Are all your customers happy after you've moved their documents to SharePoint and OneDrive? Warning: The following is a message for every entrepreneur who wants to generate recurring revenue with a suite of services but can't seem to figure out to end up with customers for life. And by that I mean, that they eventually leave because the product or service doesn't provides what they expected to.
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So, I'm Marcel Martens and welcome back to the Cloud Secrets Show. And today we're going to talk about how we manage to end up with happy customers or customers being happy after we move their data or documents to the cloud. And then, we don't use SharePoint and OneDrive as you might've expected.
The Succes Formula:
In this episode I will, at the end, I will tell you how to get all the steps of my success formula, my M-IT method, that has made me a fortune the last two years. It made me debt free. It made me do the things that I want to do. It made me run my business in three days a week. It gave me financial freedom. And more importantly, every customer that we move or migrate to the Always Safe in Business package is a happy customer. They can do more than before and we met expectation or exceed expectation. And by exceeding expectations you get up ending with customers for life.
So, that's my main focus and it's always been. I've been an entrepreneur for 12 years now, 11, 12 years, and I still can count all the customers we lost on one hand. So that's something there we're doing right because otherwise they would have left.
Let me tell you the story of a customer, and that was, I don't know, somewhere mid 2016, early '17, yeah, early '17 I think. The requests for Office 365 was raising pretty big. A lot of customers, a lot of businesses here, we're talking about moving stuff to Office 365 and it kept even growing bigger and bigger and bigger. And as I told in one or two podcasts back, They've got over 60 million users right now, active users, on the Office 365 platform. It's still... Well, it's expanded amazingly fast.
And at that time that customer wanted to move everything to Office 365. We recommended them to only move his email and start using, of course, the OfficeSuite, but be a little careful with moving the data there. And eventually, we spent up like, I don't know, way, way too much hours in moving the data to SharePoint. For him, it wasn't possible to look at his data on his phone or on his tablet. It was all complicated.
And user experience is, well, it's all that counts because if the user gets frustrated by using the system, the system or any system, is a tool. It's not a purpose on its own. So, Office 365 or SharePoint or whatever, it's a tool to do... well, to use for somebody to deliver what he sells or what he needs to do.
And eventually, I ended up, well, we talked about problems several times. I sent engineers to fix it. We even opened some support tickets with Microsoft, but at the end, there was really nothing we could do. And we use backup software. Maybe we use the wrong one, I don't care, but it didn't even finish. We were trying to back up all the data from Office 365 to our data center and it never, ever completed. It was running and then it was stuck for 15, 14, 15 days and we canceled the job. We restarted job.
And, I don't know, we don't have it with the way that we do it now. And when you look at other file storage solutions out there in the cloud, take Dropbox. Dropbox works great. It syncs nice. It's user-friendly, but it doesn't give you the opportunity or the ability to set an authorization level. So, well, for example, the business owner needs to be able to see and edit all files. But sales department only needs the sales files and the purchase department only need the purchase files, and support department only needs access to the support department files. And Dropbox doesn't have a solution for that. Neither does ShareFile. Neither does... what's the other one? Nomadesk. You got several of those.
We make the online world a safer place
The number one problem we solve with the Always Safe in Business suite that we sell through one of our company's M-IT services. And well, one of my personal goals is to make the world a safer place and especially online. And for that, why I created the Always Safe in Business suite in 2017.
Back in the day we were, oh, we were pretty much in trouble. I've made some bad investments in, well, hardware that didn't work or didn't work as fast as it should be. So, we invested, I don't know, serious amounts of money and we expected it to be up and running in August, and in December we were still having issues and a lot of customer complaints. So, you know, can imagine what that costs at that time because we weren't focusing on new business. Oh man, if I think back, I'm glad I'm out of it.
So, at that point, there was a point that we were almost bankrupt. I was living on my parents pockets. They paid my mortgage. They paid my groceries. They paid my insurance. They paid for the whole family. I've got a wife, I've got three kids. We need food and I wanted to go to sports and all that kind of stuff. But I was glad I could buy our groceries, that I could put food on the table, and the rest didn't matter because there was no money.
And luckily, my... Well, I went to my dad and explained the whole story with... I was pretty embarrassed, to be honest, because I, as a man, couldn't provide for my own family. And how sorry is that you know?... I don't even want to think back on that. I don't... No, I don't want that to happen to anybody.
So my wife, and it was in December 2017, and we were both way, way in the mud, you know, lots of debt. Things at the office weren't running smoothly. We had wrong employees who didn't do the things that they needed to do. So, at all fronts it was almost worthless. I was literally thinking in the evening sitting behind my laptop and still trying to make money.
And I was, a lot of times, I was thinking, why again did I start my own business? Why am I doing what I'm doing? Can I stop? Can I quit? Can I sell the company? But no, we were deep down in the red, so I could sell it but nobody would pay for it. I didn't have a job besides my company so if I stopped with the company, there was no money at all. So, there was not really a way out, an easy way out. And that's where the biggest growth happened because then you need to go through it. And when you go through it, you'll always come up better at the end or come out better.
End December 2017, my wife asks me,
"Okay honey, I love you very much, but this is not sustainable. We can't continue this... living on your parents' pockets. It's insane. So, what is it that we can do, and what is it?"
And that's the biggest and the most important question she asked me. What is it that every business need? And that's when my epiphany, ....
Okay. Every business, as a foundation when looking to IT, they all need to have email hosting. They all need, well, especially here in Europe, they're pretty fond of using the OfficeSuite, so they like Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, et cetera.
Secondly, and that's where what the most important part is, they need to have an online file system, an online file solution, where they can easily tell who can do what. So, who can see what data, who can edit what data. It needs to be available on all devices, so Windows, Mac, laptops, PCs, tablets, smartphones, whatever you're using.
The third one is that they need to have insurance or a proper backup so that when something does go wrong or somebody makes a mistake by deleting wrong files or whatever, that they are insured with a proper backup so that they can always restore their data that went missing, corrupt, deleted, whatever.
And last but not least, they want their systems to be secure, and secure, I mean in antivirus, the firewalling, maybe even two-factor authentication, those four components. So, Office 365 for the email hosting and the Office Suite, the online file solution, backup online and the security solution. Those four components make up the Always Safe in Business suite. And by that, we supply any company, small, medium, or large, with a foundation, an IT foundation, of cloud services that they, well, can get started with.
And from there we take a look at if they need all the hosting or if, I don't know, we've got customers that got more servers running than workstations. So yeah, there's always a business need and we tend to provide the right solution for that business on top of the foundation.
So, long story about one customer that was unhappy about Office 365 and was especially not happy that we, back in the day, moved his data to SharePoint on his... Well, it was pressing pretty hard to us to move his data there while we advise otherwise. But he was also the last one so... I've done it. I didn't use SharePoint for over three or four years now and probably never will. But that method that we've developed in the end of 2017, early 2018, that has made me or gave me the possibility to be debt free within two years. Made me a fortune. I can run my business in three days a week. Our employees are literally doing what they should be doing. They know what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and that we end up with, well, satisfied customers who are customers for life.
So, do you want to save time, money, and frustrations? And are you ready to take this to the next level? And for those who apply this week, I will share all the steps of my success formula. And if you want these, as I said, they make me a fortune, go to cloud-secrets.com/cloudmind. Again, that is cloud-secrets.com/cloudmind and you can apply there. And the ones that apply this week will receive the exact steps to generate lots and lots of monthly recurring revenue like I did.
If you like this, please rate and subscribe on iTunes. Leave any comments if you got any questions, and I'll talk to you next time. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye. Marcel Martens.
Every business needs email, data, protection and security. Here's how I like to make an impact to the world and make it a safer "online" place.
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