About Us
Future Tech Systems, LLC was created in the summer of 2006. Chris Mai, the owner and Senior Engineer, has been working in the IT profession since 1995. He has held a variety of IT related positions over this time, giving him a well rounded understanding of not only IT issues but client concerns of all kinds.
We believe that it takes more than simply technical knowledge to keep our clients happy; many people find it difficult to relate to their IT support provider. We prefer to use simple analogies to explain issues to our clients, sparing them the hassle of having to understand technical jargon. We are available 24/7, and can fix a great variety of issues through our innovative remote support tools that let us work on your issue right over the internet.
We are a turnkey solution provider, for all of your IT needs. Everything from the planning stages to regularly scheduled maintenance, website design, Blackberry support, iPhone support, general PDA support, server maintenance and installation, desktop troubleshooting, and assistance with equipment purchasing.
We take a few unique approaches that enables us to be competitive in pricing in a variety of ways.
For example:
We took on a customer recently that is a small business, with 5 full time employees. They needed to go from a 2 PC setup, with a home wireless router, to something that would allow them room to grow, and stay in touch with their Blackberry handhelds.
We quoted out all of the equipment that they needed, and gave them the option to purchase the equipment at our cost with their credit card. In this profession, it is quite common to charge 15-30% markup on hardware. When you’re buying a $79 router for $99, it’s not a big deal. When we can get you a $10,000 server for $10,000 instead of $13,000, it is definitely a big deal!
There are three main reasons we handle purchasing that way:
1.) Nobody can get you equipment cheaper
2.) We’d rather focus our time on the support of your equipment
3.) We want you to feel confident when we quote out hardware for you, we’re helping you buy what you need, rather than trying to “sell” you something you don’t need.
For a lot of potential clients that we speak to, the first, and often the only, question we are asked is “What do you charge per hour?” We tend to shy away from that a bit for a few reasons, which we’d like to explain.
Yes, we do have a “base rate” of $150.00 per hour from 8AM-6PM, M-F and $225.00 per hour after 6PM and on weekends. However, many of our clients negotiate more affordable rates by either buying 10 or 20 hour blocks of time at a discount, or by signing up for 1, 2 or 3 year service commitments for flat rate, unlimited tech support. All of our clients make use of our remote service frequently as well, which allows us to offer lower rates as well as no charges for technician travel time!
Bottom line, if you want to work with us, we want to work with you. Plenty of service companies can offer you $20 or $30 an hour cheaper rates. However, if it takes their technicians 2 or 3 hours for a job we’d do in an hour, or brings 4 technicians for a 1 or 2 technician job, you’re not really saving.
We are also big believers in preventative maintenance. Much like a car, networks, servers, PCs, and yes, even blackberry handhelds, need regular maintenance. What good is a tape drive if nobody is cleaning it and making sure its backing up your data? Who is making sure that your antivirus software and windows security patches are up to date?
So in a nutshell, rather than looking at just the price, look at the quality you are getting. Ask yourself if you have a “Break – Fix” IT company who only shows up when something is completely down, or if you have an IT support provider that sees the Big Picture. None of us want to get a phone call that your server is down and nobody can send or receive email – we want to call YOU and tell you we caught a problem before it was a problem.
Do you call your IT support provider now, and find you can never get them out there quick enough? We offer guaranteed same day service for emergency issues… even if that day is a Saturday. Do your IT people leave at 5:00 whether the job is finished? We don’t…
Does your IT support provider feed you a bunch of BS technical jargon, and even though you’re not technically oriented, you just KNOW that they have no clue what they’re doing? We’ll be honest – if we don’t know what the problem is, we will tell you we don’t know, and that we’re working on it. And we will figure it out. We’re nerds; it’s what we do.
We also like to build a personal relationship with all of our clients. When you call, you’re not “The computer in the side office when you come in the secondary door” – you’re Sue from Accounting, and you have a cat named Space Bar. Why does that matter? Well, we get to know every employees name, and what they use their computer for. We know that if we work on something on Sue from Accounting’s computer, that her Quickbooks had better work, so we check it. And since we are on a first name basis with everyone, if you ever have an issue, you can call up the owner and say “Hey Chris – this doesn’t look right” and you get taken care of as a friend, and not as a “customer”. We feel that it helps us get the information we need to do our job better, and helps you feel more comfortable that you are going to get the best support you can possibly get.
You wouldn’t look for the car with the cheapest brake pads, or the cheapest babysitter for your kids, or the cheapest lock for your office door, would you? Of course not. Look for what is going to do the job the best, for a reasonable price.