Patience, Patience…

My last few points have raised a lot of interest. In the past week I’ve received more mail and direct contacts than I’ve received in all of 2009. At first I thought someone had broken my captcha and just slammed my Contact form, but almost all the messages are legit and someone took their time to voice their concerns. Interestingly enough, most of the mail came from people that do $0 worth of business with Own Web Now.

So since my decision making within Own Web Now makes no material impact on the overwhelming majority of people that read this blog, and that chose to contact me outside of public comments, what about me and my decisions is so interesting?*

Love or hate the Vladville act folks, it’s a reflection of the IT market. As much as Susan would like to believe that I’m just having a bad day, or that this is just doom and gloom, most of you seem to relate more to the tough market realities than to OWN’s success with the new portfolio we launched last summer (and the portfolio that your peers are overwhelmingly successful with). But this isn’t a sales pitch. This is a mirror:

The first ugly truth we have to admit to ourselves is that there is danger in self-selective sampling.

I can tell you that the world of cloud services is the future – we’ve made millions, as have our partners. Karl Palachuk (smbbooks.com) will on the other hand tell you that the future is in a mix of on/off premise infrastructure managed by the partner and owned by the client. My friends at CharTec (AARC) would have an all together different story. And Susan Bradley would likely throw some holy water on the cloud while screaming “Devil be gone, devil be gone” out of one side of her mouth while saying you need to make the ultimate decision after extensive research you conduct on your own.

And no matter which side of us you find the most familiarity with and choose to agree with because it gives you the most comfort… you must accept one thing: that we’re all assholes because while we slice and dice a few million accounts, Gmail and Hotmail are signing up 200 million users a year.

You see, 100% of the people that own their own office that Karl manages to find his way into will place value on the physical control of their infrastructure. By comparison, most of my success stories come from people that are polar opposites of the people that Karl meets. I don’t believe the word “migration” should even be in the dictionary anymore, but I’m sure Susan would disagree. We all sample the people that choose to talk to us because our message resonates with them.

Meanwhile, in the real world, mutlibillion dollar companies are trusting their entire communications platform to the security and privacy-ambiguous web site that randomly takes an hour or two off and make billions of dollars giving it away.

Hi, My name is Vlad, and I’m an ass.

I know I’m wrong. That’s why I’m still working. One of the most valuable things that we did this year was a big SMBUP (“Smack My Bitch Up”) session in which I took people on my staff around Microsoft WPC and had my partners beat them up about the stupid things we did.

Things started off nicely: “It would be nice if you could generate the report of consolidated user counts” but about 40 minutes into it when they were no longer concerned about being polite and only wanted to get stuff done the tone changed to: “You guys suck, every response is dripping with insults and you make us feel like idiots.”  [EDIT: Since I’ve managed to offend Wayne I think an edit is in order: These guys are my friends first, customers second. So while they tend to be open with me, rarely do they take the opportunity to totally unload their frustrations with my company on me – which sucks to hear, but helps give me extra motivation to fix things, quickly. We should all be so lucky instead of sticking to our notions of what majority of our customers are saying]

All day, every day, I hear about how great we are. Every day I have one negative review followed by a few dozen “Thank you for making my business so successful”; That’s why my buddy Mark calls me the most sadistic piece of @#%@ he’s ever met – I don’t respond well to positive feedback. I know we rock. Thanks. That’s why I work 60 hours a week. Tell me what’s wrong.

Most people don’t like to hear that. I’ve had people quit and crumble under the pressure and negative reviews. Life is tough, you don’t get rewarded for meeting expectations. That’s for minimum-wage-earners.

I want to be the best: So I decided to expand my circle of bag punchers and keep on improving my company. In doing so, I uncovered a huge opportunity to grow my company and help my partners. And no, I am not about to go open it all up right here.

So what now…

Start thinking.

What are you not doing that would appeal to the wide audience that you aren’t serving (but someone else is). That’s where you need to be.

Here is where we are now, here is what works in the MSP world:

“Second, the products that we use for our MSP offering have evolved over time and fit our pricing model (cost per workstation, or cost per server).

It has taken us 4-5 years to get everything in place, but I am always open to ways to improve my service and possibly save money with different products, although saving a few pennies or dimes at the expense of fewer features is not what we do.”

Folks are selling stacks. One stack, one size fits all – pay more for an XXL size but otherwise if you aren’t buying our stuff…. hit the road.

That worked well up till now. Not so much going forward folks.. so… how do you change it?