I Stopped Selling Tech Support. Here’s Why.

For years, First-Rate Tech was the IT support company. I answered the phone when the printer died, when email broke, when the point-of-sale froze in the middle of a Saturday rush. I billed by the hour, and I was good at it.

Here is what a decade of support calls teaches you: every small business has the same ten problems. The call that gets missed while everyone is on a job. The order someone retypes into QuickBooks by hand. The quote that goes out and never gets followed up. I was billing hourly to treat symptoms — one at a time, forever.

At some point I stopped wanting to bill for the symptom and started removing the cause. A missed call can text the customer back by itself. An order can write itself into the books. A quote can chase its own answer. That is the work I do now: I build the systems that make most support calls unnecessary.

If your technology is eating your week, the better fix is not more support hours. It is finding the thing that breaks the most and making it stop.