One friend called me this morning, asking me since I told him yesterday evening that I was considering providing support and trouble shooting services to home computer users, he would like to engage me to provide trouble shooting service to a long standing issue of site to site VPN using a Cisco router sent from the US to his friend's office at the rate of home computer service he used to provide before.
He told me this problem about a month ago while we went for a trip. I told him our rates for servicing business entities. At that time he asked whether I could just guide his staff over the phone to solve the problem so that the cost of solving the problem would be minimized, as he was giving his friend the service for free to help his friend who is also a grass-root leader.
Today, I told him that since it is a business entity, I would provide the service at a discounted rate but he still insisted on S$100.00 for the trouble shooting of Cisco site to site VPN. He told me that since the router came without a modem, they wanted to buy a modem but it is almost impossible to buy ADSL modem today. So they ended up buying ADSL router and the lady who went there could not get the VPN to work. So the task was to solve this configuration instead of site to site VPN.
I turned him down as we knew in the past, this would not be the case. When providing services we would frequently run into such situation and they would tell us to help without additional charges when the issue was wrongly stated or simplified to breakdown the value of services. I told him the process of trouble shooting would include the time for testing and verifying the functioning of site to site VPN connection.
If the grass-root leader could not understand the process of value creation using technical knowledge, skill, experience, timeliness of service delivery to his own company as an employee or business manager, and let the task of setting up the site to site VPN pending over a month, expecting free service from his friend who lack the knowledge or skill set to provide the service to get thing done. Expecting free service to business, while forgetting about running cost, I would think his mileage would be rather limited.
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