Blog Articles
Read MSP360’s latest news and expert articles about MSP business and technology
MSP Voice header

MSP Voice Episode 68 – “Clients, not Customers” with Thomas O’Brien

MSP Voice Episode 68 – “Clients, not Customers” with Thomas O’Brien

This week I welcome Thomas O’Brien with IDEOLITY to the show. Thomas is in the Kansas City area and has been in business since 1988. While it took Thomas and his partners about 3 years to settle on IT services, they have been going strong ever since. In 2008 they changed the name of the company to IDEOLITY to better reflect what they do and it’s also much shorter than the previous name.

Even though Thomas has been doing IT services for over 30 years, this is actually his 4th career. With the introduction of the Microcomputer, Thomas taught himself the platform and started up a training company to train companies on how to use these new computers. This experience eventually led him to IT services.

With an educational background in psychology and government, Thomas went back to school in 1991 and got his master’s in computer and information management. He says this additional education experience really helped him to better understand the business. Interestingly, IDEOLITY has always been “the IT resource” for their clients and has basically had them on monthly contracts. They were doing break/fix in the early days, mostly because things always broke. While they have a core group of clients who have been with them since the ’90s, many of their customers have been with them for about 10 years.

Thomas also recommends continuing education and found some great resources at the Kauffman Foundation which helped him tie the technical to the business aspects at IDEOLITY. Listen to the end to understand the meaning of the title of this episode.

Guest: Thomas O’Brien

Company: IDEOLITY

Watch on YouTube

News of the Week

Brief: Download the set of free marketing materials created to help MSPs to sell Backup-as-a-Service. All templates are white-label, so you can brand them with your logo and add any company information you need.

Brief: Sometimes you set things up in a dumb way because you were given no other options. NOTE: the original post was removed for cross-posting but the OP added it back in the comments.

Brief: A new MSP is seeking advice, feel free to offer some.

author avatar
Doug Hazelman
Doug Hazelman is a software industry veteran with over 20 years experience. Doug is currently VP of Technical Marketing for CloudBerry Labs. Doug engages with customers as well as the MSP community to help spread the CloudBerry message as well as get feedback on products and services. Doug has held various management positions at other software companies throughout his career, joining CloudBerry after spending 9.5 years at Veeam Software.
FREE ASSETS
MSP’s Marketing Templates for Selling Backup
  • Leaflet Template
  • Customer Presentation
  • Promo Emails
New call-to-action
MSP assets