Posted by Glen Thomson on Mon, Jan 25, 2010 @ 11:50 AM
Sean Furman is fishing for a perfect blue fin tuna. When he’s not running his business, STF Consulting, Furman is out on the open water, usually more than 50 miles out in the ocean off the tip of Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Very early in the morning on a recent Tuesday, he and his crew left the dock at Seabright, where he moors his 26-foot boat, Painless, and headed out to sea. They saw much more than tuna.
“There is a lot of life out there. There are dolphins whales everywhere,” says Furman. “They were so friendly, they’d come right up to the boat.”
During fishing season, Furman takes his boat out several times a month. He says he’s even arranged it so the birth of his first child doesn’t upset his fishing schedule. “I planned my child’s birth around fishing,” says Furman. “The baby is due in the off season so there’s no conflict with fishing and I can be 100 % focused on what my wife wants me to do.”
Until the baby arrives, Furman is in search of perfection. “I’m always looking for that trophy fish and I’m looking for trophy customers,” says Furman.
STF Consulting is a managed service provider (MSP) in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, offering IT services to businesses in the central part of the state. STF Consulting oversees approximately 100 servers and 550 workstations in 40 businesses in the area.
Furman says he is always looking for the best tools to round out his MSP offering for customers. He uses solutions like those from Level Platforms to monitor laptops to make sure all systems are “go” as well as the StorageCraft ShadowProtect line of award-winning backup, disaster recovery and migration software to keep his customers’ data available.
“ShadowProtect IT Edition is worth its weight in gold,” says Furman. “We also use ShadowProtect Desktop Edition and ShadowProtect Server Edition to take snapshots of systems every hour.” Furman says his business uses ShadowProtect, not only to backup systems they are managing, but to migrate systems from one type of hardware to brand new hardware.
Because workstations can be tough to rebuild, Furman says that ShadowProtect is an invaluable tool for his business. “ShadowProtect’s Hardware Independent Restore feature is a huge time saver,” he adds. “Multiple vendors help us create one image that we can deploy over and over again.”
Finding ways to save time and money are part of the process of polishing his business.
Furman says his goal isn’t to grow his company into a behemoth. He would rather run a small company and constantly refine STF consulting to make it better. “I have a vision for my company where it is always improving. I am always fine tuning our offering. I ask myself, ‘How can we make it better than ever?’ Building our MSP offering means constant refinement and figuring out how we can get more with less.”
When Furman and his team get a new lead, they spend weeks preparing – sizing up the customer’s needs, their systems and processes, and assessing whether or not the customer is a good fit for STF Consulting. “I tell potential customers that I’m evaluating them while they’re investigating me. I want customers who will accept my methodology, my procedures. If you bring in a customer who is burdensome, it’s going to cost you.”
He also advises other IT consultants to take their time developing what they can offer their customers. “MSPs should take it slowly. Everyone’s in this mad rush to develop a solution and put it out there. Talk to your existing customers. Use them to help you design a solution.”
Customers may not like the analogy, but Furman says fishing and business are very similar: “What I like about business is what I like about fishing. The teamwork. The details.” Just like he works for weeks to prepare for a new customer, Furman works for weeks getting his boat ready, turning it into the perfect machine. Then he puts together the perfect crew to head out on the water to reel in the trophy fish. Adds Furman, “The sense of accomplishment is the same.”