Viva Exchange: Day 2 with SBSers

Done with my first presentation. As you can tell they gave me a really big room for my Mobility & Compliance session and I packed it… with one guy. The other speakers tried to make me feel better because I was going up against Steve Riley but it still felt a little defeating to present to a few dozen people. I think at some point I had about 20 people but I ended up with  a decent mix of just a few.

I even shot a picture of a few of them that remained after the presentation and to my surprise they had a lot of business question. The gentleman in the suit jacket is from Belgium and said that SBS was huge (“the only thing”) abroad. It was nice to get a global perspective, on SBS, at such an enterprise event.

And thats me with the “unauthorized E12 button” proving I was actually here

So what have I learned so far?

First off, there is a lot of interest in SBS, small business and consulting even for the enterprise engineers. Strong interest. However, their primary concern is being good at what they do and working on their skills.

And oh my god did that feel good.

One thing that consistently disappoints me about my peers in the SMB space is the total disregard and disrespect for ones technical abilities. When Jeff Middleton spoke to our Orlando ITPRO group last month I wrote down only one line where Jeff reflected on where his fees go: “….some of it goes into the skills that I maintain.”

One thing that I’ve brought to Las Vegas and one thing I continue to do is to constantly bridge the values of SMB and the skills of engineers. It can be hard at times because each space can lack grownups that enter conversations…. but SMB technicians have the work ethic and values where they are constantly representing their clients best interest and looking out for them…. and in the high-end technical field respect is earned through ones expertise, performance and pride in the craft, abilities and development of those skills.

I feel that given enough time, passion and perseverance everyone at this conference can benefit from the union of those values. But we have to learn to share and learn to respect one another. We’re all ITPRO’s after all, right?