Residential vs. Business customers

Briggsy said:
Businesses want everything done yesterday. They never want to free up their computer to let you work on it - and when they do, they huff and puff if it takes more than 10 seconds to fix. They generally talk down to you and then after all that, they take forever to pay.
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We just fired one of those, but we have had more residential customers like that than businesses. It's all about finding good customers on either side of the fence. Good business customers understand you have business hours and are human like anyone else. They also respect you and understand that you are there to help them. This is especially true with MSP services, because you make more money if everything just works, let your clients know that.
 
It can depend too on how you are staffed. We lost a guy to another company and are very small. So we currently rule out any on site service as we don't have the staff for it. Remote is also out of the question except for emergencies.

I have enough demands for my limited time in store (3 days a week) and our other "tech" doesn't do hardware at all. Only software.

So each circumstance will be unique. We mostly do residential, but the boss still sells to businesses where he can install himself or give the work to one of our partners etc.
 
Briggsy said:
I'm 100% residential now. I've had business customers in the past - and it's not for me.

Businesses want everything done yesterday. They never want to free up their computer to let you work on it - and when they do, they huff and puff if it takes more than 10 seconds to fix. They generally talk down to you and then after all that, they take forever to pay.
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We have the contract for the three local McDonalds and they are always classic in giving us access to do the repair. 99% of the time we are called out to replace the eftpos/credit card readers in the drive through as they stretch the cables out the window. A two minute job can take from 15-30 mins waiting for a gap and trying to finish before getting shoved out of the way to wait for the next opportunity to finish the rewiring.
 
tl;dr: Business is better than residential, by far.


Like I've mentioned a few times previously, I'm a 'one man band' but I'm probably 99.9% business (now) .... and I wouldn't have it any other way. I started off doing residential work, many years ago, and for years almost all of my work was residential.

Having done both, I can completely understand both points of view here and, 20-odd years ago, I would've agreed with those who say residential work is easier and less stressful but, I'm afraid to say, you're doing it wrong. You have to be more proactive with your business customers: Try to prevent issues by replacing problematic systems and equipment and, wherever practical, factor in plenty of redundancy. Make them understand the weaknesses in their system - any single point of failure - the potential for downtime and the impact that downtime will have on their business. If they acknowledge such potential issues in advance, yet do nothing to prevent them, it puts the onus on the customer when something that you warned them about fails. In which event, this not only takes the pressure off you since 'you told them so' but it improves your reputation (since you were proven right) and makes it more likely the customer will follow your recommendations in future.

Working in the business environment, you have to turn the importance and urgency to your advantage. Residential customers just want a fix -- being without their computer is merely an inconvenience and they're happy to take a chance that it'll break again, and again. Downtime in business costs money, often much more money than preventing the downtime would've cost. Get this point through to your customer and you will make far more money selling equipment and services and a lot less time hastily fixing stuff.

I have around 15 business customers, including a couple of large retail stores. I employ nobody and, while I have to be available 7 days a week (12-14 hours per day), my typical day is spent working from my office, drinking coffee and remotely configuring systems. I get maybe 3 or 4 calls per day on average Mon-Fri (rarely any over the weekend) which are usually quick fixes or requests to add users to domains, etc. And, in the rare event that something critical fails, in most cases there's plenty of redundancy to cope. In the retail stores for example, there's 6 physical servers running the show (all Hypervisors, containing multiple virtual servers). I could lose at least 2 physical servers without any downtime. In fact, I often work on the servers and reboot them during working hours. I simply live-migrate the VMs back and forth as necessary, without so much as a second of interruption to the users. By contrast, back in my residential days, I spent most of my time speaking to members of the public, driving back and forth, doing lots of small jobs for little money (sometimes even for free).

Another thing to consider if, like me, you're a one-man-band, is whether or not to go down the MSP route. I know a lot of people here will disagree when I say consider NOT doing this (unless you employ staff). I don't have service contracts with ANY of my business customers, and that's exactly how I like it. I get paid for each and every bit of work they ask me to do and I get paid (by the hour) to maintain their systems. The downside is that I don't get paid if I don't do the work but I also don't get pestered. When a customer pays a fixed monthly/annual fee for service, you can bet they'll try to get their money's worth. For me, every phone call is a bonus and more money in my bank.
 
Well said Molt!

I think a lot of "MSPs" take on business clients...and then put little into it, they "wait" for problems...and then those problems are big, hence the emergency.

Gotta be a proactive MSP...get clients on regular hardware replacement cycles, and utilize your RMM tools to be automated. Keep things fresh, fast, running like a top!
 
I am mostly residential, I do have quite a bit of SOHO clients and a couple of small business clients. With that said, while I enjoy the SOHO clients the businesses are the ones that generate the bigger income for me. I have a couple of business on recurring revenue with contracts and while a lot of it is maintaining the day to day the project based work can pay very well.

You will get clients of all different types the cheap residential that will try to skimp by on the bare minimum and even the business clients. But when you get a really good client, you just wanna clone them. I know if I had about a dozen of those good clients I would be full time.
 
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Briggsy said:
[...]
The only frustrating aspect is when customers are bored and want to chat constantly, or want to know everything you did, why you did it and how you did it - but they get charged for that time anyway.[...]
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The way to go: just stop working when they want to chat. They'll soon realize you will have to spend more time on their computer.
After all, it's their choice... Being paid good money to chat with a customer... not so bad ;)
 
I'm a mix of higher end residential clients and home businesses. I do very few businesses that are actually in a commercial building. That's not my target market. I don't like setting up servers or being on call or on the hook for large medical centers and such. I've done work like that in the past and the time I spent chasing invoices and dealing with bad checks really put me off to it.

My typical residential client makes at least $70k/year and can afford to have 2 desktops, 3 laptops, 3 iPads, and 4 smartphones in the family. They usually work for a big company and are already used to business grade machines from work.

I've been focusing a lot on walk in computer sales recently and it's been great for the bottom line, but it's also bringing in undesirable customers that are cheap. I'm sorry, but that computer you're looking at is $150. It's not going to be super fast, or have a brand new battery with a 10 hour runtime, nor is it going to be able to store your entire 800GB iTunes movie and music collection. I'm thinking about pulling any laptops from the shelves that aren't at least $300 or more. People have unrealistic expectations of the cheapies, and cheap wads are referring their cheap wad friends to me now.

Do you want to know where the stress is? Cheap wad clients. I don't care if their residential or businesses, but if they're not willing to pay what it takes to get what they need and then they blame you, that's just stress you don't need. You've got to charge enough for it to be worth it for you. Me? I don't think I'd go back to large businesses for any amount of money. I just didn't enjoy it, and I don't enjoy managed services either.
 
Porthos said:
Single home business users are the worst for me. They rely on their computers for work and income but they are cheap. Wont backup and when something goes wrong they want it fixed yesterday. Many don't have second computers to separate business from porn surfing. Or even to use when their daily driver goes down.

They fall for the FedEx emails and crap their pants when they get ransomware. (remember no backups). Around here they use Black Friday special computers and don't want to spend for a reliable business class machine or an external drive till its too late.

Rant over.
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I feel your pain with this one. They are the worst of both sides wrapped into one.
 
We mainly work with high end residential customers and have a few small businesses. We only do break/fix and find this suits us fine. All our residential clients pay at the end of the callout or when collecting their repair. We find that if the client knows the payment expectations up front there are no problems with collecting payment. Business clients mostly also pay on the day or in some rare cases by direct deposit overnight. On a couple of occasions we've had too chase business client payment after 2 days but they realise quickly that if they want good support then they'll have to be good payers.
Ultimately if a good service is provided, that is done properly and professionally both residential and business can be good, they just have to be handled differently.
 
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Melanie L said:
We mainly work with high end residential customers and have a few small businesses. We only do break/fix and find this suits us fine. All our residential clients pay at the end of the callout or when collecting their repair. We find that if the client knows the payment expectations up front there are no problems with collecting payment. Business clients mostly also pay on the day or in some rare cases by direct deposit overnight. On a couple of occasions we've had too chase business client payment after 2 days but they realise quickly that if they want good support then they'll have to be good payers.
Ultimately if a good service is provided, that is done properly and professionally both residential and business can be good, they just have to be handled differently.
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All new customers pay via CC or cash on job completion. When we've built up a rapport over time I let clients do EFT transfers or cheque within 7 days.
Worked well for 20 years for me. :)
 
Barcelona said:
My business is mostly residential, as I've said before. I do support some small businesses (an accountant, Civil Engineering works, a Subway franchisee, Hairdresser, an Auto Electrician and a few others) but much prefer to do residential. As @nlinecomputers computers so eloquently stated (lol) "teaching Grandma to Facebook" is exactly what I like doing! Yes, it can be frustrating, yes, I feel like running from the house screaming sometimes, but it's a great feeling when you show an older person how easy it is to use Skype to keep in contact with that Son in America, or that Daughter in England etc. Email, websurfing, Facebook etc opens up a whole new world for older people! (And they make great biscuits!)
90% of my residential clients never question my prices, they just pay what is owed.
I like that!
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I feel the same way. I love working with older clients and watching the enjoyment they get when I show them something new.
 
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