It’s always been my assumption (we all know what that leads to…) that most of the regulars here (and at FreePBX Community forum) are either on the corporate side (Sangoma or ClearlyIP employees) or run their own shop hosting/managing FreePBX for their own clients.
My background was corporate IT in both large companies and small startups, I dealt with phone systems because I had to, not so much because I wanted to (seems to be common in the IT world). I eventually left the corporate life for various reasons and started my own small MSP and Custom Integrations business (More residential tech, home automation, lighting, AV etc).
When I was in corporate I had a habbit of working very hard at being lazy… I basicly would spend two weeks coding a way to automate that one task that took me 1 hour a day to get it down to 1 minute a day… Eventually I had everything so that I was basically just doing preventative maintenance and reading reports and done by 9am every day. I was bored out of my mind and had the anxiety of needing to “look busy” to the higher ups on me all day.
When I went out on my own full time I was a one man show so that history of making my life boring paid off and I build my business like that. I only took customers that would allow me to clean up what they had and then maintain it so that I had less fires to put out. This worke well and still does, we’re proactive, not reactive like many MSP seem to be.
I got dragged into the PBX world because a customer had a voip system that wasn’t working and had been down for two days with neither vendor (PBX or Carrier) taking resposibility for the issue. They called me out of despiration and I agreed to “have a look.”
I found the issue (forget what it was now) contaced the vendor responsible, explained and they just flat out refused to do anything about it. I told the client to give me a day or so and I’d find a better solution. The next day I had FreePBX setup with some soft phones, and account with VoIP innovations and had Digium desk phones on order. Charged them a small fee monthly to manage the whole thing and the rest as they say is history.
Since then we’ve got about 60 PBX clients, some big, some small, we now use ClearlyIP as our carrier (because they’re awesome) and for the deskphone/softphone product and I’ve continued to automate my work away.
We host our PBX’s on cloud VM’s. Keep them locked down to only specific public IP’s, generally discorage the end customer from playing with them (which 99% are totally fine with). Touch each system at least once a week for PM and have written a few custom tools to monitor/alert on any system issues so that we generally know before our customers do that there’s an issue.
We tried using Zabbix for a while but it was a square peg in a round hole, too cumbersome and didn’t ever give me what I actually wanted/needed.
I’ve also developed a web based queue management tool for my end customers that gave them business inteligence they needed to manage employees and see real time call volumes (The QXact tool never really fit the need either).
So long story short I’ve gotten to the point where I belive there’s market out there for me to scale this and in thinking along those lines I started wondering what are other people/MSP’s doing? How are they doing it and am I on the right track here? Would the tools I’ve built be of value to anyone else?
So, if you’re read this far, for anyone on here doing the same/similar thing, what’s your story? How are you doing things? what’s your experience with customers: both pain points and successes?