At its core, Bit-Wizards was built on trust. As co-founders and best friends, Vincent Mayfield and Louis Erickson relied on each other as trusted advisors to start their own company and run it with integrity and empathy toward employees and clients. Being a trusted advisor has become a pillar of the company's core values that continually pushes our team members to consistently deliver exceptional services and solutions.
By continuously building trust with our clients and fellow team members, we develop the Bit-Wizards magic that helps enhance the impact and efficiency of our Managed IT Services (MITS). With the importance of the client's best interest at the forefront of everything we do, our team actively endeavors to build trust through excellent work.
What makes a trusted advisor?
Mayfield and Erickson developed the following statements to describe what it means to be a trusted advisor at Bit-Wizards:
- Wizards understand that our business is based on the transfer of trust. We own failures and share success.
- Wizards are experts who exude confidence. If they don't know the answer, they know where to find it.
- Wizards actively listen and understand the customer's business challenges and definition of success.
- Wizards ask intelligent probing questions with at least three levels of "why."
- Wizards think two or three steps ahead of our customers so they can deliver value before the customer knows they need it.
Both Mayfield and Erickson strongly believe that the title of trusted advisor must be earned and cannot be self-appointed. To be considered a trusted advisor, our team must figure out how to treat our clients well and approach problems from the same side of the table. Much of that work comes from learning to be foresighted and anticipating our client's needs. Instead of being wallflowers and waiting for clients to request assistance, we act as if we truly work for our clients and proactively find ways to identify opportunities.
Our Wizards often try new things or learn about new trends well before a client realizes it has even the slightest chance of impacting their business, and that weaves back into being a trusted advisor," Mayfield emphasizes. "If we can provide our clients value by giving them information before they even think to ask for it, then we can earn that trust and status as Wizards.
How does our culture promote being a trusted advisor?
A significant part of promoting the pursuit of being a trusted advisor is giving Wizards room to make decisions and pursue innovative solutions. By internally exemplifying the traits of a trusted advisor, team members often earn new responsibilities and opportunities to complete trustworthy work. Mayfield shares that because our workplace culture must be shown through acts in addition to words, our team's creativity and proactivity are met with positive reinforcement.
"We choose to trust our team unless they prove that we can't, so our Wizards get to expand their responsibilities as they consistently show they can handle it," Mayfield explains. "They unlock new opportunities for themselves as long as they demonstrate that they can be trusted to take it on and do it well."
Erickson shares that he sees three levels of depth in being a trusted advisor to clients. The first is that Wizards should always make choices that benefit the companies we work with. Past that, we must be confident in the decisions we make and the answers we provide. At the most detailed level, our team investigates a problem from different angles to fully understand what’s causing issues for a business. By assessing needs and problems at this level, Erickson says our team avoids getting stuck in routines and is able to pursue creative methods to better understand our clients.
"Trusted advisors seek the root of the problem, and that can only happen by putting in the work and asking multiple levels of questions to diagnose an issue," Erickson says. "If a client's Wi-Fi goes down, our MITS team knows to ask how many people are affected, what it's stopping them from doing, and other questions to help them develop a sense of urgency and identify the deeper problem."
Another significant part of being a trusted advisor is the interaction and trust built between Wizards. By striving to be trusted advisors to each other, the team increases its ability to function as a cohesive unit and lean on each other for support. Mayfield identifies the importance of understanding how people communicate and why that impacts far more than just our team.
"People need to be communicated to in different ways, and that applies to members of our team as they work together to provide for our clients," says Mayfield. "When our Wizards understand how to best work with one another, they become better teammates who are more productive and trustworthy all around."
How do our clients benefit from trusted advisors?
By emphasizing the importance of trustworthiness in every interaction and project, our team has consistently shown care toward our clients and developed dependable relationships. Instead of waiting for an answer and dealing with a problem that impacts long-term productivity, our clients receive proactive support that seeks to identify and understand their pain points. While being a trusted advisor is a vital part of being a Wizard, Erickson emphasizes that it's not something we usually discuss with or promote to our clients.
We don't outwardly communicate that core value to our MITS clients—we internally communicate that standard to our Wizards,” says Erickson. “We’re trusted advisors because our clients have decided we’ve earned their trust, so it’s incumbent upon us to earn that title.
An essential component of our MITS clients’ experience that strengthens trust is our periodic business reviews (PBRs)-- and yes, there was a bit of humor involved in choosing that name and acronym. Each client meets with us for a PBR several times a year, depending on their respective needs, to discuss their progress and how we can assist with meeting their goals and following new industry trends. With PBRs, Erickson believes that our Wizards create the opportunity to look for ways to provide solutions proactively.
"With Client Success Manager LXS Fregger at the helm of our efforts to work with the businesses we serve through PBRs, our clients have an advocate who helps our MITS team better understand their needs," explains Erickson. "Our Wizards take the time and effort to truly understand how the client feels and continuously deliver solutions that are in their best interests."
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