Eating Lunch Alone

This week, I will be eating lunch alone at Annies down the street. I intend to sit there by myself with a little paper notebook and brainstorm all the ways in which we suck as far as our organization is concerned. Basically, I want to try to take myself out of the OWN space and see what would piss me off about working with OWN.

Then I intend to take those items back, meet at 4PM and find a way to fix them before Jul 1. We’re coming up to a major rebranding (marketing) point and I want to make sure not to leave any stone unturned. We’ve received a ton of feedback since September of last year, we have stepped up the documentation and communication efforts which have been very well received, we’ve fixed tech support by getting rid of the top offenders and have been seriously working on addressing the issues with billing, portal, software and even licensing.

The key point being totally disconnected from it and forcing myself to lay it out without ability to actually do anything about it. No laptop, no cell, no PDA, just pen paper and some grilled chicken. The frequent downside to “fixing” things is that you focus on the solution and not the 18,000 other problems that are going to be caused by the change you’re about to make.

As always, will keep you up with how it changes / evolves.

P.S. On a flip side, another killer month on the books. We’re seeing a pickup of people going out of business and we’re seeing a tremendous pickup on the side of the people that have been reselling services across the board – Exchange, mail, web hosting, ExchangeDefender, offsite backup… While I will never wish any ill will towards anyone that disagrees with me, I have to say I find it rather amusing that the people that argued with me over the years over not wanting to resell hosting services as a part of a business model and instead focused on MSP & hours and projects and are now closing doors. “Vlad, what’s a few bucks here and there going to do for my bottom line? Nothing!!!!” Turns out people will stop funding projects, drop patching managed services but they won’t swallow thousands of messages piling up in their inbox or getting rid of their email or backups, who would have figured there would be a sustainable business model behind that. Keep on fighting the future and saying “My clients would never go for that”..