Hi Everyone,

We have been approached by a company for an IT Support Contract for their 3 new restaurants that are being built in a different state to their normal operations to provide the “hands on the ground” in the event of an IT issue.

They want an SLA and the support will also be required after hours as well, because being the service industry, this is a prerequisite. Obviously they can’t give me any indication as to how many call outs will be required on a monthly basis.

I have no idea how to structure this or even charge for this type of setup. Has anyone else ever had to deal with something like this and if so, would you mind sharing how you handled it?

Thanks

Duke

27 Spice ups

Take how much do you charge for a visit (include travel and hourly rate) to each location if they were regular 9 to 5 customers.

Add how much overhead being available 24/7 is going to cost you (On-call scheduling, overtime, additional employees needed for full coverage, etc).

Figure out what can be done remotely vs. in person and their costs.

Factor in posible lost revenue from having to bump a regular client to meet your SLA specified response times.

Add that all together and multiply by five. That is my starting negotiating position for an 24/7 support contract with an SLA with 1 hour response time.

17 Spice ups

If they already operate similar establishments in a different state they should have some idea of how often they need help. I’d get that information (if they didn’t come up with some sort of figure I’d walk away!) and price based on that with the proviso that the contract includes that number of call outs per month, if the number exceeds that then the additional call outs will be billed separately or the contract will be subject to revue.

4 Spice ups

You also need to get an idea of what IT issues they will expect you to support. The company I work for has a restaurant chain as a client and don’t see much for support. We setup the network for location as it comes up, but the POS system is actually installed and supported by a 3rd party. In this case, the POS vendor also provides the back office workstation as well. As such, our support contract is primarily limited to making sure the POS system can communicate on the network. Actual issues with the back office PC and the POS system is the responsibility of the company that provides that equipment.

In our case, the after-hours support we provide the restaurant is an on-call basis and does not require us to staff our phone lines in case they call.

3 Spice ups

That is a very good point. If you’re also supporting the POS system, you are going to be responsible for receipt printers, cash drawers and possibly POS pole displays or even handheld card swipe terminals. Those will be things you can’t fix remotely. I got my start in IT working on POS systems. POS is a different beast than your standard IT setup. And nothing against servers and cooks, but they are usually on a different level than your standard office worker end user. These can be anywhere from 16 year old kids that know as much about computers as some college grads to 40 year old crackheads that can’t tell you the difference between there left foot and right foot (seriously had a dude that couldn’t count to 8 once. You’d think he’d at least make every stack the same height, but even that concept was beyond him.)

Another consideration is will you have to stock any parts, and who is responsible for stocking those parts? A receipt printer costs around $300. If you’re going to have to keep a hot spare available, who’s going to pay for it? If its you, consider the lost opportunity cost of having $300 sitting on your shelf just to support one client.

Finally, you don’t mention if it’s a 24/7 operation or if it has a bar or anything. Its one thing to get paged at 7 pm because a cash drawer won’t open. It’s another to get paged at 2 am. But remember, restaurant margins are pretty thin. If they start balking at afterhours prices, you can always get creative and trade services for meals (probably not drinks though…liqour laws get funny about that stuff).

3 Spice ups

Ain’t that the truth! And nine times out of ten, POS hardware falls into a “different” meaning of POS.

5 Spice ups

They are never going to call you for things that can be done remote, because they can do those things themselves, so it is all going to be service calls, and they are all going to be flagged as emergencies, because the managers at these places have no clue if anything is actually an emergency or not

Trust me, we work for franchise owners for several well known chains who have stores locally.

We won’t do a contract, because what we found is they are just trying to cover their worst case expense by only paying you for a certain amount of work… They know exactly how often they are likely to call you, it will always be more than you agreed.

We change them time & materials, with 4 hours minimum plus travel time if someone has to actually visit after hours.

Parts are whatever we happen to have, or they wait for it to arrive from our vendor,

We offer to stock spares if they buy them, they have never ever taken us up on that offer…Pffft

And they cry a lot, the margins are thin, during covid they were non existant…

1 Spice up

Thanks everyone, for the suggestions. I think I’m just going to use @tulioarends ​ formula. I think it has to be worthwhile to us to have staff on call for this type of thing considering they want an SLA