Apple would very much like me to have a Digital Landing Page, and honestly, I think they’re onto something with that, and have thus created this thing of glory for your beholding pleasure. It’s a brilliant idea, and I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t think of it all by myself, years ago.
I didn’t really understand what a Digital Landing Page was when I read their helpful suggestion on the subject (i.e., that I should probably have one), so instead of blundering around and sort of trotting out a lot of blithe, third-person nonsense about How We Strive To Empower Our Clients or somesuch nonsense – after all, there is no “we”, as the mighty edifice that is RWX Consulting is really just “me” – I’ve decided that the canny thing to do would be to stick to their talking points. There were four good ones, so I’m going to lift them wholesale and work from their list.
Yes, it’s intellectually lazy. I know. Anyway:
Step 1: Detail the specific Apple-related services offered (e.g., deployment, integration, training, MDM, security, custom development, support).
Oof. There’s a lot to get through there, so I’m going to break out bullet points to go through these. Partly because it’s a functional grammatical tool, but mostly because I’ve always thought bullet points were rather fun.
• I do a certain amount of deployment work. Honestly, I primarily work with small businesses, and Apple Business Manager (which is sort of Apple’s hub for deployment – i.e., the deploying of devices to end users) is fabulous. Doesn’t cost a penny (save the time required to set the thing up), integrates with MDM, allows you to federate your domain – in other words, hook it up to your Google Workspace or Microsoft IDP setup so that your work emails become Managed Apple Accounts – and there’s a low-cost MDM right in the thing in the form of Apple Business Essentials. If you have a small business and you want to set up a tool that vastly improves and streamlines your IT infrastructure? You should get Apple Business Manager. And/or call me and I’ll come set that up for you.
• Integration covers a lot of bases. Most of the time when I’m integrating an Apple computer or device with a thing, that thing is an existing network of one stripe or another. Sometimes that network is very simple, and is really just a WiFi network or a lot of Cat-5e’s plugged into a switch. Sometimes that network is a hellish monstrosity of interwoven VPNs architected by a madman and documented in eldritch scratches on the inside of his asylum door. It can really go either way.
The other major thing that integration seems to cover is existing workflow and data storage. That’s often a more nuanced and interesting set of challenges; you can’t just roll up to a site and start laying down the law about how people should be doing their jobs and using their computers, after all. For one thing it’s very rude, and for another thing there’s decent chance that you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve worked for people who make pressure switches for high-explosive devices, people who do terrifying things with lasers, an organization whose sole function was to look at the wobbly parts of deep space telescope images and infer the existence of distant planets, and an actual, no-fooling chocolate factory. I’ve long-since learned that those are specific and diverse workflows that are critically data-driven, and that ensuring that new technologies work with those workflows? That isn’t an optional part of the exercise.
(Also, the things I know about high-explosives, lasers, exoplanet traversal and chocolate manufacture are borderline nonexistent, save that only one of those four is safe to eat.)
• I don’t do a lot of training work. If you ask me how to make a new smart album in Photos then I’m going to have to stare at it for a moment and figure it out. The clients I’ve done training work for in the past all seem to enjoy it when I do that kind of work, and I enjoy excellent feedback (customers cite my ‘humor’ and ‘wit’ and ‘myopic, puzzled whining’) but no, honestly it’s not something I do as a matter of course and I can recommend some great local people who are happy to do that kind of thing better than I.
• I have been professionally supporting Apple and its associated products and technologues since 1994, which makes me feel very old indeed. In that time, I have had precisely one (1) occasion to work with MDM at scale. One. Uno. Ein.
This is Santa Barbara, which – along with its surrounding satellites of quaint, idyllic offshoots – props up the USA’s lucrative Wine and Small-Batch-Gourmet-Preserve industries, and also does sterling work in the Artisanal-Handmade-Jewelry arena. It’s not an area where there’s a huge base of potential customers looking to roll out a thousand-seat JAMF install. If that changes then, well, here I am with all the relevant qualifications. In the meanwhile, I support a few Apple Business Manager and Jamf Now clients. Both are fine products that I endorse robustly.
• I’ve given a lot of talks about Security to a lot of professional people in mid-priced Conference Center Hotels in the last ten years or so – most of them next to airports – and IT Security is thus something close to my heart. I have a lot of slides and presentations on the subject that I have run through endlessly while everyone who has been sent to the conference by their boss surreptitiously browses Reddit and pretends to listen, but I’ll give you the tl;dr because we’re pals in this Digital Landing Page Adventure:
- You can never have enough of it,
- You always have to stay on top of it, and
- It doesn’t actually exist.
Yeah. Let that one sink in for a moment.
You can mitigate risk, but security is fundamentally a human psychological construction that isn’t functionally real. That said, I’m very serious about mitigating said risk, and frequently do comprehensive IT Security audits including pen-testing, as well as offering monitoring services.
• Custom Development. Other than knocking out the occasional ugly shell script to do something miserable like extracting hundred of thousands of images and PDFs from a broken MySQL database? No, I don’t really do Dev work. My degree is in Anthropology. You don’t want an Anthropologist writing software for you. I mean, it’ll look great and have a great set of insights about ceremonial gift-exchange, but it’s probably not going to work terribly well.
• I think that a lot of the above sort of roll together under the “Support” banner. If you hire me, I will advise on things, set them up, make sure they work in the manner in which you might most desire, and then be available at either an hourly, project, or retainer rate to support those things. That, really, is pretty much what’s on the tin, re: me.
Step 2: Expert and Certifications: Highlight relevant Apple certifications and areas of specialization.
A few years ago, I worked with another ACN in another consulting venture. Like me, he had an impressive list of Apple certifications, and on a whim we decided to pool all of the certificates we had for all those certifications, print them out, frame them, and put them on the office wall.
(CVS would sell you a three-pack of letter-size frames for about five bucks, and was two doors down from the office, and he and I found areas of discord about interior decorating and also, it turned out, many other things.)
We then put a table and two chairs in front of said wall, and when meeting with new Apple Store Business people, we’d sit them there while we chatted. There were about fifty-something frames on that wall, and it was fun to watch them get a little pale and try not to count them all. Yes, it was a little (okay, very) childish, but it did rather make the point, and did an excellent job of shortcutting around any do-you-actually-know-what-you’re-talking-about parts of the conversation.
Some of my certifications are so old that they no longer seem to show up anywhere any more, which is rather sad because I was quite proud of my MacOS 10.2 ACSP Certification. Still, here’s the current list (not shown: Jamf Associate, CNWP networking certification, probably a couple more than I can’t remember right now):
I think that – on balance – if I had to talk about my area of specialization then I’d say it was probably… Apple. Particularly the Mac, but also those new-fangled mobile devices that the kids seem so into these days. Tsk. Kids, eh?
Step 3: Target Audience: Identify the type of businesses you serve (e.g., SMBs, enterprises, specific industries).
Ah. Finally, an easy one. Right then!
I work with small businesses in the traditional sense of being somewhere between 1-100 employees. I don’t work with Enterprise clients – partly because the enterprises in this geographical area have their own in-house teams, but mostly because this is Santa Barbara; a pretty wealthy, bucolic slice of the American Riviera that isn’t exactly brimming with corporate behemoths. As for specific industries? Well, no, I work with anyone, as the skills I’ve evolved over the last thirty-something years are pretty flexible. I have as much fun working with my professional race car transmission supplier client as I do with my jewelry production company as I do with the frankly charming lady who writes astonishingly grisly murder novels.
Step 4: Value Proposition: Clearly communicate the benefits of working with you (e.g., increased productivity, reduced costs, improved security).
Another fairly straightforward one! I shall endeavor to speak clearly on this subject, thus:
• I cannot make you or your employees more productive. That would be a ludicrous claim. What I can – and do – do is work with you and your employees to identify solutions for existing productivity roadblocks and then work with stakeholders to ensure that each project is tailored to address specific concerns.
This is often a more painstaking and nuanced process than one might imagine. Do you have a satellite office in Los Angeles that you need to be able to share data with in a private cloud? Do you also have a remote employee who is traveling while he works in Mongolia for the next year? What issues are there with his satellite internet that render conventional VPN connections problematic? What are the fixes, and how does accommodating those fixes affect the overall purchasing and installation decisions required to move the project forward? (Note: true story).
Again, I can’t make you or your business more productive. I can help, though. I’ve been doing that for thirty-one years now, and by all accounts I’m really pretty good at that.
• Reduced Costs? Yep. More often than not I can save you a lot of money. If I had a nickel for every client I’ve walked into and done a complete audit for who’d been outrageously overcharged for prior work and/or had a stack of subscriptions and services silently bleeding cash every month then, well, I’d have a lot of damn nickels.
• I will probably also improve your security. Again, like the productivity thing, security involves buy-in from all parties. It’s simple to get all draconian and lay down the law about how people should use and secure their data and devices, but that often backfires. I’ve met a lot of competitors and other IT professionals who favor the stricter approach on the grounds that when the people in the trenches chafe at the restrictions placed on them and, say, start using their personal hotspot instead of the company firewall so that they can look at their nephew’s photos on Facebook, and then some kind of horrifying breach takes place? Well, they can shrug and hold up their hands and exclaim that it wasn’t their fault.
This always seems disingenuous at best, and also ethically awful. I have been doing this for three decades. I have been engaged to clean up breaches, but in that time I have never had a client who has had any kind of security-driven loss or outage. Educating users about risks, regularly checking in with them, doing the work and actually being open to answering questions and resolving issues? Those aren’t flashy, but they’re solid strategies for improving actual security instead of blindly throwing a product or subscription at the worry and then walking away.
Being mindful about the actual risks and potentials for security breaches is ultimately more effective than putting people in a position where they are – often very quietly – disincentivized from actually taking appropriate caution. IT security is about meeting people where they are and making them allies and proactive stakeholders, not about yelling at them to change their password every fourteen days.
Step 5: The End.
Well, look at that! We got to the end of this Digital Marketing Page, and made it in one piece, together. It saddens me, stranger, that our paths must now diverge; yours as you doubtless wander off to pursue your own goals and dreams and engage in self-improvement, and mine taking me to Montecito in about forty minutes to go and see if I can work out why one laptop out of about a dozen identical other laptops stolidly refuses to talk to the Time Machine setup on a huge Synology NAS in a rack in a warehouse full of organic shaving cream bottles.
Still. It’s been fun, and I shall leave you with nothing but good memories, and also this gif of a cat playing the piano. Take care, and remember; the real Digital Landing Page?
It’s the friends we make along the way.
