Jon talks to Tony Chiappetta, CEO of AMC Modern IT. Modernize your organization's IT and then train your staff to actually use it. Their goal: Let's make your people more productive! Tony Chiappetta's IT company is all about "heartbeats, not hardware™" Chiappetta, CEO of California-based Advanced Microcomputing Concepts (AMC) Modern IT, is so passionate about the phrase, that he trademarked it. As an entrepreneur for almost 20 years, it's been his mission to change the IT game to people-first instead of focused on fixing tech problems. "There's so much more to IT than security," Chiappetta said. "You have such an opportunity to make your people, your company, your life so much better. And people have the potential to have so much excitement about technology. When things run smoothly, it makes everything else so much more fun. … And you can get so many more things done at work, that you can get so much more out of life." Chiappetta has never understood why IT has to rely on so many tools and applications. Over the last several years, he's streamlined his company and his clients to run almost entirely under Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. That has allowed the vast majority of his clients – which are companies on a global level with between 20-500 employees – to quickly and effectively channel their IT needs under one platform. Whether Chiappetta's company runs a client's IT division or complements a client's dedicated IT team, the "less is more" mantra has been a game-changer. That especially has been the case over the last 12 months since Covid-19 forced most employees to work from home. "The clients who were modernized under Microsoft 365, they were just easily able to take their laptops home and work from there," Chiappetta said. Two years after graduating from the University of Southern California in 2000, Chiappetta decided to leave the corporate world and go into business for himself with AMC Modern IT. He reached out to 1,000 people – cold-calling people directly from the Yellow Pages – before landing his first client, an older real estate agent who said Chiappetta reminded him of his younger self. Chiappetta went from charging hourly rates as a 23-year-old to eventually monitoring systems and backup systems on a daily rate to building a team of 24 employees in 2014. That year, his company was trying to plug tech holes, pull all-nighters and solve an overwhelming amount of problems. "I knew I had to make a transition that year when an employee broke down and turned down a promotion offer that I gave him because he didn't want to be in charge of all the problems and getting yelled at by clients," Chiappetta said. "At that time, I was killing my team." So Chiappetta devised a list of 400 items that prevented downtime and security breaches as well as created client-specific documentation, such as a detailed new user setup and removal process for each client. He then created a dedicated role in his organization to continuously review the checklist and found he was preventing 80% of the reactive issues that once plagued his clients. Without reactive issues, time was focused on creating IT strategies for clients with an end result of training them on how to use more Microsoft products. This new process required a lot more time, so Chiappetta was forced to raise rates exponentially, which left him with 19 clients from an original pool of hundreds and dropped his employee count from 24 to 8. But eventually, the smaller pool of clients became a much bigger one, and his team began to rebuild as well. Now Chiappetta and his firm are global, with employees and clients around the world. Connect with Jon Dwoskin: Twitter: @jdwoskin Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.dwoskin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejondwoskinexperience/ Website: https://jondwoskin.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondwoskin/ Email: [email protected] Get Jon's Book: The Think Big Movement: Grow your business big. Very Big! Connect with Tony Chiappetta: Website: www.amcsolutions.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/amcsolutions Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amcsolutions/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/advanced-microcomputing-concepts Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amcsolutions

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