Seventh Monkey of the Seventh Monkey

Yes, it’s a tip to Iron Maiden and the prophecy behind it. 🙂

I’ll be back in two weeks. Taking a long needed mental vacation from the past few months of mind breaking journey that has been the globalization of the OWN’s US-only businesses: virtual hosting, virtual services, exchange+sharepoint services, enterprise storage network, security tokens, enterprise services and something we only call Karl. At the first of the year the only true global OWN services were ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey, now we’ve got our most profitable lines of business in Europe, Australia, Canada, Dubai and Hong Kong. Next quarter is all about announcing and positioning all that to the greater benefit of everyone involved at OWN.

One of the downsides of mortality is that you don’t get to live forever and you get to change your mind about which parts of business you work on. The past two quarters, or the seventh monkey of the seventh monkey, were all about teaching folks around me how projects, business lines, relationships and processes get built. It took twice as long but it’s always nice to fail right away than to fail down the road when you can’t fix it easily.

New year doesn’t start in January, new year starts in August. If you’re not on that same page yet, go read this. I was talking to Dave the other day about the advances we’ve made in internal documentation, the issue with the body of knowledge is that it should not be limited to one single person. No one single point of failure should be the holder of any critical knowledge of the corporate service, we sell commodity enterprise services, not specialty blown glass vases.

So with the stuff all complete, running and buzzing, I’m taking some time off till after the SEC championship (Dec 8th) and am coming back with something you’re really going to enjoy hearing. In the meantime those of you working with my staff will be getting the news about what all this means to your bottom line so fax back those NDAs if you want $$$$.

Mythology: Seventh son of the seventh son is European mythology for the special healing powers the seventh son of the seventh son is supposed to have.