Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Over the past few days I’ve been walking you through the year since the release of Shockey Monkey 2. Way too much went into making of the new release and it’s fundamentally different in a spectacular way. Please tune in to the webinar, this Thursday at noon.

Much of what Shockey Monkey 3 has become has roots in the problems ExchangeDefender has as we’ve grown – using dozens of applications, portals and sites to manage our business is kind of ridiculous. My partners came to the same realization – we can sell infrastructure and servers all day and night but it’s getting to the point that the technology is just good enough and replaceable enough that we need something else to stay in the account.

That something else is a matter of accountability when stuff inevitably goes wrong. When stuff breaks, as it will, who gets to take care of it?

In small business the DIY culture often puts the boss or the most senior person in charge of dealing with problems. Obviously, that’s a very lucrative area to address as a service provider. Unfortunately, the level of visibility is just not there because the controls are not there because there is no way to measure what is going on.

Organizational Efficiency

With Shockey Monkey 3 we are really pulling ahead and staking the software on the simple fact that people that make the business are the most important thing to track and manage. Not the support tickets, not the expenses, not the opportunities, not the invoices, not the quotes, not the schedule/dispatch, nothing else.

Let’s face it, if you cannot account for the people that manage all that stuff how can you trust any of it?

The first tab in Shockey Monkey 3 is “My Business”

We have integrated the punch clock, checkin, timesheets, employee career path, accomplishments, reprimands, equipment, education, career goals, in/out board, working status (#waywo = Vladism for “What are you working on?”) and a bunch more.

We’ve tied it in with the Unicorn as well.

(The whole “it’s not an RMM” thing should be sinking in right now)

The key to running a successful business is effectively managing and motivating your people to do the best job possible. Always.

Technology is there to help you. If you’re an IT Solution Provider, the technology and services you sell are there to help. But without properly accounting for how that technology is used, you’re just buying a lot of expensive gadgets that download a lot of updates.

Now allow me to connect the dots.

You sell technology, right?

You sell servers, managed services, web sites, accounting, PoS equipment, terminals, laptops, tablets, right?

What if you showed them how to put all this cool stuff to use?

I mean actually show them how it’s used. When did the employee check in, what are they working on, when did they check out, what did they work on throughout the day, which accounts they touched and which projects they were involved in?

Now for the close… what if you could sell them the system, the advice and the knowhow of this system to help them run their business as effectively as you do yours?

Monkey. Shockey Monkey.

See ya Thursday.

As I mentioned yesterday, over the next few days I will share some background behind what happened between the release of SM2 (this January) and SM3 which will come out in a few days. Please tune in to the webinar.

You need to know how we arrived here so you can be as successful as you possibly can be.

Much like SM1, SM2 was a work in progress. We put out a fantastic product at a fantastic price point and a business model that has made us an insane amount of money. You know how they say there is no such thing as a free lunch, right? Well, the reason Shockey Monkey is free is because it’s used by our partners who, once on Shockey Monkey, sell a lot of ExchangeDefender products and services.

With SM2 I had hoped to open up the same opportunity to third parties (for a fee) but there was a catch – I’m not just letting you SPAM the SM users with pointless ads, you actually have to help us produce content and training for the users on how they can best leverage the service to make something out of nothing. It’s something that worked incredibly well for ExchangeDefender… but it’s something that flopped catastrophically. While we had a ton of people step in to sponsor it, having your ads displayed somewhere is no guarantee of sales. That’s just not how it works in SMB, you don’t get the deal just because you exist, you have to earn it.. or more bluntly, SM would have to do this on it’s own.

Please… take our money..

Due to it’s popularity.. Shockey Monkey got a lot of interest from both the VC and the big software companies in the channel.

I spoke to everyone that wanted to discuss it.

Without exception, everyone was interested in the ExchangeDefender piece which was obviously not on the table. Everyone wants the cash cow to be a part of the deal because that’s how they can finance the deal. That’s kind of where things typically fall apart though – folks are accustomed to taking over brokeass companies that are typically in debt. We have 0 debt and are incredibly profitable – so it’s not your typical “investment” where daddy pays off your credit card and allows you to keep a contract job with a golden parachute. You have to break off a lot of cheese.

The more time I spent with some of the smartest people in our industry discussing the sale and explaining the business model the more something became readily apparent: they had no plan for it beyond what someone else was doing. To which the obvious question becomes: Then why don’t you go and buy them?

As of the summer, Shockey Monkey is no longer on sale and going forward I’m declining any invites to sell it. Why? Because the painful part of what needed to be done within SM to make it a top tier product has already been done. Sales force? Done. Sales automation, marketing automation, HR automation, career management.. Done. The stuff that I really did not want to do myself and would have been easier to hand off to someone else.. is at this point complete. That’s business – sometimes you try to take the easy way out, when that doesn’t work you can either give up or get back to work. I owe an immense amount of credit to my senior management who sacrificed a lot of sleep to bring us to this point.

Now..

I will discuss this in the next few blog posts but I spent a lot of time with some really smart people as they looked at SM and poked at every single side of it to figure out how it made sense. No matter how smart and successful we happen to be, we’re really good in the tunnel and tend not to be able to see but one light at the end of it.

I owe perhaps the most thanks to Arnie Bellini whom I showed the whole thing and pitched a bunch of different applications for the system. We did a little “hot and cold” type of an exercise.. “Is this something you’d consider to be valueable?” No. “How about this, do you think a business owner would care about this?” No. “What about all this data over here, it’s unmanaged and unchecked but is it a source of potential or worse, liability? “ Maybe but no.

The more incredibly smart people I talked to, the deeper we went down the tunnel of only seeing one light at the end of it, only one possible fit and one real potential.

If that were true, I’d be working for Microsoft today.

I will break down the details to you in a bit but I will offer you this teaser: We make an incredible amount of money at ExchangeDefender connecting the bits and pieces of stuff for our clients. Exchange to SharePoint, workstations to LocalCloud, email to Encryption, etc, etc, etc. But what the hell for? To enable clients to communicate better and run their business.

We have this tunnel vision that we are stuck in: If we just throw more infrastructure and assemble these building blocks, business owners and managers will be able to do what they need to in order to manage their business. Even if they hit it like a caveman where all this technology, infrastructure and tech consulting only leads them to replace their memos / faxes and document libraries with a digital crutch.

Here is the bitch though: The easier those lego bricks become to assemble, the less margin there is and the less complexity and the less opportunity. When everyone focuses on cheap and slow and easy everyone loses. So the best reach for stuff to give them an advantage.

I believe that advantage is Shockey Monkey – not just for IT businesses but for any SMB – and I look forward to showing you how next week.

We will be officially launching Shockey Monkey 3 next Thursday. Please register and tune in. For the next 7 days leading up to the launch I intend to share a lot of very frank and honest details about what we’ve done so far.. so you can take advantage of what we’re about to do next.

Shockey Monkey goes beyond your IT management / PSA suite. As I’ve maintained since the beginning, we’re not in this to build a PSA for the IT guy. I think that opportunity is both played out and, let’s face it, it doesn’t actually make you money.

It has taken a while but I have finally built what I believe will give my partners a head start to the next great opportunity in SMB. Tune in to the webinar or read the next few days of blog posts or just give me a ring. We’ve listened to the feedback, we’ve taken design and implementation advice, we have dealt with bugs and features and I look forward to this huge next step.

-Vlad

The way people run and manage their businesses has changed fundamentally over the past decade with the introduction of new technology. First-run CRM solutions looked little more than digital forms of the existing paper inefficiencies with Microsoft even adding a product to it’s Office flagship to do nothing but generate digital forms. Yes, it sold a lot of software but never really had much impact in the way business is being done because nothing was connected in a way that involved senior management and transparency through the layers of employees or communicated any level of standards for how business was to be done.

Everyone made their own thing up until they hit the limitations and then they went elsewhere – without senior management oversight – the whole thing was just allowed to flop.

There you have it.. The brief history of SMB business management solutions, according to Vlad

Shockey Monkey is perhaps the one area of my business where I’m not looking at the past or what has been built in the management space for inspiration where people are forced to use the software they don’t like… but at the solutions that people love that have an element of motivation.

As a business owner/manager, critical part of the job is to motivate your employees to do better than their best so that you don’t have to do their jobs for them. 

With that, I’m extending the first of many Shockey Monkey 3 invitations to you:

Thursday, Noon EST

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/440236337

For example, consider the following:

This is my Fitbit report which basically monitors my physical activity and tells me when I have days that I haven’t done enough. I could just ignore it, take it off, throw it away.. yet, I need to lose weight so I can post better times on the bike so I can do the full Ironman. It lets me set simple reports and metrics that allow me to go from fatass CEO to an Ironman finisher.

Work, or really any level of effort, is incentivized in much the same way. The smaller the small business, the less knowledge it has of the millions of hours that have been spent studying management, motivation, incentives. Most small business owners don’t happen to be business college graduates or MBA holders – and even those of us with those credentials make more mistakes than we’re willing to admit.

But I think we can all agree that there needs to be a level of accountability across the organization.

We can also agree that there are significant benefits to business transparency.

After all, if the employee isn’t performing is it their fault or the fault of the management that has not incentivized them properly? Does the employee simply not care about doing a good job or do they not understand that doing a good job leads to rewards?

You could get really cynical…

And say that the awards and the screenshot above are fantastic for 5 year olds trying to collect badges for their Xbox avatar.. or to unlock a hidden feature in Angry Birds.

Yet if you can agree that you benefit from transparency and your staff buying into the platform and using a combined common set of metrics.. then a visual indicator of progress is important. Rewarding a user for using more than one module (Support and CRM) or creating X number of leads or Y number of opportunities or creating a report.. gives them visual indication of the progress that you want them making with your tool. If there is a bonus at the end of the rainbow, more people would buy into the process more and standardize on the way business communication gets done.

I can teach you what I want you to do and I can force you to use a platform.. but if I want you to embrace it more than I’m forcing you to.. then all I need to do is slap an incentive on the end of the trail of awards and let you motivate yourself.

Little candy along the way can’t hurt.

-Vlad