Do you believe in magic? To many people, how technology works is magic. At IT Radix, we work hard behind the scenes to help preserve this illusion for our clients. But what does this really mean?
Earlier this year, I had the privilege of hearing Doug Lipp, management consultant and former Disney executive, speak on how Disney makes its clients believe in magic. He shared a number of outstanding lessons throughout his discussion but my personal favorite was “flawless execution” and a story he shared exemplifying this at Disney World. This story was also part of his presentation entitled: “Snow White Never Has a Bad Day: Lessons from Disney U about Leadership, Culture and Legendary Service.” While I’d love to share the full story with you, I encourage you to learn more about Disney University and Doug Lipp online.
Today, I want to focus on how his lessons confirmed that IT Radix is on the right track. As with most organizations, it starts with the people. If you hire right, train right and finally treat them right, you can create magic within your own organization.
As with most things at IT Radix, we have a process to ensure that we hire the right people to be part of the IT Radix team. It’s not just about understanding and supporting technology; it’s about being able to communicate effectively with our clients, vendors and ourselves. We hire people who want to make a difference and help our clients succeed.
Next, we spend a lot of time training our team not only on technology but also on process. We support approximately two dozen different backup technologies alone. This doesn’t include the myriad of hardware and software that our clients use. What’s more important is that if you are an IT Radix Management and Support client, we are checking your backup every day. We have a process for setting up your backup consistently, monitoring consistently and testing it consistently. Should we detect a problem, we correct it. This is all done behind the scenes, like all the activity occurring in the underground tunnels at a Disney park. Why? So that when a client accidently deletes a file, we can—as Mike Oster would say—“auto-magically” restore the file so that our client can keep working and move on with their day. Now, that’s flawless execution!
But let’s back up to the beginning, to a time before an organization becomes one of our clients. We offer free events and a plethora of knowledge in this newsletter and online. When we first meet a prospective client, we have a long list of questions to encourage the prospect to share information about their business, their technology needs and their overall partnership preferences. Of course, we learn about their specific technology too. Only then are we able to pull together an assessment to assist the prospective client in their evaluation of us. Let’s face it, in the beginning, you hardly know us; but by sharing our knowledge and expertise, we find that prospects feel more comfortable in their decision making. This doesn’t happen by accident. We have a process for nurturing potential client partnerships which may and sometime does take years to come together.
Once an organization partners with us, our client onboarding process begins to continue the nurturing and strengthening of our partnership. Because like Disney, we want to ensure that an IT Radix client doesn’t have a bad technology day.
First published in our October 2017 IT Radix Resource newsletter
