I’ve made my opinions of the SMB IT events very clear in the past and given some of the humorous proposals we’ve gotten so far I can assure you we’ll continue to chop away at our schedule of 2014 conferences. I for the life of me can’t figure out why any IT Solution Provider would want to go to a large scale conference given how much of what conferences provide is now available online. That said, here is my travel plan for Q1:
Australia (Sydney & Melbourne) – February 3-8
Dubai – February 9 – 11
UK (London & nearby) – February 12-16
USA – All day every day
Agenda in 2014 is primarily to help our partners grow faster by doing their migration and support business (why would you do all that work if someone is going to do it for you for free?) and in Q2 promoting the soon to be renamed Shockey Monkey for SMB.
ExchangeDefender 2014 Strategy Meeting
Thursday, January 23, 2014 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
Other Initiatives
This section is more appropriately titled “Count the ways in which Vlad was wrong” but here is the short summary: People don’t read anymore. When they read they don’t pay attention. Even those not easily distracted or otherwise occupied rarely take the time to implement what we deliver effectively. So all the support and handholding services that we’ve provided in the years past are effectively getting an axe.
Here is my math when it comes to business investment: If I have to spend $100,000 on salary and another $100,000 on promotion of the service/content and then burn another $100,000 supporting it all, I’m in $300,000. And ROI of this investment depends 100% on whether or not you read the documentation, attend the webinar, train and properly incentivize your employees to do their job instead of blaming us, etc.
Or I can just spend $200,000 on the entire project lifecycle and just do something for you directly. It’s on me to do a good job or lose the business and the return is nearly directly proportional to my effort not yours.
The math becomes pretty simple. I can either keep on burning tons of money trying to search the marketplace for the IT Solution Providers that haven’t heard of ExchangeDefender or try my odds at finding them on the month when their current provider did something to piss them off, or I could spend even more to go direct.. Or I could just focus on helping my existing partner base grow faster.
I can take what I save in this process and expand my other solutions into filling more holes in the product portfolio that businesses need and are paying for through inefficiency like crazy. One thing we’ve turned up in virtually all of the migrations we’ve done so far was a messed up and completely crackheaded way small businesses collaborate and manage correspondence. The way some route mail or assure responses or customer service is so insane it’s a minor miracle they are using computers at all. In my opinion and with a few tweaks all of these folks are potential Shockey Monkey clients and I have another solution that can print money.
For more details please tune into my webinar in two weeks. If you’d like to meet on my trip along the kangaroo route let me know as well!
Love, -Vlad.
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