Why I came back

Earlier this summer I decided to take over two months off of work and really had the minimal contact with the office and with most of the employees. What I had to figure out is whether I am done with ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey and indeed with the rest of IT world.

This is a tough business. When you’re in the technology part of it, your motivation and your reward is the man triumphing over the machine and making that underlying technology work better for the business that invested in it. You know what to do. If you’re any good at that and happen to like people you’re on the business side, helping people not waste their money and productivity. Then you make money. You know why you’re doing it. Lot’s of money. Really, rather obscene amounts of money.

So there I was.

When you’re making so much money that you don’t know how to spend it, but still have responsibilities, things get rather monotone and boring. It’s just a number. You go through the daily motions but the process itself kills you. You want to put the pedal to the metal and get a new feature rolled out but that takes time. New marketing agenda – needs to be researched, sold to partners on which benefits work and where, designed, tested. New business lines – ditto, starting it from scratch. I’m not going to lie, it bent me.

So I went on a vacation. Around the world. Did all the things I love to do. No, still didn’t sleep, I’ve come to peace with the fact that it’s just who I am. Ate a camel burger. Rode camels in multiple countries. Hey, it’s Wednesday! Hi Andy.

It wasn’t a soul searching expedition.
I wasn’t trying to ask myself what’s next.
I wasn’t making plans in my head or hoping and wishing.
I just enjoyed my life.

And then it hit me

All my adult life I wanted to make $100,000 a year. Then somehow that changed to wanting a million dollar business. As I got more successful the obsessions added zeros but the bank balances never really did much for me other than giving me the confidence. What I got out of ExchangeDefender, when it’s all said and done some day, won’t be the money. It’s the relationships I’ve built, people I’ve trained and made into professionals, companies we’ve helped build and seen each other (and our kids) grow up.

So I did no work this summer. But I kept on chatting with partners who are actually more my friends at this point rather than the people I work for. And that in the end is my value – in seeing that people like myself beat the odds. I founded my company on the promise that we will not screw or exploit people, staff or customers. Over the past 18 years lot’s of people worked very hard for it. Don’t get me wrong – we’ve done great – but it’s been an effort that is more than a paycheck. When someone wakes up at 3AM to deal with an issue that could be handled by someone that just got hired that’s no longer a “I need this job” mentality.

I cringe when people tell me they are building their business on top of a partnership with a giant company who is accountable to it’s shareholders and barely even to their employees, much less you. And then what do you tell your staff? Your clients – your family?

To me, Own Web Now has been and will be a company that helps small business succeed. And we have a lot of cool things we are working very hard on – with a management team that has rendered me completely useless and replaceable. I can’t tell you how liberating that feels. And just how awesome that is going to make the next 5 years that I’m mapping out for us right now.

As always, thank you for all your money and your confidence in us. I appreciate it.