474: My Clients Computer Guy

Command Control Power: Apple Tech Support & Business Talk

Apple Consultants Network members Joe Saponare, Sam Valencia and Jerry Zigmont discuss working with Apple technology and clients in their consulting practices. Technical challenges and client relationships are freely shared in this weekly podcast.

For our “cold open,” listen in on our candid chat about the work that goes into producing a weekly show for nine years, how we share the workload, and what we hope to get back from our community.

We discuss the great response to our recent Patreon-only show with Tim Pearson.

Joe recaps some of the recent Patreon-only episodes that supporters have enjoyed recently, including Mistakes and Adventures in Billing, Rates & Service Offerings with Tim Pearson of CreativeTechs (mentioned above), an interview with Richard Wingfield of GObytes and Envision Design about productivity, organization, and time management, and an upcoming episode about client frustrations.

Jerry brings up email hosts and we discuss Microsoft 365 vs. other options like Fastmail, Rackspace, etc.

Joe describes an issue helping a client recover their Microsoft 365 hosted email account when the client-managed admin account was compromised and the recovery email address was changed to a non-existent email address.

Sam shares a personal story about someone near and dear to him being scammed and having funds taken.

How can we help guide clients to evaluate scams accurately?

Business idea that probably already exists: a website to forward your emails to in order to determine if it’s a scam. Could something like that work for phone calls too?

Wouldn’t it be great if we had stories to share with clients to motivate them to care more about their own online security? Send us your stories! We hope to see some of them in an upcoming TidBITS Content Network article. As Adam Engst says, “People respond better to narrative than nagging.”

Speaking of helping people understand the importance of security, Joe wants to remind listeners about honest.security (by our supporter Kolide) and the 5 Tenets of Honest Security.