Bienvenidos a Miami SBS UG

Yesterday was a bit of a homecoming for me, I was going back to the town where I grew up and I got to talk about Shockey Monkey. The fun part of what I do is that people ask me to come and talk about the products that I’ve designed and I actually get to meet people and hear how they are working with our solutions, making money, etc.

I hate to sell, so I basically gave them an option of talking about anything I do and Shockey Monkey just seems to be the most uncommercial thing I can do because well.. the product is free, it’s designed by over 3,000 IT solution providers that are constantly filing bugs, feature requests, etc. So I came up with a pretty cool (read: extremely arrogant) tagline for it:

I am not saying this is the best thing out there. The 3,000 people that use it to run their business on it do.

It’s better than the other insulting taglines people have offered me for it in the past. The cool thing about Shockey Monkey, organizationally, is that I got such a deep understanding for how the SMB consulting works and really a feel for the variety of what people do and how they make money – not everyone is the TS2 subscriber that pushes SBS or a blindfolded MSP, there are many models out there and its those that don’t subscribe to the herd mentality that make the most money.

It was so nice to be there again. I remember a few years back Alex and Richard telling me about the idea of the SBS UG, asking me if its worth it, etc. Really, I would not recommend the SBS group leadership to even my worst enemies. You get to deal with thankless bitter people, play a wedding organizer, teach people how to act like real human beings and businessmen (like thank our sponsors, give them the business whenever you can, clean up after yourself, wear shoes), you have to put your reputation on the line and keep things fair and not kick out people when they seem to be going way out of line…. all so that everyone can think you’re Microsoft’s bitch, that you’re making money off the group in some way and no matter how much you do it is never enough because a large majority of the people will view this as a service they can use and never give back.

But… if you’re stupid (and persistent) enough you really get something that is available nowhere else, in no other profession. You get true business owners and technology experts, talking things out with one another, finding solutions to common problems that benefit everyone and through the large enough crowd you get close access to the vendors you do business with and most importantly, form lasting relationships with people that can think out of the box and outside of their little comfort zone (and you know what, those are the folks that take risks and in the end persevere); so huge thanks to Alex and Richard for taking their time to organize Miami, to lead it, to get people out, to establish a sense of community that Miami is famous for.

Thanks for having me over folks, I’ll be back when the meetings move to South Beach