forums are full of technicians giving away knowledge they paid for with their own mistakes.
I have a theory about why.
Nobody calls an I.T. company to say everything is working and you are doing a great job. We get noticed when something fails. Meanwhile, there are people around the world running attacks against our systems and our clients’ systems every hour of every day. Our vendors ship software and hardware with vulnerabilities, and we patch on their behalf. Then the patch breaks something else. Yes, Microsoft, I am talking about you.
That shared pressure builds a kind of recognition. When I meet another owner in this business, I already know what their Monday looked like. I know what it costs them to keep a promise.
The economics do not make it easier. Margins in a service business like ours run lower than in most industries owners compare us to. The risk we carry per client is higher. Vendor price increases have outpaced inflation for several years running. Hardware backorders can push a project a full quarter, and the only thing to do is tell the client the truth and rebuild the plan.
People who stay in this work for decades are usually here because they like solving problems for other people. The money is fine. It is not the reason.
I will not pretend everyone in this industry holds the same standard. Some owners sell things their clients do not need. Some walk away when a client is in trouble. After 34 years in this industry I have seen it. But the 80/20 rule applies here. The large majority of people I meet in I.T. services are honest operators trying to do right by the businesses that depend on them.
At CIO Landing, several of our better operating decisions came out of a phone call with another owner who had already made the mistake and was willing to describe it in detail. Tooling choices. Pricing structure. How to handle a client relationship that had gone sideways.
So I want to name some people who have given me their time over the years.
John Sikaras, Fulton May Solutions Stephen Taylor, LeadingIT Will Foret, Spot Migration Brian Davis, Aligned Technology Partners Todd Davis, Obsidian IT
There are many more I could list. I have taken notes in peer group meetings, borrowed processes, and asked questions I probably should have known the answer to.
If you run an I.T. company and someone in this industry has done that for you, the way to settle the account is to take the next call from the person who needs it.
And if you are a business owner outside of I.T. reading this, here is the part I would want you to notice. The company managing your network is part of a network of its own. When something goes badly wrong, that matters more than the logo on the invoice.