Howdy do, Turnkey Lovers?

How are you feeling this week? I’m only asking because I’m not sure how to begin this topic. Let’s see, not too long ago, one of my co-workers mentioned that some of our competitors were writing blog entries on what it’s like to be an “IT Professional”. This has actually been something that I’m curious about myself.

What makes an IT Professional? I mean, IT (Information Technology) is such a large umbrella. So I did what I always do when I need to know something: Google. You would be surprised—well, you might not be—about the number of articles out there that deal with this very topic. Hundreds of “IT Professionals” all list their own explanations of what an IT Professional does.

Rather than bore you with yet another article on what an IT Professional does in general, I would prefer to take you into the world of a “TurnKey Professional”. These are probably one in the same, as a common denominator through all of the articles on IT professionals was this idea of wearing multiple hats; metaphorical hats, in this case. This could be anything from fixing a certain type of software, to providing customer service to a local client. If you’re really lucky, you may even get to work with a businessman or salesman.

In no place did I see this idea chiseled deeper into stone then at TurnKey Internet. On some days, I’m just your friendly, neighborhood slayer of tickets. This extends from any support issue as small as resetting a password on a locked out cPanel account, to deploying a major upgrade to new technology. On other days, I might be working on LiveChat, attempting to sell one of our many services—everything from dedicated servers, to colocation, to domain registration.

A TurnKey Professional is a jack of all trades, if you will. We each have skills that we must call on in a moment’s notice, to best service the needs of our customers. Isn’t that what an IT Professional is supposed to do? I’m not 100% on that, but I know here at TurnKey Internet, that’s what we do.

Having team members who each possess different skills, leads to a diverse, all-encompassing set of solutions to common issues that any IT Professional may run into. You know, that’s why I love working here. There are always multiple ways to solve an issue, and here at TurnKey, we usually end up employing many of them—if not all of them—to solve our clients’ needs. It’s quite refreshing.

Well, that’s just another little bit of information I wanted to share with you. It’s another way to show you Turnkey-lovers that I love what I do; another piece of information to share and bond over.

Until next time…

Howdy do Turnkey Lovers,

It’s Jeremy here again. I had a bit of a brain block when writing this post. I wasn’t exactly sure what to share with guys.

We’ve chatted about everything from cPanel hosting to reseller hosting and even if the Internet will die. However, I have to apologize. Me being from the deep south, Georgia to be exact, we have this little thing called Southern Hospitality.

For those of you who do not know what that is, lets just call it manners. That guy who passes you on the streets and says, “Hey, how you doing?” to the guy who holds the door for you when you’re entering a venue.

That leads me to my apology as I’ve never introduced myself. I’m Jeremy Walker, slayer of tickets and women hearts. Born and raised in this little town twenty minutes out of Atlanta called Inman Georgia. Now, I won’t bore you with telling my life story here as this isn’t the venue – but it leads to the core of where I speak from, and always keep a customer is always right attitude to assist people.

I wanted to actually share more about my love for Turnkey and technology. I began working at Turnkey in the summer of 2010. I was year removed from my junior year of RPI(Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst.) I had a taken a year off and needed to find some work. I tried my hands at Staples, and other retail shop opportunities – but never found the right fit that challenged and excited me.

I had grown up in technology and knew that items they wanted me to sell, but found it rather unrewarding to put politely (I am after all a southern gentlemen, so i’ll simply say that!).  One day, I felt I was wasting my potential. I had went through 3 years at RPIand I didn’t want to just be selling things I didn’t believe in. Enter, TurnKey –  I’m cruising craigslist for potential opportunities and stumble across this aid for a computer technician.

One email later, one phone call, and an interview later and Turnkey had its new Hosting Evangelist, neither of us knew it yet though at the time! Now, I worked before in my  life, but I wasn’t in such a  professional environment where you weren’t face to face with a client all the time when helping them.  This was new territory for me. I was actually working in my chosen career choice with a Tech company that was rapidly growing. Cloud, Shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS(virtual private server), DNS etc. were all new things for me – but logical tie ins with my technical experience.

My education up to this point was more theoretical based then hands on. Sure, I had dual booted my machine at home and built web sites and facebook pages at RPI and even had an internship as a systems engineer my freshman year at RPI, but none like Turnkey.

It’s been a fun, stressful, awesome, rewarding, education and any other adjective you want to use.  The key here was I was part of something, and really got to interact with you (the clients, and potential clients) to see new challenges, opportunities and ways of using technology every day.  For someone invested in technology their entire life, and career / education path – the diversity of technology uses, and challenges can be one of the biggest perks to the job.

I’ve grown the most at this company by learning more about offering Hosting, ISP(Internet service provider) collocation, green energy datacenter services – all have added to my knowledge of this beautiful creature of the Internet. Seeing the industry from this side has been quite a rewarding experience.  And the best part, over the last years I’ve moved through the customer service ranks, to the engineering ranks and now after learning more and more about the technology and working with clients to see all the different challenges that come with it, I get to write to you guys about great ways to leverage the technology.  I get teased as our Hosting Evangelist – out there on forums, and our blog – but that’s ok.

Now, we’ve been properly introduced. I hope you’ve enjoyed this encounter as much as I did providing it.

Until next week Turnkey Lovers