Let me start with a bold statement. I have two distinct advantages over most of the other business leaders I know. The first one is that I work with the smartest and most capable people I have ever known, period. A culture of excellence is not made, it is cultivated, nurtured and cared for day by day. We have a separate blog and presentation on how powerful this is for our business. The byproduct of this is that we can solve very difficult problems and have the tenacity to ensure that we do the right thing.
The second one is that, being a IT consulting and Managed Services company, we work with a significant number of businesses and are exposed to the good, the bad and ugly of what is out there. This gives us insight and the ability to solve problems quickly and help our customers efficiently. It reminds me a bit of the Farmers Insurance commercial , "We know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two." We see all the time that some business, process or technical problem stumps a company so they do a work around. That work around develops a life of it's own and after a while, it becomes complex, unsupportable and a major barrier. This is why we developed our Chaos to Clarity service and methodology; to help unravel unnecessary complexity.
We had a recent example of this that I would like share with both the problem and solution. As part of our Microsoft 365 solution, we often use Microsoft Surface Laptops, as they are lightweight, powerful and work very well within the Microsoft Infrastructure. Recently we deployed them to a customer and they were having issues, where they would freeze and become unusable. These were brand new machines and configuration. There was no real reason this was happening and this was not occurring at other customers or even myself who uses this configuration.
The Senior Consultant on this project dug deep into the system and worked with Microsoft to find out what was going on. He discovered a very obscure hardware issue with the Ambient Light Sensor driver that had a memory leak and would quickly use all the memory and cause the system to crash. We were able to get a solution and Microsoft then wrote it up in their Knowledge Base. The customer needed to be productive and even though it was not something we did, we were going to get the vendor to solve the issue. We have seen other organizations who do things like reboot devices periodically or write scripts to stop/start services to "work around" an issue, but experienced people have the ability to get to the root cause of issues and solve them the right way.
We do this type of thing all the time, because of our people, our experience and our culture of excellence. It has a value to me personally and our customers. I hope you have the same experience that our customers do.