Standards

I’m a huge fan of Gordon Ramsay - but not for his cooking. From his earliest shows over in the UK to his global career on “Kitchen Nightmares” and “Hell’s Kitchen,” his standards were the true draw, for me.

Some people only see an angry man calling everyone a donut - but from the very beginning, I saw a man who put quality over every other metric. If the food wasn’t 100%, he’d refuse to send it to the customer. Satisfying him was therefore fairly straightforward - just be flawless!

Really, though, it’s not about the service provider being perfect - but the product they’re selling. When a customer says “medium” and one of Ramsay’s chefs accidentally cooks it “well done,” they’re expected to chuck the meat and start again. The customer waits a few minutes more, but gets what they ordered every time - and the restaurant eats the cost of the mistake.

This is how we all expect businesses of all kinds to work, whether it’s how our steak is cooked or how our car is fixed… mistakes are ‘eaten’ by the business, and the product delivered is exactly what was discussed and without flaws.

Poorly cooked food can cost you via food poisoning - and poorly built networks can cost you via lost productivity. From home to business, so much of our daily lives depend on Internet connectivity that a failure of just a few minutes can mean huge inconvenience and losses.

“Standards” means refusing to push substandard work under the carpet. It means re-terminating cable ends that don’t 100% pass. It means re-running a kinked cable run, or replacing a suspicious patch cable. It means proactively replacing aging connections before they break, rather than waiting for them to fail.

It means doing the job right the first time, rather than praying the wrong way holds up over time.

Cable Dressing

I meet some pretty messy networks, and the cringe is often very real. Of course we want things to look nice, but is it really even all about appearances? I spend a lot of time and materials dressing cable - but why?

Messy cabling costs more - firstly because things will fail more often, and secondly because repairs will be much more costly and involved.

With carefully-designed and -dressed cable pathways and equipment mounts, cables are less likely to get “snagged” and pulled loose, plugs are less likely to wiggle free over time, equipment will get rid of heat better and last longer, and future service/changes will be quicker & smoother every time.

Ubiquiti Networks

I’ve been designing & building networks with Ubiquiti gear since my first AP Pro’s from them in early 2015. In fact, many of the networks I built back then are humming along happily to this day - many without a single service/maintenance visit, and most with an uptime of >99.99%. Ubiquiti commercial-grade switches, routers, and cameras have all proven to be rock-solid reliable, rarely seeing downtime that isn’t caused by something unrelated (like the Internet connection going down).

Today, I continue to proudly build networks for residential and commercial clients needing as many as 100+ endpoints and 10+ WiFi access points across several floors and thousands of square feet, wired security cameras, VLANs, intrusion security, strictly-controlled guest WiFi, and remote diagnostics/administration. And those networks will run reliably for years, with minimal or no downtime, ensuring the highest overall value and ROI for my clients.

Ultimately, it’s up to the client to choose - would you prefer a lower cost today, with equipment/cabling that’s difficult to service and more likely to fail… or would you prefer a higher cost today, with equipment that’s easy to service but almost never needs it?