AASP: Should I, and if so, how?
I am in need of some advice from the community, and I hope I have come to the right place. Here is my scenario:
I am a small business owner. My company provides an array of IT services, from Managed Services to VoIP phone systems, to document/content management. My technical background ranges from medium sized business IT support to designing/installing/maintaining IT infrastructure for K12 to government and law enforcement IT support. All that to say I haven't had a hard time pursuing what I wanted to pursue. That is, until I decided that I wanted to become an Apple Authorized Service Center (AASP).
This is a nut I have not been able to crack. Unfortunately, I don't have an "advocate" at Apple, which I think is the main problem. It seems to me that it wasn't that hard to become authorized in the past, but Apple has really tightened up over the last few years.
I have recently been pursuing a fairly large opportunity where my company could potentially provide hardware support for 10,000 MacBooks currently under warranty, but obviously I can't pursue this opportunity until I have achieved AASP status.
So, here are my questions:
1. What type of margins are there in Apple warranty work? Is this something worth pursuing, not as a core business, but to add on to our portfolio given the fact of this rather large opportunity, plus the fact that we are currently servicing quite a few SMBs and K12 institutions that are Mac users.
2. Assuming it is, how do I go about becoming an AASP? I have an employee with all of the required certifications, but I can't get anyone at Apple to talk to me, and every person in the IT industry that I have talked to doesn't have any connections with anyone at Apple with any clout. Each time I fill out the paperwork online to become an AASP, it comes back rejected with no reason.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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AASP Wannabe
I am a small business owner. My company provides an array of IT services, from Managed Services to VoIP phone systems, to document/content management. My technical background ranges from medium sized business IT support to designing/installing/maintaining IT infrastructure for K12 to government and law enforcement IT support. All that to say I haven't had a hard time pursuing what I wanted to pursue. That is, until I decided that I wanted to become an Apple Authorized Service Center (AASP).
This is a nut I have not been able to crack. Unfortunately, I don't have an "advocate" at Apple, which I think is the main problem. It seems to me that it wasn't that hard to become authorized in the past, but Apple has really tightened up over the last few years.
I have recently been pursuing a fairly large opportunity where my company could potentially provide hardware support for 10,000 MacBooks currently under warranty, but obviously I can't pursue this opportunity until I have achieved AASP status.
So, here are my questions:
1. What type of margins are there in Apple warranty work? Is this something worth pursuing, not as a core business, but to add on to our portfolio given the fact of this rather large opportunity, plus the fact that we are currently servicing quite a few SMBs and K12 institutions that are Mac users.
2. Assuming it is, how do I go about becoming an AASP? I have an employee with all of the required certifications, but I can't get anyone at Apple to talk to me, and every person in the IT industry that I have talked to doesn't have any connections with anyone at Apple with any clout. Each time I fill out the paperwork online to become an AASP, it comes back rejected with no reason.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
--
AASP Wannabe