Why Should I Join the Apple Consultants Network?

As an unemotional consumer, I am terrible at marketing pretty much everything, myself included. So, several years ago, I signed up for a membership in the Apple Consultants Network, thinking that just having a link up on an Apple branded site would be a great way to nab a few referrals here and there. After joining, I definitely got to meet my share of really cool, really smart cats from all over the country by volunteering to staff the ACN Macworld booth on Thursday evenings—the timeslot when most of the dumber consultants were too busy getting sauced at some ridiculous dinner party to care about actually helping people—but mostly I just ran into a lot of loudmouthed alpha male MBA jerks in mid-midlife crisis who made me really uncomfortable.

One non-jerky guy who really sticks out in my mind to this day was a highly trained electronic engineer from Colorado who liked working on Macs and had been doing so professionally for a number of years. He came up to my Macworld booth seat out of the blue and asked me “Why should I join the Apple Consultants Network?” The reason that he sticks out so much is not because it was an odd question for a Macworld attendee to pose, but because, after three years worth of being a paid ACN member, I couldn’t think of a single reason to give him. Being confronted by the fact that all I’d really gotten out of the rather pricey program was the black polo shirt my exhibitor’s pass was clipped to and a couple bottles of water was more than a little embarrassing, and uncontrollable laughter was the closest thing to an answer I was able to come up with on the spot.

Now my experiences are almost certainly not representative of everyone’s, but I still think it might be helpful to take a look back through the lenses of hindsight and translate some of Apple’s creative marketing claims describing the six rewards of ACN membership into plain English so that I might finally give that poor guy the answer he deserved.

Before we go any further I want to make a couple of things perfectly clear. Apple Consultants Network memberships are available in two flavors: Basic and Plus, at a yearly cost of $395 and $695 respectively. There is also a one-time $60 application fee after you’ve taken at least one $150 multiple-choice certification exam. I have never been a Plus level member, and for all I know there was all kinds of crazy hot man-on-ham action going on in the Moscone Center Champagne Room that I totally missed out on by not coughing up that extra couple hunsky. For the duration of this essay, I will be rounding all dollar amounts up to the nearest hundred, and I will be referring only to those membership benefits which are available at both Basic and Plus levels.

If you would like to learn more about the three yes, three differences between Basic and Plus level ACN memberships, feel free to consult this hideous AppleWorks document that looks like somebody took a screenshot of a word processor window, exported it as a PDF and called it a day.

Now, onto those sweet rewards:

Expand your expertise and your business

This claim is sufficiently vague that it cannot be disputed. However, it may be worth noting that simply continuing to draw breath on this Earth has a tendency to expand one’s expertise at a comparable rate. Correlation or causation? You make the call.

Receive up-to-the-minute information from Apple

Again, this claim is so nebulous as to be indisputable. However, all of the up-to-the-minute information that is made available to ACN members is generally available to every member of the public with an internet connection. There aren’t any exciting pre-release software builds or NDA-protected internal roadmaps or anything like that.

You will get a free copy of every major OS release in the mail at some point, but that point is usually best measured in terms of months rather than minutes, as the ACN program is dead last on everyone’s priority list. Pretty cool, but $400? Maybe if it included an OS X Server license that didn’t expire almost immediately.

Connect to a growing community of industry professionals

What this means is that you get access to a private mailing list where other ACN members gather to shoot the breeze. While I have certainly met some absolutely brilliant ACN members, both during and after my time with their organization, not too many of them ever wasted much time on this list. Instead, I found it was populated primarily by the less capable consultants who needed to ask each other questions about things like incredibly basic server administration issues you’d probably expect them to be abundantly familiar with, whether or not accepting American Express cards is worth it, and what their kids did in iWeb over Christmas vacation. Why’s it private? Because if anybody ever found out that the Avon lady they hired to tune their nameservers had to ask other people what BIND was the night before, they’d probably just go connect with the industry professionals on AFP548 themselves.

If you’re lucky, you’ll also get to attend some ACN regional meetings in your town. This will obviously vary wildly from region to region, but if you’re in San Francisco, an ACN meeting involves traveling to the heart of a gentrified ghetto where some tired old sales manager from Netgear or Marketcircle or Drive Savers or some other asinine affiliate program will give you a sweaty PowerPoint sales pitch which he expects you to repeat to your clients in exchange for commissions and pixelated GIFs. I’m sure it’s not easy to organize a genuinely interesting gathering every single month, and my hat’s off to anyone who tries, but whether or not the number of participants these events draw is actually “growing” is something no one would blame you for asking to see some numbers on.

Have access to valuable members-only resources

The resources they speak of are accessed through a rickety old FileMaker-backed website that looks like it was built by an intern in the early 90s and is usually broken. Finding any of your promised treasures in this mystery-meat navigation maze is difficult at best, and once you finally do, you begin to realize that they all seem to involve minor discounts on crappy software you don’t want, QuickTime Pro serial numbers you don’t need, and a sizable collection of Apple marketing collateral in TIFF and EPS formats. How valuable are those? Probably not very, but if you have as much art training as most computer nerds, those giant product photos will fill up all the blank space on your MobileMe site pretty quickly.

Get promotional pricing on equipment, training, and software

Ah, the inside deal, the secret handshake, the homeboy hookup; now we’re talkin’! As a member of the Apple Consultants Network, you can expect to receive several phone calls toward the end of each quarter from people you’ve never heard of offering to make you or your clients a fantastic deal on a brand new something-or-other because somebody came up under quota and they’ve got a mountain of discontinued backstock to unload, quick. Unfortunately, these “deals” are usually in the neighborhood of 5% off MSRP, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that better prices can be had on Amazon any day of the week.

Apple’s not really in the discount business; For two years of my life I was an Apple Senior Engineer with a Grade 7 salary and all I got in the way of discounts was like 10% off of one department approved purchase per year. Now what chance do you think you, a person who just took a quiz and wrote a check, have of getting those firesale price cuts you’ve been dreaming about?

But hey, since you like deals so much, the Apple Consultants Network will go ahead and sell your email address to pretty much anybody who sells anything. Once accepted, you can expect to receive a whole lot of marketing spam from every Tom, Dick and Harry out there who’s hired an idiot from rentacoder to build them a FileMaker template that prints FedEx labels which they’re sure you simply cannot live without. I still get them to this day, and I’m not even a member anymore.

I never attended any of the training camps as they were another couple grand on top of everything else. I also couldn’t think of a good reason to lock myself in a room full of fat, loud dudes with patchy beards for extended periods of time, but if that sounds like fun to you, rock on. Odds are good there’s an anime convention nearby that’ll get you the same results for under $50.

Utilize the Apple logo in the marketing of your business

Apple Consultants Network members can indeed use the Apple Consultants Network logo in the marketing of their businesses, unless Apple decides you’ve done or said something that they don’t approve of.

Since they don’t approve of much, when that happens, you will receive a giant package in the mail detailing all the ways in which Apple intends to sue you for using the Apple Consultants Network logo in the marketing of your business. This package will not include a refund for all the ridiculous testing fees you paid.

But what about the retail store referrals?! You know, the thing that convinced even a readily embittered cynic like myself to go take a computer-proctored multiple-choice certification exam at a Heald College learning annex downtown just for the chance to be a part of the big team? Well, the system is supposed to work like this:

1. Consultant schedules a meeting with local Apple Store staff to discuss his or her focus and capabilities.
2. Customer meets with Apple Store staff and expresses needs that extend beyond the realm of basic support.
3. Apple Store staff match the customer with the consultant(s) they believe to be the best fit.

This way, little old ladies who just want to learn how to send an email don’t have to bother the enterprise networking guys, and Johnny Corporation doesn’t get stuck with a little old lady whose expertise ends at sending an email. Sounds pretty cool to me.

Unfortunately, what actually ends up happening frequently looks a lot more like this:

1. Consultant schedules a meeting with a zitty college kid to discuss the number of new Mac buyers he or she is going to bring in to their store.
2. Customer meets with Apple Store staff and expresses needs that extend beyond the realm of basic support.
3. Apple Store staff try to solve their problems by selling them more equipment.
4. Customer becomes dissatisfied and asks if there is anywhere else he or she can go for help.
5. Apple Store staff says no and tries to sell them even more equipment.

In my three years of ACN membership, I got exactly one Apple Store referral despite having visited and chit-chatted with the staffers of several throughout the midsection of this bankrupt state on a regular basis. Maybe it was because there are a lot of consultants in my area, or maybe it was because they just didn’t like me, or maybe it was because none of the people I talked to remained employed by the Apple Store for more than a few months and there was always a whole new batch of single-serving interchangeable strangers behind the counter every time I went in. Either way, that one referral came from the Burlingame location and netted me a fat, juicy $100—roughly one quarter of my membership dues for the year.

If that wasn’t bad enough, just about every client I’ve ever had has told me that, even when they specifically asked for a referral to a paid consultant, the Apple Store staffer they were dealing with told them they were not allowed to refer customers to businesses outside of Apple at all. Why nobody ever mentions this likely made-up rule to the consultants who drive all the way out there with a stack of business cards in tow, I’m not sure, but I quickly adopted a similar policy when it came to referring people to Apple Stores.

Like a battered housewife, I kept on paying my dues because I was still getting a fair number of hits from their web directory, and even though the ACN site was not promoted in any meaningful way whatsoever, that seemed like it might pay off at least a little. I honestly did get a couple of really good clients that way, but they really had to work to find me.

Then Apple changed their profile system so that any consultant whose focus was not on generic enterprise IT tasks would never be found by anyone, ever. Where once there were wide open text fields accepting all sorts of descriptive input regarding one’s areas of expertise, there were now just a handful of skill category checkboxes. If your specialty wasn’t included amongst those checkboxes, it simply didn’t exist, and subsequently, neither did you.

Go ahead, try to find an Apple consultant who specializes in color management or software development in their directory. I’ll wait.

I expressed my concerns with the parochial new direction the web directory had taken to the ACN Advisory Council which seemed to be comprised of just one really disinterested person as far as I was able to gather repeatedly in the wake of these changes, and after being told that they’d pass it along 4 or 5 times without result, I began to suspect that they might have been lying. I even applied for a seat on this illustrious Advisory Council in an attempt to contribute some genuine solutions to the problems which clearly plagued the organization and was promptly denied. After another year’s worth of being ignored, I stopped sending them complaints—and checks—altogether in 2008.

While I may be a marketing dunce, I’m pretty sure I know that this network didn’t do a whole lot for me. Behind every reason to join the Apple Consultants Network lurks five reasons not to bother, but to be fair, if you’re really into schmoozing and generic, drudgerous, Fortune 500 IT work, I have no doubt that you can make an absolute killing with an ACN membership, and you should totally go for it; the certification tests are easy as hell compared to other vendors’ and you don’t even have to re-take them every year all of the answers are also freely available on public torrent trackers thanks to the airtight security at Prometric, so even really stupid people can pass. If, on the other hand, you’re more of a small-timer who’s interested in targeting really specific niche markets that Novell never penetrated, you’ll probably get more business handing out fliers in a Safeway parking lot.

If you really want attention, take all that money and hire a PR firm. The highly marginalized and completely unpromoted ACN program is absolutely on the ass-end of Apple funding allocations, and I feel perfectly comfortable in opining that the only reason they didn’t kill it off along with their other neglected business parter programs back in 2007 is because there are so damn many people out there who are willing to pay $400 just to post on a terrible mailing list that costs nothing to maintain. Assuming their headcount claims are accurate at over 1,000 members, that’s at least $400,000 worth of revenue per year with virtually no overhead. Quite the turn-key racket if you ask me.

Now just pray nobody ever asks me why they should sign up with Ingram Micro.