Knowing when and who to hire is a major benefit

With 100 staff working from multiple offices across Oklahoma and Kansas, R.K. Black’s Managed Network Services is growing strongly at 30-35 percent per year, delivering a full suite of office technology products and services for their clients.

R.K. Black is a second-generation family business. President Chris Black has worked his way up, starting as a 10-year-old in the company’s warehouse. Like his parents, Chris Black is committed to building a business which remains true to the company’s single founding goal: to deliver great value in an honest, friendly manner.

As the company’s services have become more diverse and complex, an early investment in ConnectWise was strategic to supporting highly sophisticated managed services. But, says Trevor Turner, R.K. Black’s Director of IT, Sales and Service, there was ‘a huge void’ in getting the reports out of ConnectWise that the company needed to best manage its people and deliver the best outcomes for clients.

“We started out with a competing product to Cognition360,” Trevor Turner says. “Report Writer brought its own set of challenges, meaning you had to do a lot of your own report building and you needed a degree just to build simple reports. I had to do the legwork but didn’t have the time.

“Cognition 360 is a very well-rounded product. I use it to help me understand if my team is well utilized, tracking ticket load and ticket count. I can watch the data and understand when I need to hire staff and the particular skillset of each new hire. The reports on utilization, technician efficiency and productivity, and analysis of ticket type are all really valuable. As is contract profitability, where I can look at all my managed service agreements and understand profitability and the reasons why.

“The bottom line is that I’m now able to make decisions faster with more background into the decision – and I’m confident in my decisions because I have accurate data from ConnectWise,” Trevor Turner said.