Thanksgiving and return of The Ironman

It’s hard to put together long and coherent essays when you’re constantly running out of battery or being pestered by flight attendants to turn off your electronic equipment. I really have been a worldwide monkey over the last few months but tomorrow The Ironman strikes back. As you know I’ve promised myself that I would no longer do 50–70 hour shifts to compensate for Microsoft’s lack of QA and I must admit I have lived up to that. It has given me an opportunity to finally take some of Karl Palachuk and Roger Otterson’s advice on stepping back, reflecting and thinking more before I act. I have…

But tomorrow that changes, Katie goes out of town to spend Thanksgiving holiday with her family and I go into the full ironman mode for the next five days. So this weekend I am most thankful for what our customers have allowed us to build. Thank you for all your money!

Really, sincerely… thank you for your faith, for your patience and for your support over the years. I run a global business and we indeed never do sleep. Now back in the long long ago when I was an ISP in South Florida we could take servers offline for a few hours to do maintenance. As we grew into the national company the workday got longer as we worked coast to coast. Now OWN works for customers all over the world, for 24/7 operations for people that pay dearly to open this up. Not a moment passes by that I don’t lose sight of what an incredible leap of faith that is.

So this Thanksgiving, as usual, is an all out 24/7, 5 day marathon of IT upgrades and maintenance schedules. Everything we could not do during daylight hours in all the zones we are in happens during Thanksgiving. The load over the network took a cliff-dive over the past few hours and is likely to remain there until about Saturday night. We will be using this time to lock down on some gigantic holes in the software and put in the systems that have been under development for quite some time.

The magnitude of whats going on is spectacular to say the least. This month we did 0 project work, it has all been planning, projecting, building and growing for the next 12 months out. All aspects of the business, marketing, community engagement, partner relationships, technology, support, etc. We spent all month looking at feedback, prioritizing, planning, testing, piloting, etc. Now the fun part — integrating it all and hoping nobody notices the difference!

Again, my personal thanks to all of the people that allowed OWN to become what it is today and for the faith you put in us every day. I truelly appreciate it. On a very personal level…. I simply have the best job on earth, one that I’ve built myself. I oversee a global company and a global network that gives countless people and organizations the power to be better at what they do. When you’re down, we’re down, and we work very hard to keep things running. I always talk about the importance of being a professional and in USA there is an awesome commercial that goes a little bit like this:

Amateurs practice until they get it right.

Professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.

This applies to IT as well.

But on the subject of being professional and thankful… Again, I cannot thank all of our customers and partners enough for this. I walked away from so many lucrative opportunities to run itsy bitsy networks just to spend 6 years in college getting an education to do more. And I did. I think one thing I am most proud and thankful for is for the living proof which Own Web Now has become – that you can scale small business customer service and care to service a worldwide network.

I’ve lost some sleep over that, true, but I’ll rest plenty when I die.

In the meantime, you can count on us to stay awake so you don’t have to.

-Vlad