Robbz: So, BJ, I noticed that you have a fantastic tan, and it happens to be not just past St. Patrick's Day. What is your secret? I don't have any. I don't think there's tanning boos in California.
BJ: There's actually remarkable amount of tanning booths in California, which is surprising. They actually have the kind that actually burn your skin and then the spray on kind because you want to be healthy while looking brown. No, my trick is you go to the desert, forget to take sunscreen, and then have it rain for two days, and then the last day is finally sunny. So you just go outside and enjoy the sun, and I look like a raccoon. That's just pretty fun.
Robbz: So if you could come capture me, time me up, put me in a trunk, and then throw me in the desert just so I can look a little bit less cancerous because I am pasty white. I'm telling you, photocopiers are jealous of the amount of toner free skin that I have. So I'm your host, Rob Zolsen, and the guy that can't breathe is BJ Pope, the owner of Etep technology. He'd like to take a moment to breathe to welcome you to this fantastic podcast known as the business tech playbook.
BJ: Exactly. Welcome to the business tech playbook. We're here to talk about all things tech related. Tech nickel. Again, just a quick reminder. Like, our goal of this podcast is to be, hopefully, mildly funny. I know I'm probably the most boring one. Robbie's. Robbie's the guy who's got beta fishing fight stories in, like, the underground.
Robbz: Hey, hey. No one knows about that. That's between you and me.
BJ: Oh, sorry. Okay, don't. Let's not talk about that. That doesn't exist.
Robbz: So this is a. I'm a fish guy, apparently. Didn't know.
BJ: The thing about Fight club is you don't talk about Fight club.
Robbz: Thank you.
BJ: I totally broke that. The circle. The cone of trust is. Has officially fallen off the rails here.
Robbz: Sorry.
BJ: But if any of you are into fish, go look up Rob's other podcasts. He's like a freaking pro at aquarium fish stuff, and he's actually really funny and a great, great engineer.
Robbz: You actually listen to one of the episodes?
BJ: Yeah.
Robbz: Oh, I'm so proud.
BJ: I forgot which one.
Robbz: Because you listen to one of them. That's okay. But today we're here. That's called the aquarium guys, if you want to look it up. But we're here to talk about nonprofits and their it needs. So I'm gonna start the conversation with you ever gone out with one of your just turned 55 friends? I'm in my early to mid thirties. I got friends that I'm talking friends that we hang out and spend time together up to age 70. I'm of the minority. Not a lot of 30 middle 30 year olds have 70 year old friends. But so I have a whole gamut of different friends. So I do have friends that are just turned 55. And when they do, let me tell you, it might not be midlife crisis. They're flexing into asking everybody if they have a senior citizens discount. Because in the midwest, everybody, once you turn 55, you qualify for those old timey senior citizen discounts. The senior citizen discount was for a time period when you hit 55. It was a miracle that you're alive. Like, the average lifespan of a person was 52 years of age. And they're just trying to cut a guy a break for barely being alive. For some reason. In the Midwest, we just kept that being a tradition. And now you can go to, like, I don't know, Perkins or what you guys call on the west coast, Denny's and walk in and get yourself a 55. If you're 55 or older with your id and prove you can get your senior citizen discount. So that's amazing. If you are a charity or a nonprofit, you should be that pompous 55 year old white dude in the midwest asking to see if you can discount everywhere you go. Honestly, you're there. You're there and doing your work in the regards for your nonprofit or charity. You're there to help someone else. So why should you pay full price for the tools and the technology that you need when all of these companies are giving it out there for massive discounts or for free, depending on what you're looking for.
BJ: My favorite price is free 99.
Robbz: Free 99. Not free. Free 99.
BJ: Exactly. Free 99. It's like, it's free ish. Free ish. I honestly was really trying to figure out where you were going with the.
Robbz: Hell of an analogy. Am I right?
BJ: That's a heck of an analogy. I woke up and I have to.
Robbz: I woke up with 9 hours of sleep today. I'm ready for this podcast, man.
BJ: You, you are a spicy mother trucker. Like, this is amazing.
Robbz: I know.
BJ: Like, I got sleep. I've had, I've already been told by three different people that I've probably had too much caffeine today. So this is going to be a fun podcast.
Robbz: I'm drinking Pepsi as we speak.
BJ: If you, if you can keep track. More power to you. Like, I'm, I'm really, I'm proud of you. We probably actually shouldn't be talking to nonprofits because they're typically, like, more refined folks, and we're over here, like, we're.
Robbz: Taking a traditionally boring topic, people, and we're having the best time we can with it. So enjoy the ride with us.
BJ: We're doing everything we can. Right, right. And to your point, like, there's some phenomenal, like, organizations out there, and really they need to, the more you can have those, like, the tools that you use given to you for, like you said, free or close to free, the better off you are. Like, there's more money that can go towards paying your staff. There's more money going towards furthering the, the mission of the organization. We love working with 501s because there's so much that can be brought to the table, and oftentimes nobody tells them about this stuff or, like, they kind of know, but they don't. Like, they just don't take advantage of it. And so oftentimes people think, you know, nonprofit, that means, you know, like, on a shoestring. Well, a lot of nonprofits are even reasonably well funded, but they really just need to have somebody focused on helping them make good decisions. So that's hopefully what we're going to cover a little bit today and go from there.
Robbz: Now, what we're not going to do is we're not going to tell you exactly what prices are. We're going to tell you what they have been and some experiences we've dealt with in the past between our personal experience with BJ and I. But know that all of the, quote unquote, prices, benefits, packages, and everything are a continual moving target. So what they used to be or what they are now will not be that same way in five minutes from now. And I promise you that. But they at least hold commitments most of the time and grandfather you in once you're, quote, unquote, locked into a plan in almost all cases. So if you, let's take an example, want to purchase a piece of software? Well, we'll pretend it's like a software as a service that you pay a month to month for, like Asana. Asana. Most of the time, if you get locked into a plan that's half off because you're nonprofit and they change that to 25% off later, most of the time, a company like that will still grant you the half off because you're grandfathered in. Now, we can't keep up with all the prices and all the different platforms, Adobe, Microsoft, Google. I mean, we can go through a list all day long, hardware, all the pieces. But what's some of the details that you've done? I'm a Google guy. You're a Microsoft guy from experiences in the past. Let's do Microsoft first, because those are the two big platforms really rolling these spaces.
BJ: Absolutely. So Microsoft has several options. You can either go directly through them or through some of the different platforms, like Techsoup. Basically, even if you go direct, you can, you have to just upload your 501 C three documentation. And in a lot of cases, these companies, they have access to the filing platforms for the IR's and for the state. And so they, if you put in your name and your information, a lot of times they even had the 501 documents available to them that way. So it's a pretty quick and easy process. So like with Microsoft, they have, Microsoft is as if anything, a complicated organization, right. But one thing that they've done really well for small, like for nonprofits, is they've made the business premium licensing very inexpensive. It used to be, I think, free for up to ten. I think they still give you five for free. And then it's like one or $5 per user per month. This is normally a $22 per user license and order and getting that for, you know, between, let me see if I can find the actual, like current pricing on that. But it's, let's call it $5 per user.
Robbz: Last time I did it $4 and they changed it based upon scaling. The last time I did it with a Microsoft license. So if you had, let's make something up ten users, it was $4. If you had 50 users, they drop it to three. If you had 75, they drop it down a little less. So it was a scalable model. But still, when you're going from, you said 20 plus to $4 or $5, that's an incredible savings, right?
BJ: Exactly. Well, all of our business clients are paying full, full price for this, right? Like that they're getting, yeah, they pay $22 per user for these licenses. And so it's not, it's not abnormal for our 30, 40, 50 user clients to be paying 1500 just for Microsoft licensing. And like, and we're basically just passing it through at, you know, the exact MSRP that Microsoft has it. And yeah, we make a few dollars on it, but it's very, very minimal right now.
Robbz: If you clicked on this podcast and didn't listen to other episodes, which is very common because you'll just see, oh. Nonprofit helped for us know that these licenses that we're talking about are one license per user. So Kathy would get a license, you would get a license. Each person would get their own individual license. This would include their email, their Office 365 tools, all of their cloud software, such as SharePoint, OneDrive, that includes the syncing and backup. It goes on an entire list of all of your business apps to really get your job done. Logins and security and MFA for your Windows machines. Everything you need to put on your big boy pants and run a business is literally built within these licenses, except for your specific line of business application.
BJ: And what we mean by line of business application. That could be your finance package. So that could be accounting. QuickBooks, you know, Xero, QuickBooks online, QuickBooks desktop, sage 50. There's a ton of them. And honestly, a lot of the nonprofit, so a lot of the business premium licensing, it includes things like it really could replace Asana. So it's got task management, some basic project management. Most people look at Office 365 and go email and office.
Robbz: It is a suite of literally hundreds of different applications and features that are all paid for by that single license, which is why so many businesses are dependent on it in Google that they have their own suite of products trying to compete with this as well. And we'll explain that in a bit. But this is so we don't talk about Google here.
BJ: Like, we're not that kind of. We're not that kind of organization.
Robbz: I'm going to do a pro and con that you'll be quite happy with when we get to Google.
BJ: Don't you worry. Good. So the rough breakdown on 365 licensing, as I found on Techsoup, business Basic is $1 per user per month. We don't recommend it because it's just, it's very, it is, as it said, basic. One of the areas we like having these conversations are for our clients that are very like, you have your main users and then you have like, what they call frontline users. So like a receptionist who doesn't get a lot of email, you can give them different licensing. That's typically less expensive, but it gives you a lot of the same security pieces that are baked into business premium. A big part of why we've been really forcing and encouraging people to move over to business premium is just the excessive amounts of like, security pieces that are paywalled behind that license. Like, we can do really amazing things with premium that we just can't do a standard that.
Robbz: And last time I did this, again, moving target with nonprofits, they did not let me last time I did it mix and match. So if you needed one user with it. Sorry, all users have to be because you're already getting a discount. I don't know if they changed that since then. This was four years ago. Five years ago.
BJ: Think you can mix and match now? But I want to find out. Right. So we can do nonprofit pricing, Robbie, through Synapse. Yeah. So, like, we can pass it through just at, you know, at cost through Synnex. So the Microsoft standard license is $3 per user. That's a better one. That includes your office licensing kind of the basic stuff. And the business premium is $1 per user for. For the first ten licenses. So if you have ten users, it's $10 a month for ten users, and after the first ten, it's 550 per user. So, like, it's a phenomenal value for dollar. They're actually making it less expensive. And it's. And the one caveat is this is for nonprofits at 300 users or less. If you're in the 301 and above, then you're going to need to be moving over to, like, the e series licensing because they allow for more than 300 users.
Robbz: Yep. Now, one asterisk on this that I want to point out is free, isn't free or discount isn't completely discounted. So yes, you're going to get that four dollar license, five dollar license, whatever the discount is, and you're going to have to fill out your 501 c three. But this, the reason that they're doing these discounts and have to file that out is because they're doing it for tax benefits as well. So they have to know that you are a nonprofit with that 501. They have to know who the business manager is. They have to know a reporting of how many users you have each year and quarter. They have to have all of the details upfront, and then they have to go through approval process of does this business qualify? Because you may have a 501 C three, but they have qualifying businesses that they choose that they can or cannot have even if they're nonprofit. Google specifically, because again, I know Google quite well. If you're education based at all, it doesn't matter if you're nonprofit. If your entire thing's a charity, if you are education organization, they will reject your licenses because that is their bread and butter. Business is schools. That's where Google has their biggest ingest is elementary, high school, and college education. So they. They have blocks. Microsoft has their own gamut of stuff that they block as well, well, so.
BJ: In that sense, like, a school is a completely different set of licensing. So. But they're super generous with it. Like, both Google and Microsoft are both going deep into school districts because the way they figure it is like they're training the next generation. And so if they come out of high school only used to Google workplaces, that's what they're going to want to run in 15 years. So, like, these companies are playing the 15 year timeline, but the same thing applies for Microsoft. So, like, they've got a. They have an. A series of licensing, which is a whole. If we could do a whole series on just Microsoft licensing and, like, what. It includes, what it means. And so let's. Let's kind of avoid poid. That suit the eight for. Yeah, that.
Robbz: For the.
BJ: We could talk about it for hours, but.
Robbz: But, yeah. Know that they reserve the right to say no even if you're a charity and you still have to go through an application process. This process, depending on the amount of applications they get, if COVID was out there in a thing, depending on the type of year and seasonality, because there's a lot of different influxes, depending on your budget, can take anywhere from three days to. I've seen it go as long as four weeks to get approval.
BJ: Well, and the other piece that is. That probably needs to be paid attention to is it will also somewhat depend on, like, the type of nonprofit. So it's not just the schooling piece. I've also seen it change depending on religious institution. So, like, if. If a. If a religion, they might have a 501 C three, but if they have a specific dogma that excludes a certain, like, type of people, like, they will. They reserve the right to reject like that. A lot. A lot of churches are kind of exempted from getting nonprofit status with Microsoft just because, like, of the belief systems.
Robbz: Taking the Microsoft Google equation out of it. There are SAS companies out there that I've heard of and seen that have denied applications to the Church of Scientology for free licensing. Who knew? You know, they have the right to deny for whatever reason, and they get to choose and based upon their request. But again, like you said, they're very generous. I've only ran into a couple cases where they flat out denied it, so.
BJ: Well, yeah.
Robbz: And they do detail why. And they do detail why. Now, knowing that when you put in your application, and let's say that you did have follow up questions. No, that's what they're generally looking for, and they'll detail those in the question. So I had an example of an institution that was there to help and watch. It was kind of like an adult daycare center for disabled children and some sub adults. They sub adults like 18 to 20 something. And it was a center for parents and to caretakers to drop them off and have them take care of it day. They had certain programs for them and it was on the border of seeming to be an education service. So it got flagged for a Microsoft license in the process and they came with follow up questions. It wasn't a flat denial. They wanted to know more. Are you doing this? Are these considered education classes? They want to know more about the organization. So be clear. And what they're going to want to see stuff annotized on your website that you are clear. You have to have a mission statement. Without a mission statement, they will say that you have to have a mission statement and to publish it and they'll follow through with the requirements. So we're just telling you this not to do this ahead of time, but to know what to expect in this process and the road bumps you might hit along the way.
BJ: Well, and kind of the amazing part about working with techsoup is they really give you access to a huge swath of tooling. So acrobat or Adobe licensing. So that might be creative cloud acrobat pro, that kind of tooling. It could be. I know they have an option for QuickBooks nonprofit, so they both have the Quickbooks desktop and QuickBooks online nonprofit versions, docusign, zoom, that kind of thing. So they have a ton of tools available to you.
Robbz: Now. Again, the only change for Google on the Google side is last time I checked, the Google mid tier licensing was free outright. Again, it had to be certain qualifications. And then they also had where they came back and said no, for you, we're only doing a discount. And they held reservations for that. And they had, instead of going, you can go to directly like Microsoft, so you can go directly to your TD synx, your Ingram micro and get your licenses or buy them directly from Microsoft. Google has at the time a hard requirement that you don't have to purchase them from techsoup, but you do have to file the approval through techsoup because that's where who they pay to do that application process. So that's who you have to file your 501 C three through. That's who you have to do that back and forth through because they found that they, techsoup does it faster and they've just had it more polished and Google doesn't have the time for it. So you have to file through them. You'll get approved through techsoup, and then you can either purchase direct through the normal consumers or through techsoup. That was the only big change I saw there through Google. Now, when we say Google versus Microsoft, you know, Microsoft's a few dollars, Google's free. So people a lot of times just see that and just lean directly towards Google. Well, I don't want to pay anything, so I'm going to lean towards the Google solution. I me being a Google guy, don't do that. That's the worst loophole you can fall into. And I see it happen over and over again with nonprofits is they will grab the free solution because that's no cost to the nonprofit. On paper, it sounds good, but then they get in bed with it, find out it didn't fit their need, they didn't do the time, they didn't do the research and see if that actually could fit with what they needed. And then had to pay the time to switch over all their employees back to 365 because that's the actual tool they needed, because it integrated with their platform, because it had the one proprietary thing they were missing. No one did the scoping they needed to figure out what they had to have. Not saying Google won't work for you. I'm saying do not go in bed with someone because it's free.
BJ: I completely agree with that. I mean, at the end of the day, it's, nonprofits need to function a lot like a business in a sense, and it's understanding the requirements for your company or your organization. Right? So an executive director, when they're looking at these things, it's having an understanding of what's required upfront and recognizing. A lot of executive directors are amazing at giving back. They're amazing at running their organization, they're amazing at what they do, but they don't understand the technology. And that's oftentimes we're bringing in like a CIO into your board of directors, bringing in an MSP, somebody that's going to help you make the right decisions. I hate throwing good money after bad. Like, I'd way rather recommend that you spend the right money upfront. It makes sense. Like, it gets you into the right budgeting life cycles, and you're able to have these conversations before it's painful. Like, would you rather. Migrating from Google to 365 is absolutely doable and we do it all the time.
Robbz: It costs you way more than that $4 per user would have cost right from the get go.
BJ: I promise you, like, we, realistically, it's probably going to cost you about $180 to $200 per user to do it. Like just that's, it takes that much time and the software cost for somebody to do it. Realistically, it's gonna cost you about that much.
Robbz: And then training time on top of it isn't in that equation. You know, you gotta retrain everybody on it. Then there's downtime of people trying to figure out how to get to what they used to have completely.
BJ: Well, so what's always funny to me is like people get into Google and then they refuse to use the web version of it. It's like they do that, then they go by Outlook. We literally are working with a company, we just finished moving the child company over to 365 fully and the parent company is using Google workspaces. But then they also have outlook for and 365 for almost every single one of their users. They're double paying for everything because their users are like we used to Outlook. And so, like, that's how they do. Email is outlook and they're, but they're using Gmail as the back end instead of just doing it right the first time, running it all into 365. And again, I recognize I'm a 365 fanboy, but part of it is just like, it's knowing the Kool Aid you drink. Like, we've drunk the 365 Kool Aid and now we know what flavor it is. We know what's involved in making it. We know what water to bring, you know, like it. Yes.
Robbz: As a Google fanboys, same, same problem, brother. I'm over here. Same, I'm win your camp, same problem. And I'm a Google Fanboy.
BJ: Yeah, well, I mean, but to that point, like, if somebody was came to us and said, hey, we're gonna stay google, I would give them, I'd give, shake their hand and give them, you know, wish them well because like, it's just not what we know. Like, we just don't know it well. And so, like, we can't make, we can't do our automations. We can't do all the things that, you know, that we are excellent at.
Robbz: So imagine, you know, people expect us in it, right, to be a ice cream shop, you want to go in and you want 389 flavors of ice cream because why wouldn't you? You want to satisfy that customer. The customer comes in and they can choose anything they desire for any reason. That's a great premise. But when we want to be able to serve you ice cream 24 hours a day, have it ready. Soft serve, hot, serve up, serve down, serve. We can't do 385 flavors of ice cream because we only know 186 and train our people in 186 flavors. So if you want those other half of flavors. Sorry. We're really good at these flavors. We can promise you we will always have the freshest, best ice cream in these flavors. There's other people that handle those flavors. We're the best at what we do in these flavors. And it's hard for people to get that.
BJ: Well, I kind of look at it, and I feel like we need to turn into the in and out of MSP's. Yeah.
Robbz: Like, we have.
BJ: We have a limited menu. I want a little bit of animal style on the side. But, like, it's like, we pay our people really well. Our service is really awesome. But, like, you get a burger, a double double. Like, I mean, fries in a shake.
Robbz: And it's not that we can't accommodate, you know, there's going to be integrations with our french fries to your milkshake. But, you know, we're. We're not a lasagna shop.
BJ: We're definitely not a lasagna shot.
Robbz: You know, there's places with that. It's a slow service. You got to bake it twice. It's not always available. Sometimes it gets hard on the edges. We're just, you know, we're going to be consistent in quality. I love the analogy. More caffeine for us before podcasts.
BJ: More caffeine. I know, right? I'm over here. Like, I get the feeling in about 45 minutes, I'm going to need a nap and just pass out slight jokes. I pretty much never sleep. But there's so much caffeine involved. No? So, like, for a nonprofit and an executive director, really, so much of it is. It's taking a moment to step back from the missional aspect of your organization and think about the business piece of it, because at the end of the day, you're still a business at the kind of the core. You're providing a service to someone. And just because you're providing it for free doesn't mean you don't need to get funding. And so much about. So much about what we do is trying to protect the way income flows through your organization so you can do the good things you do for the. For the community. Right? So if 99% of your income comes from fundraisers, how do we work with you to protect that? How do you work with your it provider to protect those fundraisers? If 99% of your income comes from, like, a county or state organization or the federal, like the fed level, how do we protect that? Because more and more requirements are coming from the state, county and fed for downstream vendors who distribute money for them. And so that partially is how money flows through your organization and what you use it for. But then part of it's going to be turning into like the cyber requirements for your company or for your organization, your nonprofit. And so it's, there's going to be, there's going to be allowances inside how you need to spend this, spend the money that are going to dictate that you have a good cybersecurity plan, a good it provider. That doesn't have to be us, though. We're pretty awesome. But at the end of the day, like, it's how do you protect your income so that way you can do the mission that you have been hired to do or that you feel called to do.
Robbz: So we nailed the topic of software, I think at least high level. If you got questions, there's going to be a ton. And if you're listening to this, contact us, podcastdtoptechnology.com. We'd happily talk with you on any of these questions. If you're, you're the it guy or you're the business manager or a nonprofit wanting to know from information, we're here for you. Next thing is the hardware. So actually, before we move on, one last piece of software, there is one more requirement. Let's say you onboarded with some piece of software. We'll call it ABC software company. ABC Software company has a cool suite of specialized software that do the thing you want to do things for. And they onboarded you. You gave them your information, you qualified, they gave you free licensing for whatever the you needed for your 50 user team or a discount licensing for your 50 user team. They may still want information audits throughout the year, and they have their use policy. Even if you pay for your software, you have a fair use agreement. If you do it nonprofit, they have a stricter fair use policy. And you need to match these fair use policies of you cannot share with anybody outside and they're going to monitor it much worse than you would if it was paid for. And I've seen people that go and violate their nonprofit policies and then lose access to be able to purchase correct keys or have to pay a, not a fine, but a penalized fee to be able to go purchase normal licensing after, after the fact. Now, again, that's a moving target. Everybody's a little different on their use case and exactly what they require.
BJ: So we actually had a situation where one of our, a really big client of ours also has a foundation on the side. And so they had a techsoup license. And when we came in, we found out that all of the majority of the company the corporation was running on nonprofit licensing. So we had to have some pretty tough, awkward conversations with management and explain why, you know, they had, they needed to pay to upgrade these licenses and, like, all these things they were getting for free. And it's like, well, it was free because the nonprofit, and I recognize a number of your employees also work for the nonprofit. And, you know, your miles may vary a little bit.
Robbz: Your sneeze might change this in the.
BJ: Wrong direction, like your feathers, you know, width from being in deep water because you use nonprofit licensing for your business. Oh, man, you're gonna like Microsoft or insert large mega companies coming after you with, like, the weight of a bag of bricks.
Robbz: And these places talk with other companies, I promise you. Not only there, they talk with their software companies, but other agencies as well, depending on your size and prestige. Right?
BJ: Well, and, and again, it's like, trust me, like, I get it. Microsoft makes billion, you know, hundreds of billions a year, and I have no necessary real love lost with them sometimes. But at the end of the day, it's like, I like sleeping well at night, like, I don't love paying taxes, but I pay taxes so that way I can sleep well at night. Same thing with licensing, same thing with, it's just kind of doing the ethically right thing. And so if you have a foundation, I absolutely, I think you should use that licensing for your foundation, even if it's attached to a for profit organization. But just make sure you're paying attention to it and keeping things isolated. So that way you're not, you're not potentially walking into hot water and talk.
Robbz: To your it guy. If you, if you have an organization's nonprofit and an organization that is for profit, they will help you define the church and state, if you get that reference. So, yeah, definitely look into that, because I've seen it. Accidents happen, and they don't even, accidents they don't look very friendly upon. They expect you to take their generosity and be cautious with it.
BJ: Yeah, for sure.
Robbz: All right, so next conversation is hardware. Hardware. If you buy, you know, cameras, computers, mice, accessories. There are hardware companies that do this as well. This generally has. Certain promo codes are done with bigger companies like CDW. I know there was some sort of charitable organizations that help you purchase software. We're not really getting to that. It's more of going direct to the manufacturer that we're going to be talking about. So Dell has a program for nonprofits. HP has a program for nonprofits. I think Lenovo has a program for nonprofits. Check them out. But most of the time they still want you to purchase through their nonprofit funding through the, a business qualified hardware. For the most part. They have exceptions for, again, education. But we're not talking about education today. We're only talking about nonprofit. And reach out to the person that you source business laptops from. We are a Dell shop. We can certainly source certain discounts. BJ works those numbers. I work none of it. I'm the tech guy, so he would know how, where and when, and I haven't touched that and I'm not going to lie to you. Years. So do you know any the last time you've touched something like that was.
BJ: That's a good question. So typically when we like, especially if we're dealing with like a larger transition, like we're going to do a, what they call a deal registration, which is going to get us an extra ten to 15% off anyway. We haven't really tried to figure out how to make this happen for a nonprofit. So that's a good question. I should go find that and maybe we can talk about it in the future.
Robbz: Well, this was a long time ago that I did a deal, registration with Dell. I mean, years and years ago we got that 10% or whatever it was. And then once I gave them the 501 C three information on the particular deal, it had to go through a qualification process, much like filing for the software when it came back. Then they had to go through a specific deal. It didn't have flat rate pricing, they didn't have some sort of promo code for percent off unless you went through a retail website, those deals are the best deals that they can get. And this is your one deal. For the amount that you purchased, here's your special bid, and it'll represent the discount that you're getting on top of the normal bid discount. And this, the last time I did it was, is. Oh, man, seven years ago, six years ago.
BJ: So it's been a minute.
Robbz: Yeah, it's been a while.
BJ: The other thing, to your point, like, these are typically things that are gonna be done. Like it's gonna be time intensive on our part because we're gonna have to go work with a sales rep, do all these different elements. And so, like, if that's something that was important, I wouldn't personally, I wouldn't do that for, like, one device.
Robbz: No. And they. Somebody's, I would assume they would eject, reject it for one day device.
BJ: Oh, sure. So, like, for Mike, for Dell, like, deal registration doesn't start until there's a 15,000 at MSRP, right? So, like, I can't even, like, I can get discounts, but I can't get good discounts until deal reg. And deal reg is over 15,000 in one single purchase. Realistically, I need. I'm probably not going to go through the effort for anything less than at least ten laptops, probably closer to 20, especially if it's going outside of, like the, like, we'll do DL Regford, ten laptops, no big deal. But, like, if we're having to go through the nonprofit process to make sure you get that extra percentage, it needs to be a big enough chunk of equipment for it to make sense.
Robbz: Let's pretend that you onboarded with ETop tomorrow or another MSP. You know, just that they're now with MSP. They're going to be representing your it needs and your laptop purchases, your computer purchases, your hardware purchases. We're going to get that information for the 501 C three in advance, and we're going to try to get that because we know we're going to be the one purchasing for you. And then we'll show, because we already have the information, show the plan to dell of here is this year that we're onboarding them, and here's all the computers we plan to replace this year and next year, because we know all your hardware and we know the ages, then we'll take that information as a deal, showing that in the next two years, we're going to be replacing twelve laptops and three desktops. We'll take that and make a bid out of it and then make a plan. And because of that, we might have some lean wiggle room in those situations. But again, that would be commitment based. You be a customer and that's generally how these flows work with an MSP.
BJ: Exactly. I mean, and whether it's you doing it or somebody else doing it for you, like, it's just a function of, like, it's. There's just a lot of pieces that have to go on.
Robbz: Right.
BJ: And making that work, one of the big things that I. I'm not going to distract Rob, is there anything else about hardware peripherals?
Robbz: Some companies do peripherals. Again, Dell does all different types of peripherals. We do docking stations, monitors. We do everything that we can through Dell. There are some exceptions if you want to go purchase your own mouse. Most MSP's don't care about your certain preference of mouse and keyboard. Plus, it's a personal item. If you get spilled coffee on it or it gets gross because you didn't want to clean it, we don't want to be responsible for that. So let's say that you bring your own mouse and keyboard from home, or you got your boss to approve your own little Amazon purchase. So be it. But if you're a nonprofit, sometimes places like Logitech will have a promo code for nonprofits. So look into that, depending on it. And then you can tell your company that we only get these because we get them for $10 because we have a nonprofit promo code. Check it out. But if you can, try doing your peripherals through the same company you ordered your computers from, because that sweetens the deal and motivates them to give you a deeper discount. That's my last note.
BJ: Yeah, no, that's perfect. I mean it. Again, I would like to also point out that there's a, there's a time loss for every dollar saved on the nonprofit thing. So it's like, it's a reminder of people. Time is also pretty expensive, and so oftentimes it's less expensive. Like, if you already know that there's a really good discount program, then absolutely take advantage of it. Like the Microsoft one. Getting those licenses for a dollar or $5 is such a huge savings. But especially if you have 2030 people, I mean, you're saving $15 per user. That's three, four, five, $600 a month. It's worth the time to go through it, to save that perpetually. But if it's like you're saving dollar three on a Logitech keyboard and mouse, I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, but how much did you spend? $20. You know, an hour or two of time trying to save $5. Just make sure you're balancing the people element with the, the cost element because there's.
Robbz: Yeah, you wouldn't believe what that $20 keyboard matters to the sales guy in Dell, because these sales guys, they're. Honestly, they have their sales teams over at like, dell, HP, stuff like that. They have specific. What they call. What was it? Um. Oh, my brain. Give me 1 second. This is night out target bonuses that they, that they have to sell if they get a special, like, bonus or they get a prize based upon the specific thing that they sold that year. So sometimes they'll say, if you sell x amount of peripherals then you get a little bonus. So it's a silly, but sometimes it matters to some of those reps, especially newer, younger reps that are trying to prove themselves at the company. So you wouldn't believe what throwing on the keyboard and mouse would do to lower the percentage of your bill.
BJ: Well, and so I always, so, like, especially with Dell, I always try to throw in like, good peripherals from Dell simply because it's, it doesn't, it doesn't take that much more time. And if you can get $3 on a laptop, you know, if you're saving dollar 200 on a laptop and you did that on 20 laptops, and then you save $3 on keyboard and mice, like, that's great. Like, that's, that's just adding, you know, adding like a nice little bonus. I probably wouldn't try and do the laptop or the keyboard and mouse without the laptop.
Robbz: I'd rather save $50 on the entire. $50 to $100 on the entire kit than save $3 on the keyboard and miss that $50 discount.
BJ: Oh, 100%.
Robbz: And people don't realize that until they throw it in. We see that. You don't see that. Yeah. Your next topic, I got one more after you.
BJ: Oh, man. So I was thinking through like, one of, one of my friends, he's done ERP work for years, right? And so he then started doing work for a nonprofit and helping them just set up their management platform. It was so interesting hearing him talk because once he helped them set up their, like, he's used to working with like 50 million, hundred million dollar your companies managing their ERP. So, no, no, no tech words, right? ERP is enterprise resource planning, business managers. It's a business management plot tool or piece of software. And so, like, you might use Salesforce, you might use some kind of like, donor management tool, you might, there's hundreds and hundreds of tools out there. Choose one, preferably one that's going to meet your company's needs or your nonprofits needs, and then pay somebody to help you set it up. Right? Like, putting a little bit of money in it up front is going to dramatically improve your outcomes as an organization. There's a ton of, a ton of like, retiring ERP consulting types that love helping nonprofits take advantage of that. Or you get, get somebody like that on your board and have them help give you guidance. Talk to your MSP. There's, there's a lot of ways you can get this really strong business outcome, but talk to business leaders and understand, like, the way to most efficiently run your business. So that way, your team has the most amount of time to do the mission oriented aspects of your work.
Robbz: I'm gonna jump in on this one as well, so bring it. There is a nomenclature in some it organizations that, I'm sorry, I'm nonprofit. That some MSP's won't work with you, you'll say the word nonprofit, and immediately the owner, manager, salesperson of that MSP will go, oh, you're already in the mindset that you want everything for free. I don't want to work with you. We don't work with nonprofits. It's not because they don't want to work with someone that, you know, morals or whatever else. It just comes down to the fact that they're sick of hearing the pickup, the phone saying, you need to replace your computer. We don't have that in the budget. There's no grants for that right now. We're going to get that in three years. Well, you have a person down, and they're just sick of dealing with that phone call. Trust me, it's out there. So if you're having problems finding someone to help you with your ERP system because you're nonprofit or you don't know of someone, you're in a particular business where if a normal business would go out and talk to their competitors, saying, hey, what do you do for this? They'll go, no, that's our secret sauce. You can go away now. You're a nonprofit. Nonprofits help each other. You can go ask another successful nonprofit and say, hey, I heard that you're using the same ERP. How did you make it successful? And they will be like, we hired this firm. We have this expert on retainer. This is how we got the onboarding. This is what we do that works. And they are more than willing to share where a normal business. You don't get that luxury, actually.
BJ: So there's a tool that I've seen used quite a bit. It's called odoo. It's basically like a business management tool in a box. And there's a guy here in Redlands whose name is Wolfgang hall. Yeah, I totally just pulled that out of the recesses in my mind.
Robbz: Shout out.
BJ: He's shout out. Yeah, right. Exactly. We should get him on this because he's really focused on business application type work through Odoo, which is a form of ERP, and he's specifically going after, like, working with nonprofits. So we should actually talk about getting him onto the podcast, because that'd be a really interesting conversation for him.
Robbz: Ta da.
BJ: So sorry. This is how we figure things out, is we just talk out loud and we figure things out.
Robbz: I promise you that none of us that do this for a living can shut off our brain at night. That's why we have to live on caffeine and energy drinks.
BJ: I pretty much go until I stop, like I'm.
Robbz: Exert ourselves so we can sleep.
BJ: Yeah, like 900 miles an hour. And then it's just like. And then I hit my head, hits the pillow, and I'm all occasionally wake up at like 03:00 in the morning and be like, huh? And, yeah, like 3 hours later. I'm kind of, whatever.
Robbz: Yeah, I got one more if you're ready.
BJ: Let's go.
Robbz: You said, so I want to hear yours first. No. Okay.
BJ: I was just going to talk a little bit more about the ERP conversation. So a lot of this comes into understanding the desires and needs of the organization. There's a lot of talk out there about small businesses typically spending two to five or 6% of your gross revenue on tech. Right? So that's phones, Internet, software, computers. It support MSP's insert, you know, insert everything tech related here. Copiers, printers, camera systems, access control. Like, literally anything that's like tech, right? A nonprofit needs to be thinking about it from that same perspective. You should probably be spending anywhere between two and 5%, depending on your total gross revenue on tech per year, simply because if you're not budgeting for it, it's going to catch up with you. And it's. We talk, we've talked about technical debt. It's in previous podcasts, like that technical debt builds up for a nonprofit as well. So if you have that three year old, you know, five year old computer and you haven't budgeted to replace for it, like, that's a problem. Like, you're going to quickly go from having a functioning person to somebody who can't work because you didn't pay for it, and now it's throwing off your budget. So, like, you need to be proactively thinking about how to fit this in and recognize that it's part of supporting your mission.
Robbz: In a business versus a nonprofit, business all the time can screw up. They are allowed to screw up and not plan. Let's say that they didn't plan for the new computers, the new employees, the growth, the this, that they had to replace the old copy machine, whatever they had to do for the next year, the new version of software, you name it, they didn't plan an expenditure for that so they screwed up. And suddenly the CEO still pulls out of capital expenditures money to pay for it because he knows the business has to stay running, and he screwed up. Nonprofits don't get to do that, because if you do that and you pull the money out of it, you're taking that money directly out of your charity's cause. You've stopped. Let's pretend this is a food pantry, for crying out loud. You're literally taking food off the shelf for someone to eat that day. That's the reality. So you have to plan these things. And the it person, the MSP, has to be proactive with these things, telling you, this is what we have to have. So you can go out, you can get the money for it, you can find the discounts for it, or the next segue. You have to be prepared for grants. And I shouldn't. I'm not the one to tell you about grants. If you're listening to this and you're a nonprofit, you're by far more of an expert than I am on grants. That is what you're good at. That is why you are in a nonprofit, is because you figured out a way to try to wrangle money to make something happen. Now, the only way parts that we want to provide is when you're going out there for these grants, know that it people are ready to help. We have dealt with some grants in the past. If you're experienced at all with any form of nonprofit, and there's local nationwide, some sort of private party grants as well, check your local out area. And the most common way of finding some of the it specialized grants will of course go to your township or county organizations. Keep up with that. But MSP's do need to know about some of them for sure. We got to keep up with a lot of the changes and the requirements of some of them. Now, again, if you're that one MSP.
BJ: Oh, shoot, I need to go find grants for technology.
Robbz: No, no. If you're one of those MSP that don't deal with nonprofit, you're pretty much close to it. But we at least have to know about some of them in the area. For instance, education grants we hear about in our local areas all the time. We see different bids go out for different, different projects. But during COVID we had to keep up with a lot of different business grants and nonprofit grants left and right, because we were suddenly both in the same boat. And that got us real sharp for stuff that we generally weren't in the field of. So definitely keep in the loop. If you find a grant, we're here to help you gather information to try to make a bid better. You don't have to go alone. Like, when they come to the IT questions, we should be able to facilitate some of those. Instead of you having to facilitate all the questions. We're used to dealing with insurance questions for your nonprofit and business. Those same questions we already have gathered, we can give to you to arm.
BJ: Your grants for, well, and something. If I might suggest, make sure you're using the grants for something that you like. As funny as it sounds, don't sign yourself up for a reoccurring expense or a subscription based on grant money. Like, go into the, go into spending the grant with a plan. So, like, either work, work with your IT provider, work internally. Obviously, you know that. But if you, if you got a grant to replace a bunch of computer hardware, that's great. Just make sure that you have a plan to start looking for a new grant in about three years. Because, like, this isn't a one time expense, right? Like, working with an IT provider or having an in house person isn't a one time expense. This is an ongoing expense that is part of what you need to count into that two to 5% of your gross revenue. And just because you got a, like, a chunk of money doesn't mean that you can abdicate the rest of the it spending.
Robbz: Thank you. That's so often done where it's just, oh, we've put down the fire and we didn't plan for. How long does this last? It's all one time expenditures.
BJ: Well, we see that a lot with, like, state and city government, where it's like, they'll, you can buy the streetlight, but you can't buy the subscription for the thing that connects it to the Internet. You can buy, you can buy a server, but you can't buy office 365 or insert whatever here. And it's like, more and more of the world is going subscription oriented for reasons we've discussed before. But, like, make sure that whatever you do, you're. You're not spending the money on something you have to give back. And then you're also, like, you're actually fulfilling a need that makes your organization better.
Robbz: And that's high level. We could talk intricately about your specific organization. Even if you're trying to think about starting an organization, you want to know how it expenditures would work. We'd happily talk with you for questions. Podcaststoptechnology.com dot. You can go to businesstechplaybook.com to find the rest of our episodes. Share this with a friend. Share this with a nonprofit.
BJ: You may know that's struggling and then struggle no more.
Robbz: And, you know, get that. Get that caffeine and join us for next episode.
BJ: Caffeine. There's more caffeine. I'm gonna go get a coke zero, I think, because. Yum. I know, right? That's my fave.
Robbz: Well, we're getting ready for Speedo season, aren't we, BJ?
BJ: That's right. Gotta get my. My beach body going.
Robbz: Until the next beach body episode. Bye, friends.