Dealing with investment fear

It takes a strong gut to look at the financial investment statements these days, even more so to start ramping up the training, hiring and R&D in these tough economic times. And if it’s really looking tough you probably have to take a hard look at your game plan and probably admit defeat, cut losses and move on before you lose it all.

If you’re wondering where I’m standing at this point then you’ll probably be surprised that today I’ve seen the first return on the largest single HR investment in OWN’s history since I stopped being a one man shop.

Gutsy?

I don’t think so. I’ve been very open about what we are doing, at times even to the detriment of competitive advantage, and where we are placing our bets. And unlike my usual batting percentage of 60% (with 40% of ideas ending up in the garbage) nearly everything I’ve done for the past 2 years has become a huge success. Even things that might appear to have fallen off the face of the earth, like SM, have not just added thousands of partners into our portfolio but have also created a huge surge in business done with OWN by the companies that signed up. This just builds on the ExchangeDefender brand that is on an epic climb, Exchange+SharePoint killer-combo, data center solutions and enterprise services.

Gloating?

Far from it. This wasn’t easy. I’ve held on for about 3 months as we looked at our indicators trying to figure out which direction the economy is going and which markets we focus on.

Then we started executing the plan and I’d like to sit here and pat myself on the back about the revenues and month-to-month of skyrocketing profits but I’m not Scrooge McDuck, I don’t sit on top of the money bin or get joy out of counting coins. At the end of the day, I’m just a geek that went to business school and never stopped trying to be better.

So as the revenues grew and our staff didn’t….

Well….

I’ll only say this once. It’s a bitch going to bed every night seeing how far you’re getting backed up, just to wake up in the morning and hear about how much you suck.

So a little while back while looking over the projections and estimates we decided to hire ahead of the demand and radically transform our support infrastructure. It has been a tough month, taking away from production to invest into training and documentation building and focus on more than two goals.

In case you’re wondering, they used to be “write great software partners need to make money” and “always be closing the sale”

If you were at the UG meeting in Seattle or spent some time with me at the MVP deep dives you probably know the next vector of OWN that I’m in process of implementing, not to mention the one that comes after that.

As you will read in my first little piece of serious writing in just over 24 hours, the time for planning, thinking, conceptualizing and figuring things out is over. If you don’t have your marketing, leads, pipeline and project processes narrowed down you’re basically just counting down to extinction as the IT services become a commodity and a utility.

As for me, I know my role. My role is to build the software and services that help people integrate their solutions for their customers. Which I’m glad to say a LOT of people are making a killing on. Thank you all. Moreso, I want to thank those of you that have put up with us through the little rough patch if things didn’t work out perfectly right away as they should. That’s business. But if you’ve been looking at this blog, the folks that work with me and help me realize my objectives tend to be compensated greatly.

The new big OWN support teams went online today and in the first day we have been able to cut the open issue reports in half. The support and network ops and development are clicking along and the backend side of this (which you will soon see out in the open) is back.

It’s Monday, October 6th, and the Ironman is back.