Full Throttle

With about 47 hours left in January, I wanted to hit the neglected-as-of-recently blog and update everyone about how things are going here. Having wrapped one of the bitchiest weeks I’ve had in a long while I can now look back at what happened in January.

Louis Vuitton

For Christmas I asked for one thing: A Louis Vuitton agenda. The damn thing cost more than my iPhone. I like to doodle and as my lifestyle got so digital that paper is something I rarely see (unless it needs my signature) my ability to use my “distraction” medium as an organization platform became impossible. Maintaining management focus on the same device that you use to exchange dirty jokes with your friends about why men like DisneyWorld and what wouldn’t wake up Cinderella if you were Prince Charming (think about it!) is like trying to have a fine dining experience where everyone’s seat was a toilet. Ahhh yea. Picture it, imagine it! 🙂

To those of you that said my blog wasn’t filthy and entertaining enough anymore: I demand your apology 🙂

But back to the topic: I’ve laid out the entire year in this agenda and it’s made me infinitely more responsible for hitting the milestones I’ve committed to.

McBeefy

One agenda I have for 2010 is to run everything from Orlando. That’s easier said than done, and it’s required a lot of us to grow up. In order to get to that level, and keep everyone comfortable, was to make the office more like home.

At one point someone remarked that there was more food, snacks and booze at the office than there was at their home. “Ditto” was my only remark.

The biggest challenge in making the work a place where people can grow is aligning it more with what they expect from life, instead of making it a prison they must rot in to sustain their lifestyle.

So in January we had massages, drinks, party time, TV, etc.

Most importantly, we went McBeefy. Here was my original pitch about two weeks ago:

As for social stuff, we’ll be going to <insert random downtown bar> at 4 PM every Friday. The first two rounds are on me. After that, back to work to plan the next week. Social stuff is optional, you don’t have to go. You can’t take off early though and you can’t go straight home after the break.

When you work in close quarters with people you notice a lot about them. And you count on them, a lot. One of the big things in having a functional team is not letting anyone boil in their discontent and wiping the slate clean at the end of the week.

Doing this type of stuff has allowed me to open up to my team about the reality and balance of what’s going on and it’s resulted in them putting in a lot more effort and taking charge of things.

What are we doing tonight, Brain?

The same thing we try to do every night Pinky: One of the big things we’re doing in 2010 is global expansion. Not of just Own Web Now, but lifting up of our partners as well. Trying to survive on tight margins by staying in your zip code is not be viable – and we have about a decade worth of experience in running a business globally and connections with just about everyone.

In January we really reinforced our focus on customer service and followup – and we’re still hiring across the board for that in service and level 2 support.

The bottom line here is: If we really suck as much as some people would lead me to believe, how come we’re growing so much and getting so much praise from so many of our partners and clients?

The answer is simple: it comes down to consistency. Some people cannot handle not getting the same level of service at all times. Some people don’t like working with women. Some people don’t like the phone. Some people don’t like the email. Some people don’t like the support portal. Yet, everyone makes it through the day. And what we all count on is consistency in whichever preferred way we work in. And the only thing that counts in sustaining that is knowing when we fail.

Make no mistake, Own Web Now went from me writing control panel software in high school and constantly listening to what people wanted and delivering it. It gets somewhat more complex when you grow a few million times over 🙂

We beefed up support – our Tier 2 will extend direct support from 4 AM to 10 PM EST next week. Our Tier 1 will also have more control in terms of dispatch and escalation. And we’ll also announce a strategic escallation to Tier 3 for people that are beyond FUBAR (means F’ed Up Beyond All Recognition).. or is that Third Tier? 🙂

Innovation

Our product agenda in 2010 is to extend our products and services in a direction where they become manag(able)ed services. What I mean by that is that there is a lot of business intelligence that can be collected from an extensive amount of data we collect and can process intelligently. It’s all about extending ourselves into our clients businesses and becoming valuable beyond the benefits they purchased the software for in the first place.

If you think about it, it’s inevitable. The software will eventually be free, but the knowledge and organization that will come from having access to all that data will cost a leg and an arm. That, and only that, will be making the difference going forward.

Note on Competition

In December, when we announced ExchangeDefender 5, we saw our competitors sic their partners at us trying to figure out the strategy behind the all-in-one, no-addons business model for enterprise security, business continuity and compliance. Yes, we know who you are. Yes, we check records. Yes, we see you on Facebook. As they frantically cried on the phone: “This is going to kill <insert vendor>!?!?” I somewhat laughed inside that people think about business competition in a primal way of one company trying to kill another like we’re MMA fighters.

The reality of the “next” decade that we’re in (2010) is that the skills and expertise we all claim in technology are not that far more advanced than those of a teenager. Our latest hire is a college freshman that is 18 years old. On her first day at work she had me on her Live Messenger, added me as a friend to her Facebook and managed her way around Office 2010 Beta and was on the same technical level as the rest of us in the office in her first week of work.

What does this say about businesses that pretend to be social media experts or computer services shops? Are you any more real/human than an 18 year old girl, or think that you can sell “double click, next, next, next, finish” for $100 an hour?

With the concept of “niche” gone, the “blue ocean strategy” turning out to be a fable in the world of global commerce, the “technology business” has to evolve or die. I see so many of my partners waste so much time trying to figure out how to be awesome at the exact same thing they were doing five years ago, all while their managed seat counts go down every month.

The.. technology.. world.. is.. changing.. Nothing new there – the news is the speed at which it’s happening.

My goal in 2010 is to take out the “pricing” and “feature set” from the consideration when our partners consider the competition, because the client base we serve expects it all to be free anyhow. Aligning the technology with the business management is where we’ll thrive.

Full Throttle

I hope you’ve enjoyed my rant for the month, please join our partner program if you’d like to be more involved (and informed) about what we’re doing. For obvious reasons, I can’t just dump it on Vladville anymore because the way I crack jokes among my friends is quite different from how I run a multimillion dollar global business. Damn that feels good to say. 😉

Hope 2010 is all you’ve hoped it would be so far!