Who or What are you building your business on top of?

I’m still alive, thanks for checking on me. No, it’s not the survey, I still haven’t had the chance to look at the results (Note to self: record the SQL password and db name next time).

No dear friends, nothing is wrong. It’s 4 AM and I am still working. People are banging the ExchangeDefender and other product order forms faster than we can rack the servers up, our Shockey Monkey portal is flooding faster than we can hire folks to fill it, and I’ve been doing my finest Ironman performance as I’ve promised you results last week. Why me? Well, as Mr Gekko would put it: The Carnegies, the Mellons, the men that built this great industrial empire, made sure of it because it was their money at stake. Thats the case here too, just who are you partnering with?

So as much as I would like to give you my take on the many business and technical epiphanies and exploits of the day-to-day CEO, I am exhausted, so I am going to offer you a really primal essence of a business that burns itself from within. The following story is true, sadly.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7055625.stm

Delhi, the Indian capital, has been swarming with the wild monkeys that had been displaced in the process of urban sprawl of this industrial-turning-service economy. I am not kidding. The city officials solution to the explosion of Rhesus monkey population within the city has been to train the larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller monkeys. I am not kidding. This same practice of arming up one group of people you hate to go after the other group of people you hate more, also known as the “United States Foreign Policy” has worked brilliantly in Afghanistan, Iraq and other marvels of American diplomacy. Again, this is not a joke. Finally, much like their human counterparts, the monkey population has had a “Macaques Blowback” as one Microsoft employee titled it, or the Rhesus Insurgency… I am STILL not kidding:

SS Bajwa, Delhi deputy mayor was killed in an attack by a horde of wild Rhesus macaques (monkeys) that jumped him and threw him (or he fell) off the first story terrace in his home. Ok, joke time:

The Monkey Horde:
So, bitch, you want to send your big langur monkeys after us? First you step on our turf, break down our hood, then you send your boys after us? <smack>

Where yo monkeys at now, huh bitch? You punk us out of our hood and now you want to play a gangster?<smack>

Who is yo daddy now, huh punk? Who’s the big monkey now? Think you can fly like me? Oh no – the floor! (rhyming is free)

Yes, I am assuming that monkeys can talk from my experince with Microsoft PSS, but even I am surprised with the gang mentality. I guess tech support will turn anything evil.

Which brings me to the concept of business building that many of you had asked me about since the Cycle of VAR post I made last week. The question that came up is: Given my business plan – how do I staff appropriately if I cannot afford the high end engineers? This is very simple – If you can’t afford high end engineers, you can’t afford to offer high end solutions. I deal with this day in and day out, and I know many of my fellow MVPs in the enterprise space see it as well – “Oh my god, I need help, the person that set this up left and nobody else knows how to do XYZ”; Now, the 20/20 hindsight says that in order to support complex infrastructure you need complex training and cross-training so you don’t have a single point of failure in your support infrastructure. And even though you’re reading this now – and probably thinking that its common sense – you are not going to do it. Why? Greed. Forget about cross-training, how can that happen when there is no initial training to begin with? And initial training, the tens of thousands of dollars in classes and out of office blocks do not happen in a startup company – hell, if the people are working less than 40 hours or billing less than 30 a week you grill them! Don’t you? But guess what, you can only whip that one horse for so long until it gets a different job. And then… then the empire falls down. Then you fall off your first story terrace. You have sold, and contracted, expensive servers that “The Genius Employee” built/hacked together at $11/hour salary and only a new $80,000 a year employee can support. No fear though, I’m sure the community will save you, that there is a partner out there just waiting to throw you a rope and save you… Yeah, you keep on smoking that crack. The core of every business plan is WHAT, HOW and EXIT STRATEGY. If your “how” is “we make it up as we go along” and the exit strategy is “we know people that can help us, I know Vlad is good with Exchange and Amy can do ISA” then not only are you screwed but you are lying to yourself about it too.

The lesson is that you can’t build your business with langur monkeys and rhesus macaques because your business is not selling bannanas, its selling high end IT infrastructure. High end infrastructure costs money, requires talent, requires training and thats why you make the big bucks. If you’re stupid enough to think you’re selling a commodity service that is going to be backed by indianinabucket.com then I assure you the fall from that first story balcony is going to happen very quickly, very painfully and now just might be the time to examine that business plan and figure out if you’re in the IT infrastructure support business or if you’re just competing with the monkeys on phones removing spyware.

Which one is it?