Distrusted Cloud Processor Agreement

Posted: 11:53 am
September 10, 2012
Uncategorized
1 Comment

We’re all familiar with the nirvana of the Trusted IT Advisor.

In an effort to leap over the Grand Canyon that is the legal liability of a solution MSPs don’t manage, many are trying to find ways around it.. Terms like “Cloud Broker” or “Cloud Integrator” seem to enter discussion from time to time so I wanted to offer you both an opinion and the way we handle this at ExchangeDefender (we offer Hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, hosted encryption, compliance archiving, etc through a worldwide network of partners and even directly through the agent model).

Whose Fault Is It Anyhow?

It’s the fault of the person that makes the transaction.

The end.

But suppose you don’t have a very sophisticated services contract, suppose you’re just copying someone else’s copied template that doesn’t fit your business, your offering and your local laws. Suppose you’re just a good guy. How is the cloud sold?

#1 Cloud is about efficiency. If your pitch for the cloud solution says that the client should consider it because it reduces overall management costs, reduces hardware investment, reduces eventual migration costs.. but then turn around to sell a whole bunch of stuff on top of it and bundle it in with your stuff.. you’ve just bundled in a ton of liability.

#2 Cloud is a building block. If your pitch for the cloud solution says that the client should consider it because it makes technical sense and you’re recommending a technical solution that is prone to some failure and your option is the only one you’re willing to support.. you’re doing this right!

Option #1 often fails not because it’s a bad idea but because you’re leading down a path that naturally has the client choose the cheapest possible solution. When you are pressed to make a compromise on the price (because they shopped around and found a solution without antispam, without mobile access, without SharePoint, without backups, without a phone number, etc) you too might follow them down to the gutter of choosing something horribly inadequate to their risk portfolio.

When Option #1 backfires, they will blame you. You know how people don’t want to pay for a real server, real RAID controller or even spend $200 more for another hard drive.. but when the said single point of failure blows up they are suddenly finding $ in the budget to send it for a $2,000 Hard Drive Data Recovery Lottery, Inc? Option #1 is that, except with the 100% guarantee of complete data loss.

At ExchangeDefender we offer 2 factor password authentication for the hosted Exchange. The number we’ve sold? 0.

We also have an off-brand solution at CloudBlock for a $2.99 Hosted Exchange that doesn’t even have a phone number for support. It sells around the clock like the last call for at the 4-for-1 bar. Appropriate too, because you’d have to be friggin drunk to put your business on it but I know, budgets are tight and email is not that critical and..

Note the difference.

Two solutions. Two very different experiences.

When it comes to cloud.. you have to make them choose: Do you want a solution we stand behind and support or do you want to roll the dice?

I always tell my partners to present both. No matter if this is the first or last sit with the lead, if you lead with the ultimatum (“This is what we recommend and this is the best offering and the only one we will ever offer”.”) they have no choice but to consider an alternative that may be prettier to look at than you (physically|financially|cosmetically) you will not just lose that subscription business but any other solutions they may need from you down the road. If they invited you into their office do not leave until you’ve taken some money or at least some office supplies – even if you have to take the extra roll of toilet paper from the bathroom.

But do not.. never ever never.. cross-pollinate your recommendation with ill-conceived risk tolerance of technology they do not understand that you do not control.

So what do you do?

When you go through your sales process your prospect is buying the dream of everything you are selling them… at the price that they have in the mind (which is naturally always lower than the one you’re proposing). So when they attempt to reconcile it, they still think they are getting everything and just paying less.

Never make that compromise.

Price is the price, recommendation is recommendation, pick and choose. No, you can’t have a Big Mac meal for the cost of a happy meal because the McDonalds register doesn’t do discounts – but I’ll throw in an extra few fries and let’s make a deal! Your compromise is on additional services, not at the core – because you don’t control the core.

Partners ALWAYS come to me looking to get Hosted Exchange for less than $10 or less than $8.. and tell me they’ll have to consider building it in house if we can’t work something out.

If they are nice, I pull out Excel and do the math for them – this is what it would cost you to build a comparable solution and this is the number of seats you’d need before you stopped losing money (assuming your Exchange and support worked around the clock for free)

It’s much easier for you to knock off a $1 or $2 off your $125/hr labor rate than it is to shave off the cost of a complete solution.

Now, note the consistency here.

There is a strict separation of service and solution. The liabilities must always stick with the service provider, never with the overall solution. You cannot, in all good conscience and common sense, assume the liability of a third party service or entangle yourself in it any more than you would put your business on the line of a Made in Taiwan hard drive.

So remember – as an advisor, you warranty your advice and they pay for it. Beyond that (and I don’t care what you call it) you’re pretty much processing a third party transaction. Break it up, get plenty of signatures and continue to remind them that you know better.

P.S. This is one thing that most MSPs seem to miss out on but our most successful partners constantly do – just because they bought something that got your foot in the door doesn’t mean the sale ends there. Continue to remind them what they should be using and what the risk happens to be. Every time yet another service provider blows up and downs their cloud, tell them that ExchangeDefender Hosted Exchange is the only major player with infrastructure spread across multiple data centers that doesn’t suffer from a single-point-of-failure issue. Every time a major cloud provider has their authentication compromised, data stolen, data lost – remind them of more stuff they need to take into account. So many people focus on selling to the blue ocean of leads they haven’t sold a damn thing to – and don’t invest in their own existing client education (read: upsale).. and I will never understand why.

Limit Stupidity in Business Decision Making

Posted: 3:01 am
September 6, 2012
Boss, GTD
1 Comment

Earlier today I posted this on my Facebook wall (follow me, I’m hilarious):

limitstupidity

Allow me to offer you some background.

We were sitting around discussing changes and additions to a new software product. We’re primarily a server and web services software company and in the past haven’t spent too much time dealing with this type of a product so clearly it was a scene straight out of 2001 Space Odyssey.

Here were our issues in no particular order of importance:

1. We don’t know the best way to solve the problem.
2. We don’t know the typical user case scenario: Who will install this, what will they want to do with it?
3. We don’t know if to aim for simplicity or for flexibility (next few points explain this)
4. Option A: Do we rovide a simple interface with flexibility underneath?
5. Option B: Do we rovide a flexible interface that manages simple actions?
6. Either option requires redesign of the solution (from DB schema to software)
7. The way options are loaded into the system and then distributed to the client could either be expensive now or require reengineering later.

Business As Usual

This type of a problem is encountered in every business of nearly every type every day.

You have too many questions, too few resources and far too much uncertainty. There are two paths:

Path 1: Do something quick and dirty, get the solution out there and perfect it when you have sufficient reason to do so (lots of sales, lots of users)

Path 2: Only do something basic that you can do well and push off the complex stuff until you have a sufficient amount of reason (sales, $) to develop it.

Of course, the correct answer is: Pause. Breathe. Do more research and only act when you have sufficient information to make the correct call. While this answer is the only correct one, it’s not really a valid one because in business you either do shit and get paid or you get a job as the professor (or try to share your wisdom from a broken chair in your basement in between job applications).

I typically take Path 1 or Path 2 (and sometimes just say we’re not going to do anything at all). This makes my team furious. For a long period of time there was actually an interoffice joke that I made decisions based on which way my @#^$ leaned when I got up in the morning. Considering that’s the one they shared with me I’m sure their private opinions are far worse. So for their benefit (or for yours, in case you work for someone like me) here is a point of reference.

Terrible Business Decision Making Illustrated

If I don’t know about the demand but need to have a solution, we’re taking Path 1 (Quick and Dirty). If there is enough demand, we’ll perfect it.

If we know there is a lot of demand but do not know how quickly it will gain traction, we’re taking Path 2 (Basic, if they sell it we’ll write Complex 2.0)

If I know there is a ton of demand and that everyone will sell it, we’ll take Path 1 (Quick and Dirty) and we’ll put all the resources towards perfecting it as we release it. If someone needs a product and you don’t have it, they go elsewhere. It’s your job to earn it so even if it’s not perfect, effort compensates for quality.

If I know there is a ton of demand but no money in it, we’ll take Path 2 at first (Basic) and see if it brings in new clients we otherwise haven’t worked with. Sometimes solutions are simply a part of the whole picture and if we can get them to take a look at the picture maybe they’ll buy the frame, the hanging nail, the paint protection, the insurance and the commemorative personalized brick on our Hall of Fame Walkway outside our office. But I can’t sell them a brick until I get them to look at it.

The only truly random part of decision making is when Path 1 has a nearly equivalent cost to Path 2 and happens in the same amount of time. For example, let’s assume that the cost of getting something done quick and dirty is just slightly less than doing it right and can be done right in just a little bit of time. At that point I have to guess how busy you are (and you’re not busy at all; if you were busy you wouldn’t be talking to me you’d be pulling your hair out at your desk) and if I want to make you delay all the other stuff now or if I can wait to do it later.

The Fourth Path

People who don’t do your job have no respect for how difficult it is and will always expect it to take far less than it really should.

People who actually do the work are terrible at understanding the business strategy and how the product will be positioned.

The job of decision makers is to make a decision that maximizes the dollar amount and minimizes the time to get paid. The job of the person doing the work is to make sure any shortcuts taken in order to meet an unrealistic goal do not explode immediately. At this point the two play the software architect Russian roulette.

{ This part gets ugly and we’re trying to trademark it right now so I can’t blog it }

Needless to say, there is a better way that doesn’t involve crime scene cleanup showing up to mop up the shells from the conference room floor.

Shortcut to Possible: Compromise on completing things that are easy, attainable and will not result in a lot of change regardless which path is taken.

This gives you the time to think of a better way to solve the problem or to eliminate the problem entirely.

Sometimes we get preoccupied at solving the problem by staring at it from the top “It needs to do this!” as opposed to looking at all the components that lead to it being a problem in the first place. The amount of guess work and assumptions is also broad – yet what matters most is not the solution but the strategy of getting to that solution. Before you can solve a problem you must make people aware of it, concerned enough that they understand it’s impact, substantiate it with some actual data points, sell, schedule – and only then try to implement a solution. By taking problems apart and understanding who does what, when and how things do get simpler.

Today we decided to take care of what we know how to do, solve the chunks of the problem that won’t need to be reengineered and we decided to revisit the elephant on the table in a few days and weeks when we’ve had some time to think about the best way to lift it. Because no matter which path we took in lifting the elephant off the table today, we’d still have to figure out how to get him through the door, onto the elevator, down the street and so on and so forth. Don’t attack your problems from the top.

Vlad: Accept Death

Posted: 3:19 pm
September 3, 2012
IT Business
Comments Off on Vlad: Accept Death

Note: This is the third in the series of blog posts about stuff that has served me well in the world of business. The success of Own Web Now, ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey has been well chronicled, these posts are more about me – some stuff I was born with, some I learned after hitting the wall with the head too hard and often. Take it for what it’s worth, forward it to your friends if you like and if you’re interested in these please feel free to join my private list by clicking here.

So far I’ve covered the importance of tolerating failure. I’ve also explained how I know when to quit and when to be patient. I even explained how to manage failure and make the best of it. Finally, the single biggest reason I’ve been successful has to do with accepting death as a natural progression of business.

deathEver heard of the book “Good to Great”? It’s what most middle managers hail as the greatest study of transforming mediocre companies into outstanding ones. The only (slight) problem with that is that most of the companies discussed in Good to Great are by today’s standards either immoral or dead. Whether they sell stuff that gives people cancer, whether they went bankrupt or got rescued by TARP or even if they are among the greatest polluters in the world – we focus on the good stuff. There is a lot you can learn from failures too:

The single fundamental truth to business (taxes aside) is that everything comes to an end.

I wish I had learned this early on. Smile

I’ve made plenty of mistakes early on in business.

I even had two really ugly setbacks, financially, that brought me to an inch of just going on to do something else.

With each bad day coming to an end (at seemingly later and later hour).. I would wake up the next day.

I would go back to work.

Why? Because I liked what I did, because it mattered to me and those that counted on me.

I could have just sat there and watched TV but not doing anything at all is still a choice to do nothing and you’re doing something about the problem even by ignoring it. Sadly, you’re only making it bigger.

At some point your business will end. At some point, you too will come to an end. That’s business and that’s life. Could you be angry about your mortality (if you are why are you reading this blog?) – of course not, so you can’t treat each business idea or each business as life that you’re angry at. Businesses come and go, your preoccupation shouldn’t be with the exact time and way the business ends but with what it does along the way. More importantly, because you have resources to run and build multiple companies, don’t waste time trying to prevent the death of one – spend more time trying to build something great. 

For example, email security of on-premise servers is a dying business. ExchangeDefender’s competitors that protect on-premise Exchange servers are either dying or trying to partner up with everyone in the world in hopes of preventing the inevitable conclusion that people will no longer build office-based email servers. Wouldn’t it be a better use of time, money and energy to actually focus on building products and innovating instead of trying to maximize the short-term revenue that has only one trajectory? Down.

I don’t say this to criticize them, I understand. If I feared death, that would be my course of action as well. Why spend money developing and innovating – let the service slip but sell sell sell sell. But the inevitable truth here is that it will come to an end and while my businesses may have indefinite lives, I know I don’t and I don’t want to waste my energy on riding a dead horse.

This is where most people mess it up

People equate death of a business or business line or product or service or line as a failure.

People look at relationships that end, agreements that don’t work out, contracts that end up in fire as a negative thing.

If I cried over every business fuckup I’ve personally made I would have drowned in my tears by now. So I don’t cry much – I tear up contracts, I end relationships, I fail and.. I’m still alive to go on and do something good tomorrow.

Yet, most people get so caught up in not making a mistake, not failing, not offending anyone, not taking the wrong turn and not potentially making a fatal business mistake that they end up paralyzed in something that’s already dead. Person that is stuck in a dying company that avoids making a change or moving on is losing more every single day compared to the person that went to try something better.

People fall in love with their ideas, companies, the norm… that as I mentioned in the previous post: they sell themselves the dream. Don’t do that  to yourself!

Refuse to live your business life in a constant fear of that business dying

Today is September 3rd, 2012.

Picture September 3rd, 2013. Exactly a year from now.

What do you want your business to look like then? Can you financially afford to make it happen? If yes, do it. Motivate yourself by looking at what your business could be and how you could be a part of making it there.

Do not sit in fear of making a decision that could end your business. If you lived your own life like that you’d never cross the street in fear of getting hit by a bus.

Once you’re no longer in business of preventing a business from going under… there is a second part to this equation.

We’re in business of transitioning the business

For the past 15 years, ExchangeDefender has been transitioning from ISDN to Y2K to web design to colocation and data center solutions to the cloud to the communication.. and to whatever is next.

I always get to play with the latest toys, work with the latest technologies and what I get to take home (aside from ridiculous amount of money) is the satisfaction of being able to make people realize their own satisfaction – both my employees and my clients.

So once you have a business that makes money… don’t sit there waiting for a venture capital or rich people bad at math to scoop you up. If you’re in that seat you’re already dead but you’re too stupid/ignorant to realize it… instead focus on what more you can do.

One thing unique to successful entrepreneurs is that we are always looking for that next thing. It’s about solving problems, not avoiding them. It’s about embracing and introducing change, not trying to avoid it.

Some day I will die. Pretty sure about that.

However my ideas, concepts, drawings and mistakes will die much sooner. I’m OK with that. Because I’m not in love with what I used to do for a living, I’m in love with what I’m about to do. That’s why I’m in the office on Labor day.

Vlad: Managing Failure

Posted: 2:12 pm
August 31, 2012
Boss, GTD, IT Business
1 Comment

Note: This is the third in the series of blog posts about stuff that has served me well in the world of business. The success of Own Web Now, ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey has been well chronicled, these posts are more about me – some stuff I was born with, some I learned after hitting the wall with the head too hard and often. Take it for what it’s worth, forward it to your friends if you like and if you’re interested in these please feel free to join my private list by clicking here.

So far I’ve covered the importance of tolerating failure. I’ve also explained how I know when to quit and when to be patient. The only thing left is to be disciplined about managing failure.

Managing Failure

Most of the mistakes and failures in business are manageable. Everything short of totally failing your business can be taken care of. Well, except one:

Recklessness: There is no workaround for the lack of discipline.

If you like to procrastinate, don’t like dealing with the forms or computers or government or people in general, if you spend more time on Facebook instead of your line of business app, if you detest the people you work with or work for.. well, maybe business ownership isn’t for you. But suppose that’s not an option, how do you deal with it?

Best way to manage failure is by being disciplined and sticking to your plan. Write down your plan. Review your plan. If your results do not reflect your expectations, change or quit. Just don’t let it slide.

Almost all of the catastrophic business failures I’ve witnessed have been a result of direct recklessness by the owners or management. When people take their eyes off the ball it’s easy for things to slip between the cracks until it’s too late. When you care more about things other than your business then that business is only heading in one direction. Pure and simple: straight down.

How To Manage

First, write things down. Study your competition, evaluate your opportunities, consider exit strategies, project stages, workarounds, best case scenario, worst case scenario, funding estimates, profit requirements, timelines (quarterly, annual objectives, 5 year plan) and write them down.

I like to write.

I like to doodle.

It gives me a feeling that I am for a moment disconnected from the very tool that I use to do most of my work and it helps me remember things.

photo1

I’ve discussed this in detail here.

The $400 something Louis Vutton notebook contains all of my sketches, all of my projections, notes, research and to-dos.

Every week I sit down and write down my weekly agenda. Every day I go through the weekly agenda and the daily list of tasks and check them off one at a time. Sometimes it’s just as easy as [ X ] Filed form 2925, done. Sometimes a single line spawns a product line, but it’s there.

Sometimes I take notes and write out possible action items. They nearly never get done that week. But I put a big circle at the top of the page and when I feel bored I flip through the book and look for empty circles in the supper left hand corner – if they are there, I revisit them. If I figure it out, I check them off and I move on.

The picture you see there represents 99% of my productivity and discipline enforcement. I don’t use Outlook tasks, I barely use the calendars. Everything is written down with ink on paper.

You know the expression… until it’s in black and white on paper… do likewise. Start writing down what you’re doing and pretty soon you’ll be writing out what you do each quarter, month, week, day and even intraday.

The problem with the lack of discipline isn’t in carelessness which leads to mistakes: It’s that we’re so overworked, preoccupied and overstimulated that obtaining the proper focus is impossible.

If that’s not the case for you then you’re a better man than I am and kudos to you! Start a blog Smile 

Otherwise, get a notepad.

Discipline Howto

Dedicate the first two pages to your annual goals.

Dedicate the next 8 pages, two per quarter, and write out how you’ll accomplish your annual goals.

Dedicate the next 104 pages to it, 2 for each week. You’ll fill these out as you go along. Sometimes you’ll get things done faster, sometimes it will take more time.

Then just keep yourself in the check.

Discipline is impossible when you don’t know that you’re not being disciplined. You can’t really call it procrastination if there is no due date and you can leave it for tomorrow. Unless you’re willing to hold yourself accountable, nobody else will – but your results will show that and you will not like them.

Managing failure is simply an act of being disciplined about qualifying it, quantifying it and making sure that mistakes and failures don’t become paralyzing, catastrophic disasters. You’re not going to avoid making mistakes – but you’ll at least give yourself a chance to minimize them. Once you can improve your odds of success everything else will follow.

Vlad: Quitting and Patience

Posted: 3:00 pm
August 29, 2012
Boss, IT Business
Comments Off on Vlad: Quitting and Patience

Note: This is the second in the series of blog posts about stuff that has served me well in the world of business. The success of Own Web Now, ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey has been well chronicled, these posts are more about me – some stuff I was born with, some I learned after hitting the wall with the head too hard and often. Take it for what it’s worth, forward it to your friends if you like and if you’re interested in these please feel free to join my private list by clicking here.

Last time I wrote about the importance of tolerating failure. In business and life setbacks are natural and they come and go. There is really one failure you won’t be able to overcome – death – so as long as you can accept that with each day you get another chance you will put yourself in the right frame of mind to be successful. You can always change things up, try something new, learn to let go of things and not let stuff bother you. It’s a process.

Failure is a part of it.

But what if it’s a really epic colossal failure?

So long as you’re still alive, things will be alright.

In short, you do not want to let things get so far that a mistake ruins you. With these three simple steps:

You can and will be wrong about things.

Some decisions will be bad and you will make mistakes.

It’s easier to change your mind and admit defeat than to die trying to be right.

For example, let’s say you’re about to add a new line of business. Or hire a new employee. Or take up a new marketing campaign. Or lease a car.

Establish a timeline.

Establish a review period.

Establish conditions: success or failure.

The new business you start might generate millions of dollars of profits. New employee could lead your company to the new heights and become someone to run the whole place while you move to a tropical island. Marketing campaign could transform your organization and win loyal clients for life. You can race the leased car in the underground drag racing circuit and make a six figure income after work. Awesome.

Or the new line of business could bankrupt your whole company. The new employee would steal money until you confront them and they show up in the office with a gun. The really clever marketing campaign might turn out to be horribly offensive to the general public and people would throw stale vegetables at you everywhere you go. The day after you lease the car you get fired and your new job is 60 miles away from home. Shit happens.

The key to success is knowing when to quit, knowing what is at risk ahead of time and being able to make business decisions based on facts and data not feelings and mood when you’re stressed and not thinking clearly.

To make it work, follow these three simple Vlad rules:

Rule 1: Set your risk

Before you undertake something, know what you are willing to risk.

All business decisions come with a $ value attached. Before making a decision, whether a purchase or investment, I like to know what it’s going to cost me. I also like to guess how much it’s going to make me. So if I’m going to have to spend $100,000 to earn $120,000 and I stand to potentially lose $70,000… I’m going to pass. I know what my loss tolerance is: $50,000. I know by when I expect to see the return on my investment and I know that I will need to keep an eye on it leading me to..

Rule 2: Be a disciplined failure

Stick to your schedule and make decisions based on data and your own plan, not your gut instinct. In business you almost always fail hard when you’re not paying attention.

Business deals happen without you in the room. Technology changes the landscape of the industry. Operational efficiencies render things useless from time to time. Things change. This is why it is so important to evaluate your decisions on a preset timeline and realize when you are just wrong and heading in the wrong direction.

This is where half of the people lose it. They cannot tolerate failure. Their ego will not let them admit to themselves that they were wrong. Perhaps I’m just a jerk but I could care less about what you think of me when it comes to business – that’s why I run a business instead of a political campaign or Ms. Congeniality contest. Let. It. Go. If your plan ahead of time called for certain results to be in place by a certain date and those results aren’t there – you’ve failed. Game over. The more you try explain to yourself how you were right and everyone else you’re wrong the more wrong you become with each passing day.

Rule 3: Don’t buy your own BS

Never lie to yourself. Extend that as a service to others and stick to your own definition of success/failure.

About a decade ago I coined this phrase “I just sold you a dream” that most business owners and managers can probably relate to. As a leader you have to convince people that you know what you’re doing and that they should follow you. If the only one following your dream is you then it’s pretty much the same thing as digging a hole to try to get out of one. It’s futile.

This is where the other half of the folks I know fail miserably: they have a good idea that just keeps on getting better and better the harder it fails and the worse it performs. It just needs another tweak, a little more money, a little more effort and.. yeah. Endless cycle of failure upon failure. If you’re constantly going from one business model to another, from one job to another, barely making ends meet – it’s time to reassess your core expectations and get back to the drawing board.

Balancing Quitting & Patience

How do you know when to quit and when to be patient? The answer is: you don’t. But if you establish your tolerance, risk and failure levels ahead of time and continue to review them along the way.. you stand much better odds.

This is something that has lead me to phenomenal level of success in business: My odds of success have been better because I knew the outcome I wanted and when I wanted it by before I begun. So if at the due date things didn’t look right – I changed things or scrapped them altogether.

Not everything is a winner. I’ve learned to take business one year at a time (you know, like real companies) and extend my expectations to all areas of the business not just typical annual stuff like finances. I started to look at employment, goals and incentives on an annual basis too. I’ve hired people that for one reason or another did not immediately work out. Had I cut people that failed me quickly I probably wouldn’t have had one of the most valuable employees I’ve ever had. But by the same token, I’ve allowed worthless toxic people to sit around and ruin the company atmosphere day after day, one HR policy after another.

Ever notice that there is a sense of relief when something is over? Let’s say you had a terrible employee and eventually you just had enough and fired them. Not only did they fail as an employee but you failed as the  manager – to lead them, mentor them, communicate to them how to become valuable to you. As you sit there and make that long, deep exhale you feel a sense of relief – and you wonder why you didn’t make this decision sooner? Or you just quit that crappy job and wonder why you didn’t do it the first time your boss was mean to you or the clients didn’t respect you or you didn’t get what you wanted?

The balance of knowing when to quit and when to be patient is a myth. There is no such thing as balance – you’re always either quitting too soon or being patient with a failure for too long. So forget the notion that you will be able to get it done just right (again, don’t be afraid to admit failure)

In absence of balance there is always sound judgment: Establish your expectations ahead of time. One year from now I want _____. Within the next 3 months I expect ____ and if it doesn’t look like that will happen in 6 moths I will do _______. If within 9 months neither stage is set, I am better off doing _______.

Then it becomes pretty simple. You look at your annual plan every 3 months, look back at what you expected, compare it to the way the world may have changed since then and decide if you were just wrong or if the underlying facts have changed.

If you were wrong – quit.

If the facts changed – draw up a new plan and set up new expectations.

Just don’t wing it. Do not sell yourself a dream – pinch yourself every now and then. Do not dig yourself into a hole you can’t climb out of – look up every now and then and see what is around you. Planning and awareness will trump balance and instincts every single time.

Vlad: On to the next one

Posted: 3:30 pm
August 27, 2012
Boss, IT Business
Comments Off on Vlad: On to the next one

Note: This is the first in the series of blog posts about stuff that has served me well in the world of business. The success of Own Web Now, ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey has been well chronicled, these posts are more about me – some stuff I was born with, some I learned after hitting the wall with the head too hard and often. Take it for what it’s worth, forward it to your friends if you like and if you’re interested in these please feel free to join my private list by clicking here.

It’s natural to think about the should have, would have.. things you could have said in the argument, things you could have changed, tweaked or done differently to get a different outcome. In business spending time dwelling on the past decisions is crippling.

If there is a single personality flaw characteristic that has helped me through the years it would be the sunrise.

boeing-747-sunrise 

Every day I wake up, I have a chance to try it again.

Now I’m not a motivational speaker so I’ll tell you the truth – failing is f’n agonizing. There are days when I have a reverse Midas touch – when everything I touch turns to shit. On those days, if I’m smart, I will just quit early and call it a day. Those are the good failure days. The bad failure days are the ones that never end – where I don’t admit to myself that things suck and I just keep on turning the stone over and over and over again.

Yet, eventually I fall asleep. Eventually, I wake up again. It’s go time.

If you’re lucky and capable of doing so, keep what happened yesterday in the past. Focus on what you’re doing today, tomorrow next week.

Stressing over the ways you’ve failed at yesterday are not going to make it any better in what you’re trying to do today.

Look to the future

If you’re good, you’ve sold yourself on what you’re doing next so your mind should naturally be consumed in your next step. Focus on taking that step, if you fall get up again, try again. It’s that simple.

If you’re great, you can already see yourself failing. Too often business owners and managers have sold themselves their own dream and they can’t see what they are doing or how badly they are failing. If you go into something with the expectation that it’s not going to be all roses and champagne you have better odds of being pleasantly surprised.

Remember the big picture

Each day is a piece of the puzzle. Don’t let momentary distractions trip you up.

Every day I show up in my office I have to deal with crap. Not just my own crap that I’ve caused but all the client crap and employee crap. Whose it is doesn’t really matter, it’s still being showed my way and I have to deal with it. The same goes from the executive office down to the lowest paid / lowest appreciated person in your company – everyone has someone trying to drive them away from what they need to do. It could be phone calls. It could be that the A/C is running at 300% and you’re freezing. It could be that you know you have a crappy meeting to attend to later. It could be that your bank account is running on E. Whatever it is, can you do anything about it? If not, don’t worry about it.

hulaWay too often things just don’t go our way. Shit happens. Do you want to spend your whole day focusing on it? If so, it will consume you. There are millions of ways you could have done something differently – so just remember it until the next time you have to make a similar call. In the meantime, take a deep breath and just ask yourself.. what can I do now?

I deal with a lot of people and to be honest, most somehow feel like their stuff is predestined and dictated by someone else. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s not up to your boss how you feel about your job, it’s not up to your guidance counselor to tell you what you like to do and it’s not up to anyone but you to actually do it. Unless you work at McDonalds, you could just deal with the french fries tomorrow.

If you’re sitting around reading this blog post thinking… “I wish I was doing something else” then that’s probably a great indication that you need to make a change. If you’re not mentally committing all of your concentration on being successful at what you are doing.. .. .. Well, how’s it going for you?

Perseverance or Reckless Ignorance?

I suppose it’s a thin line between the two.

In my context, I live to design software solutions.. from communicating securely to communicating more efficiently. I am always sitting here trying to think of a way to do it better.

Yet, if I look at my past there is a long long long list of failures. We’ve probably spent more time developing features people don’t use than the ones they do use. We deal with the irrational market that is not willing to give up the legacy solutions they feel good about even as they admit they aren’t working for them. Change is hard – and having to deal with living with a better solution that people ignore while the crappy solution still limps along? – it’s a failure no two ways about it. But I don’t think it’s the failure of the solution – after all it has no conscience – I just haven’t figured out the right way to pitch it yet.

See how that works? If I thought I was so smart that I could beat the computers I wouldn’t be in the IT space. I’d be the guy working the bulldozer running over PCs at the junk yard because that’s the only one out there beating it. The rest of us are just trying to make them better.

I’m not saying you should ignore your failures. What I am saying is that past acknowledging your mistake there should be no more. Leave it in the past and move on to dealing with the next problem. Dwelling doesn’t make the mistake fix itself, it doesn’t make the next problem any simpler and it doesn’t give you all the resources you could be using.

You have to believe what you’re doing.

You have to believe in yourself.

So long as you’re OK with failure and your ego is not bigger than your rational thinking.. get back to it. There is always another opportunity and another day.

Hope you liked it. Tell a friend. Smile

Strategery

Posted: 10:49 am
August 15, 2012
IT Business
Comments Off on Strategery

For years I’ve been writing about industry developments and trends on Vladville and I’ve been remarkably correct about what is going on. Not because I’m smart or because I have a crystal ball, but because I actually work in this industry and it’s one thing to have an uneducated opinion as a reporter who regurgitates what other CEO’s want them to believe… and to actually experience market shifts and trends as someone who puts the money on the line with tons of real data points around the world. For example, anyone can fill out a survey with any bit of fictional data they want to – which explains why Gartner has been so consistently and remarkably wrong about every study they were paid for – and why so many small business IT companies have grown at such a remarkable clip. It’s one thing to be optimistic and guess that things are going to look great 12 months from now – but the reality of cutting services and removing mailboxes as you trim staff is the real indicator of business trends.

Want my advice?

These days the rumors about ExchangeDefender are louder than even our own PR and webinars. My competitors are slinging more crap at us than ever but we’re more successful than ever in spite of slashing our traditional marketing expenses into a tiny fraction of what they once were. I have one piece of advice for everyone, friend or foe:

Successful business record of today does not predict the successful business track record for tomorrow.

Quite simply, things can turn quickly because we are at the mercy of the consumer. Consumers are fickle and have no loyalty. Therefore every day should be about what the consumer is willing to pay for, not what is best for the consumer. In crude terms: we’re a vendor, not your mom. In Axel’s words: If you’ve got the money honey, we got your disease.

Reconciling Irrationality

Over the past 15 years my single most successful business strategy has been bridging the gap between the things consumers want from the enterprise and delivering it to them at the consumer price. It’s remarkably simple when you consider that consumers want a very limited set of really high powered solutions – and they are willing to compromise so long as those few big features they get are ridiculously easy and reliable. It’s why Apple and Google have been able to pick apart their more successful, more sophisticated, more feature-filled competitors. People like the idea of having everything but they don’t need everything – and they sure as hell don’t want to pay for it. Solution then happens to be simple: Give people what they want at the price they are willing to pay for it.

Easier said then done but that’s the game, right?

What We Are Doing

We’re remarkably open about what we do. But we only happen to share it with our partners at ExchangeDefender. I appreciate loyalty.. and I repay it. I also have to prepare the business for the next few years because like it or not, you are consumers and you will vote with your dollars for the services you can make money on. It’s my job to make those services today so that we’re ready when you get there.

Consumerization is the number one priority at ExchangeDefender.

Remember when I started Shockey Monkey? Over 8,000 solution providers later we are the largest IT PSA in the world. Yet we’re not a PSA at all and the IT market is not our ultimate target. Yeah, I know it’s nice for people to try to pretend that we’re a ConnectWise and Autotask killer and that we’re after them… but if you do some basic math (or if you’re aware of not-so-private partnerships we have going on) that’s just not the case.

Then we launched LooksCloudy. Several hundred posts later, we continue to build a consumer-centric voice for the cloud built on common sense that gives our partners a business advantage.

agentpNow there are (many false) rumors about Agent Perry Nukem solution we’re building. Supposedly it’s an RMM, even though I’ve publicly stated and blogged at numerous occasions that we’re not building an RMM.

The folly of mankind throughout history is that it’s only able to interpret things in the context of their existing surroundings, blissfully rejecting any new ideas as insanity. Yet time and time again, innovation drives us forward through the visions of the few people who tweak things.

Let’s assume I’m not a genius. There? Good.

If the present tense of IT management is all about PSA, RMM, NOC and other acronyms that will be obliterated by consumerization.. does unwillingness to pay for those solutions invalidate the value those solutions present to business? I don’t think so.

So if the net commercial value of those solutions is $0 but the solution is still necessary and demanded.. how can we continue to deliver the solution without asking for a direct compensation for it?

I’ve been in the IT business for a while and I’ve seen much bigger and much smaller companies go under for no other reason than conviction and arrogance of knowing better than the client. If that’s your mindset, you’ll soon be working for someone else.

Otherwise, listen to your clients. Listen to their wallet, not their mouth – because everyone has an opinion – what really matters is what that card swipes for.

You will never go broke taking money from people that can’t wait to give it to you.

Common sense seems so simple when you’re willing to let go of your bias. Everything else is just details.

ABP

Birthday Meatcake Beefporkcalypse

Posted: 10:37 am
August 8, 2012
Awesome
5 Comments

I’ve known my boy Los longer than I’ve been able to speak English. He was my college roommate and saw me kick a computer through a wall when I lost 3 hours of work once. He’s been there from the earliest days of ExchangeDefender and today works at ExchangeDefender as the Vice President of “WTF Broke Now?” – long history.

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So when he decided to turn 33 and try to outlive Jesus.. I had to step in. With the meat birthday cake. Behold, step by step. Warning: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

Step 1: Prep the braided bacon icing. Line a foil with some pam and start crossing it one slice at a time.

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Step 2: Mince onion, garlic and 2 pounds of beef in some oil. Drain when done and season with whatever you want.

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Step 3: Line the bottom of the baking dish with PAM and start layering beef and filo dough. I went with 1 cup between sheets. As far as calories go, filo dough is worse than the 93% ground beef so if you want to cut corners this is where you can do it.

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Step 4: Seal it in. Pour 5 beaten eggs on top and let it soak. Boil some oil and pour over the pie, this gives it a nice glaze that you’ll see later.

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Step 6: This is where it gets obscene. Dump in 1lb of crumbled bacon and top it off with genoa salami.

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Step 7: Broil it.. this will give your meat cake a solid foundation.

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Step 8: Take the meat pie out of the baking dish, flip it and allow it to cool a bit. Apply your bacon braid icing. Back under the broiler.

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Step 9: Peperoni minis.. Write your message. Back under the broiler to seal the letters in.

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Step 10: Pray to whatever deity you believe in.

Step 11: Lipitor

Step 12: Aspirin

Step 14: Update your will

Step 15: Dive in.

Calories: You really don’t wanna know. This pie serves 6 and yeah, each serving is well into 4 digits. Cheesecake Factory, suck it.

No, Thank YOU

Posted: 3:04 pm
August 3, 2012
Boss, ExchangeDefender, Friends
Comments Off on No, Thank YOU

I often remark about how most of our great software design ideas come from our partners. Much of it starts with “You know what would be cool?” and it goes from there. Sometimes I even get marketing advice so I am going to introduce you to two bits of praise I got from my partners this week and elaborate tomorrow (obviously paraphrased):

“We are moving everything to you because you seem to be the only company that is actually innovating out there. Every time I talk to you there is something new. <Your competitors> are just announcing distribution and partnership agreements, and even though they have good support, there is nothing new in terms of value with their products and when they add something they are just reselling someone elses poorly integrated stuff.”

“We decided to build our cloud business lines on you because of all the Exchange providers out there you were the only one that seemed to value a partnership and didn’t treat us like people that lay down the bricks. Every time I call to ask for something it turns out it already exists and within minutes I get my sales collateral and customized marketing and one of your support guys even got on the phone with me with my clients IT guy to discuss a migration plan.”

Conversation with a competitor, while laughing at another “competitor”:

Well, they will be our competition soon. Did you hear that they are rolling out Exchange soon?

Vlad: You know what, I don’t consider that competition. Anyone can install Exchange. I’ll call them a competitor after they take a few years to design Exchange that fits the business model our partners happen to use.

I’ll go ahead and gloat about this tomorrow.. but in the meantime, I’ll just sit here and grin from ear to ear at the fact that I’m the luckiest mofo on the planet to be able to do what I do, at the level of success I’ve been able to attain thanks to so many people worldwide. I have way way way too many things to say about how lucky we are now (and how sweet it is after what it took to get us here).

And folks.. no thanks needed, it’s a privilege to take your money and help you build a more successful business. It’s also hard to take the credit for any of it considering how much bigger ExchangeDefender is than Vlad and how many people lost their health/hair/mind to make it what it is today.

Untweakable

Posted: 2:21 pm
July 30, 2012
Uncategorized
Comments Off on Untweakable

Over the past few months I have had discussions with many of you as the race to the cloud picks up pace. This post is not so much about the cloud as it is about encouraging you to manage your technology business correctly.

First: Come to terms that the future of your business depends on your ability to manage a business, not IT.

Second: Peer up – you need a wider view of the industry than your office walls. With respect to the IT gurus, coaches, legends, experts and grandmasters, many of them have barely been successful at one iteration of IT – few have ever been able to transition that success into the next wave of technology (which kind of goes without saying; if they knew it they would be doing it not trying to sell you advice).

Here is the not-so-secret secret: Your current lines of business need to finance the emerging technology training and marketing. As one line of business sunsets the profit margin on it should be significant and can either operate on a skeleton crew or be farmed out to someone else for profit.

Your business needs to become more about marketing technology than fixing technology.

This is a very stark contrast to how most traditional IT Solution Providers got here. Many sold hardware with a huge margin, deployed software and management service for that software at an even bigger margin and dealt with a handful of vendors. Fast forward to today: margins are tighter, there are tons of vendors, IT personnel is unqualified or extremely expensive and everyone is starting to compete for the larger piece of the puzzle.

So what can a small company do that Microsoft, Amazon or IBM can’t?

Microsoft doesn’t do house calls.

IBM doesn’t do them unless you can put a lot of zeros on the check.

Personal service still has an immense value but it needs to be focused and structured.

For example, Arnie Bellini’s Modern Office concept was a good suggestion a few years ago when he talked about looking at your clients office and trying to manage all of the technology they buy. Today the very notion of “office” is changing – with mobility, collaboration and productivity – companies are far less interested in buying stuff and far more interested in getting things done. Many of you are facing the same frustration when you try to do your own pitch for the modern office pie – you often find the device is already managed by someone else, would be unprofitable for you to take on and sometimes the very vendor that brought it in is pitching for your IT services pie.

Even though this process is frustrating – and companies are buying less stuff – they are spending a lot more (more than ever before) on services. That is where you need to be. Coincidentally, “services” tend to displace “stuff” and there is far less comparable shopping among services because they don’t come with a SKU and an MSRP.

So which service do I start offering?

Whatever Vlad Sells.

Whatever you can explain sufficiently enough to sell to the client and make someone else do the hard work without you spending any money.

Start a newsletter and a blog covering things on Mashable. Focus your time as the CEO at being the rainmaker of these technologies in your region, industry, vertical, audience. Explain how these services make sense for small/medium/your business and tell them that you’d gladly help them make it work for their business.

Why should anyone hire you? Couldn’t they just go and do it on their own? Yes, if they are one man shops with nothing to do between browsing freeones and lunch they would. What you find in most companies is that people have jobs in order to perform a given task. If they aren’t performing that task (and have time to goof off on mashable) then why are they working here? Let’s get some better employee monitoring software!

Companies are desperate to manage the growing amount of unmanageable information that they need to stay on top of. Technology is becoming more mainstream and the security of that information is soon going to become a big deal for many.

When Microsoft killed SBS it didn’t really kill a product as much as it just removed a crutch so many small business IT consultants held themselves up on – truth is so many of you are selling so much more than SBS/Windows/Office as was the case in the early 2000’s. There is far too much stuff out there and nobody wants more of it. They want new solutions – even if they don’t make as much sense even if they aren’t cheaper even if the experts are against them – because they have gone as far as they can down this road of accumulating stuff and they want something simple. They want something disposable. They don’t want stuff that needs to be managed and babied – they want crap they can get fast and dispose of quickly when they no longer need it.

I have been fortunate enough to receive many bad pieces of advice in my business life – listening to my clients about the solutions they want to buy has rarely sent me in the wrong direction. Do likewise.