Dear Apt Interactive Customer,
Apt Interactive has entered a new era. The company we are today will look more like the company we are in another year from now than the company we were 6 months ago.
No one understands how busy and stressful running a small business can be better than us so I wanted to make sure you had a chance to hear from me how things have changed recently, what we still have to work on, and most importantly, why we are doing what we are doing.
Whether you rely on us to manage your technology, keep your workstations secure, or ensure business continuity, I wanted to express a sincere thanks to each and every one of you for helping us get to where we are today.
Apt Interactive’s purpose is simple: to provide people with the peace of mind that their technology is secure, reliable, and expertly managed—so they can operate with confidence, knowing we’ve got their back.
We haven’t always delivered 100% on each of those things and that’s exactly why we have exciting news and essential details to share so let’s dive in!
Apt Interactive no longer has a brick and mortar storefront. Don’t worry, I still live in Crete. Our field techs keep the work vans at their homes. More on that later.
We are now using a mail processor to better deliver us important information no matter where we are. Our current updated addresses are:
Our legal address is: 1845 Main Ave Crete NE 68333
Our mailing address is: 2261 Market Street STE 22018 San Francisco CA 94114
We have moved between several billing tools since the end of 2023. Here we are nearing the end of 2024 with another update to billing.
Those of you with payment methods on file will be able to sign in to the new portal, using only your email, no passwords, and find your payment method still on file.
Invoices will come from noreply@aptinteractive.io and the billing portal can be found at https://portal.aptinteractive.io. The ticket portal is still located at help.aptinteractive.io. You can find all of those links on our website under Portals in the menu.
This new billing portal enables financing options, streamlined ACH payments (no more micro deposit verification), easier logins, and better tracking.
Those of you with new and pending invoices from Apt Interactive have started to get reminder emails from the new system. We expect all bills to go out via this new system December 1st.
As a quick note: we prefer all payments to be made via card or ACH. This achieves transparency, tracking, and ability to issue quick refunds. If you still need the ability to pay via check, please let us know before mailing those to our San Francisco address.
We are currently rewriting all of our customer agreements. Some of you have heard us say this for a while now. It’s proven to be a trickier than expected process. Lawyers work a lot like us, where time sensitive issues can put the regular work behind. I’m hoping to have these rolling out in the first half of 2025.
If you are on a managed services plan with Apt Interactive, we will be requiring all payments to be made via a payment method on file sometime in 2025 when new SLAs are ready. Thank you to every one who has already made the switch.
We will also start offering multi-year term agreements for better pricing, print contracts, and device leasing or financing.
While we strive to address every issue as quickly as possible, we do not have any timers associated with our SLAs and agreements. As part of our new agreements, I would like to add time to response and time to task expectations for more transparent and productive relationships.
I want to hear from each of you. How quickly do you think we should be responding to emails, calls, or other communication? Should there be a default response time for acknowledgment of any message and a separate time for work to start based on priority? I don’t just want to write industry standard times, I want to rely on your feedback to better shape the next era of Apt Interactive.
Our staff has changed quite a bit in 2024. Several folks have moved on to pursue their specific career goals and we’ve done our best to make sure our staffing changes don’t cause significant disruptions to your work.
Many of you have already interacted with our Helpdesk team. We have ~14 new team members based in the Philippines ready to jump in 24/7 365.
In the middle of last year it was clear to us we needed more “person in the chair” type folks so that our field team could continue to be nimble and effective. That’s where the Helpdesk team comes in.
If you are an MSP customer your accounts are being onboarded with the team as we speak in order of ticket volume with a goal of every one being on boarded before January 1st.
As we are starting to grow, we will be utilizing a pod based approach with one engineer and account manger overseeing a region’s field technicians. As our staff increases, this will keep the same friendly faces working on your issues.
Speaking of field technicians, they now work hybrid and in the rough geographic area of our clients with days in the field and days at home for documentation and followup. As our customer base grows we hope to continue to place technicians closer and closer to our customers.
If you have questions about contacting the team, head over to our website, aptinteractive.io and you’ll be able to find our most up to date contact info.
Account management is going to start to look a little different. Many of you will start to receive calls and emails from Bryson Trey, Trey for short, at btrey@blueequinox.com.
Trey works on our team at Blue Equinox, handling our business review process. We work both along side and closely with him to make sure we’re reviewing all of our customers accounts to find, map, and call attention to blindspots that might have been missed or created as we started supporting any given client.
One last note about staffing; if you ever have a problem with one of our staff, in person or remote, please reach out to your account contact or ask to speak with Jacob "about something staffing related". No one gets better and problems don’t get addressed if we don’t know about them.
As part of our new era we have tried our best to simplify what we offer our customers. We are grouping our offerings into three categories.
Borrowing from the insurance industry, Umbrella will be the best of what we can offer. Suited for those serious about security and productivity, that fully believe strong IT is as important to your success as accounting, finance, or legal.
Umbrella includes nearly everything we believe fills out an IT environment that can be deployed on a per computer, site, or user basis. It is billed per user.
Flex is for our traditional customers, those that might not be ready to take a leap into fully managed IT, want a co-managed role, just need some software licenses, or have never had an MSP or IT company before. It’s our a la carte model that is currently in place today.
T+M is built for those odd one offs and project based work. These engagements look like security camera installs, penetration testing, cabling, data migrations, new computer setups, and subcontractor work.
No one has to transition plans, we’re making this change so all of these plans can be more transparent, easier to understand, and easier to work with us on.
We have made some great improvements to customer security in the last two years but it is time for another pass.
Put simply:
We are unhappy with our current security tools alone.
Every year we take a proactive look at the full set of our tools to understand where we would like things to be better, security tools especially.
We make sure our recommendations are strong enough to keep the bad out without being overtly heavy to also limit daily productivity.
In the coming weeks and months you’ll see calls and email from both Trey and myself to discuss how your individual environments should be addressed. Broadly speaking we are rolling out the following:
These enhancements to our clients cybersecurity posture will go into effect after a business review with either myself or Trey.
We have officially started quoting managed print contracts for our customers. This has been many years and hands in the making. We’ll be giving all our customers that have bought printers from us a call to talk about managed print.
We now offer cellular internet backup. All ISPs have outages, some more than others. If you’re concerned about those couple hours a month, day a year, or other intermittent connectivity, let us know and we’ll schedule a call to talk about internet backup.
After bringing on a field tech that specializes in audio and sound we had the opportunity to assist with several assistive hearing loop projects around the state. We now offer design and install services for assistive listening technologies whether that be for a movie theater, church sanctuary, or just a simple ticket window, we can help you be heard.
If your internet or entertainment need an upgrade at home, we can help. From home theaters, to whole home audio, automated shades, and improved WiFi, we treat our customers home environments as seriously as business ones. I hate being my own IT person at home and want a space to unwind and relax. You deserve that too.
In building the new era Apt Interactive, I want to make sure we are putting our effort into the right places. If there is something you think we should be handling for you, we want to know! If there is something you think we shouldn’t be handling, we want to know! If there’s something that is a thorn in your side we might be able to help solve even though it’s not IT related, we want to know!
As part of the upcoming business reviews, we’ll be asking for what you think our priorities should be, not just in your own businesses, but in the greater world.
We want to rely on our customers to help us become the best we can be, as an IT company, as individual professionals, and as extensions of your staff.
2024 was a hard year for us. There was no way around that but there was a way through.
With new tools, new people, and new processes on the horizon, 2025 is going to be an exciting year of growth for Apt Interactive; one I hope you’ll be a part of.
I’m thankful for each and every one of our customers that have got us here and hope to show more and more of that over the coming months.
No matter your place in life, have a relaxing and merry holiday season and an optimistic start to the new year.
Together,
Jacob Bespalec and the Apt Interactive Team