Beyond Grasshopper MSP

Blogs are free for a reason: We rarely talk to you about what we’re going to be doing tomorrow, much like books and articles, it’s about the past and the present. So let’s look at today in the little world of IT: the HTG cult is pushing with cutting the lowest performers and making sure everything grows every single month, yet I can tell you from discussions with a few members that we work with that it’s not so easy out there. Even No-Recession-Karl is finally being affected by the downturn, though to his credit he did hold out for a year. To our OWN credit, we’re about to smash the revenue and profit figures again as August wraps but primarily due to the strength of our cloud services.

Let’s face it folks, business is still slowing down. Many people have cut people, lost big projects, clients that were around for years, etc.

If you want some of my success, call OWN and figure out how to offer cloud services.

Though to be honest, I see a world in which even that will very soon be available for free or so close to free that it won’t really matter.

If you are under impression that big projects are right around the bend, where you can charge a big hourly premium to make up for lost ground, don’t bother: Wallstreet Journal: ‘Billable Hour’ Under Attack.

Fearmongering

The recent post I wrote about Future View scared many of you. What was really just a post acknowledging rebalancing of our training and support services to a new era where the basics of technology are worthless (ie, anyone can do it) and towards things our clients are actually willing to pay for brought many to the edge. I got everything from “is own shutting down” to “will I still be able to buy stuff from you” and even “so are you going to sell direct?”

These are fears our industry is facing as it becomes every man for himself type of an environment. Between big corporations being bought for pennies on the dollar because they can’t make payroll and conglomerates fighting one another over which industry they can devalue faster, the premium of technology is going away.

So assuming that folks that are successful in the industry aren’t about to blog it, and that people on the outside that write books and articles for money only do so because they couldn’t make it in the industry in the first place.. where are you going to fight for the survival of your technology business?

Tip: Start asking your clients what they are willing to pay for.

I’m sure the SPFs, if they were still around and not selling Kia’s and Huyndai’s right now, would strongly disagree and do the song and dance about being a trusted advisor and how business people are really just stupid and would rather pay $100/hr for someone else to do it…. let’s look at the big picture for a moment: In less than 10 years, back when we used to dial up to the Internet, newspapers, encyclopedias, local garage sales and just about everything in between got decimated. Are your stills REALLY that invaluable that you’re foolish enough to think the same tide won’t take you under? Hope not.

Survey Monkey. It’s free.