Lifecycle of Ineffectiveness

Posted: 12:46 am
February 5, 2012
IT Culture
Comments Off on Lifecycle of Ineffectiveness

Before you read this: This isn’t Vartruth or Channel Watchdog, I’m not trying to single anyone out or make it a personal hit. That said, you will certainly see the similarities between these descriptions and people/companies you have met. Your opinion (or consideration of mine) is not what is relevant – however, looking at these patterns and avoiding them when you encounter them in your own career/company is critical. If you don’t have the time to read the whole thing scroll down to the last paragraph.

Lack of attention span isn’t entrepreneurship

Every now and then you will meet folks who are in webinars / panels / conferences for seemingly no overwhelming success or reason – maybe they just sent in a positive survey on the day that the marketing manager organized a webinar and their sales engineer called out with flu. This is how the Mediocre VAR becomes an Industry Expert that is paraded around the circuit because there is nothing companies love more than uncompensated third party endorsement. Unfortunately in business you can’t fake your way into profitability so eventually these folks end up in significant vendor roles because they “understand our clients business” (dear vendor friends: if they did, they wouldn’t be asking you for a job). Except they don’t, and in real companies you have to show results or you end up back uninstalling spyware for a living.

vartard

So if you can’t play, coach. Or advise. Or provide input. Eventually they learn something in the death spiral process and they go back to being some sort of a solution provider.

Lesson here is that if you’re charismatic enough you can avoid real work but that can only get you so far. Real entrepreneurs are obsessed about their businesses and maximizing their profitability, they don’t sit around looking at the grass on the other side of the industry.

Leveraging attention deficit

Bad decision making and lack of work ethic isn’t limited to individuals, companies can fail in the same way. Fortunately for those of you with paychecks, it takes a real business model (or a venture capital fund) to keep people on payroll and put the whole house on Black or Red. But it happens.

VAR realizes it has something on it’s hands and it’s easier to grow the fastest possible way – find similar beasts and teach them how to make a killing. Inventor becomes the vendor and then one of the two things happens: most die when the business model flops or they win out by making acquisitions or being acquired.

vendortard

Lesson here is that there are many business plans out there and only a few will win at them while the majority will lose.

What do they have in common?

I have spent a lot of time talking to a lot of entrepreneurs. Big and small.

One difference I’ve been able to pick out between the successful ones and the failures is in the way they treat their business: Are they focused on their business or something else?

If you meet a technology employee (regardless of rank) at a technology event (regardless of the event) and you’re both in the same field and you DON’T talk to them about technology – run.

Technology business isn’t a community college, you aren’t trying to find yourself and figure out what you want to be when you grow up – technology business is a business and it’s a business of making money now. And if you aren’t good at it then why are you talking to me?

It’s really that simple. Unless you’re extremely attractive, single and willing to do things so inappropriate I can’t even write them on this blog. Though if your decision making is so poor that you’ve found me attractive you’ve failed somewhere along the way.

Phoenix Firebird is just a myth

There is this myth that amazing things can come out of ashes. I’ve never seen a bird ignite itself and it’s nest just to immediately spring back to life more beautiful than ever.

Yet I see businesses, employees and entrepreneurs fail every single day.

There is no substitute for hard work. You’re no better and no smarter than the next guy. Want to see people that think they are smarter than the rest – go to a prison or a flea market and look behind the bars. There are no shortcuts.

Hard work doesn’t get glorified because it’s not attractive. In casual discussions more people are envious of successful folks and many would rather talk trash than be willing to join them with the same level of work ethic and dedication. Not everyone that becomes a success is a crook. Here is what it boils down to:

If you suck, you will fail. It doesn’t matter if you’re a VAR, Vendor or employee.

If you’re good and you work really, really hard… you still may fail.

Hopping from one sinking ship to another has only one certain trajectory: to the bottom. The difference between the success and failure in the long term is staying motivated and continuing to work on being the best. If you’re lucky enough, it pays off in the end. It’s still a heck of a lot better than drowning in the ocean of failure.

Persevere.. because winners don’t blame others for where they are at.

Are we not competitive or not stupid enough to be slaves?

Posted: 10:56 am
January 22, 2012
IT Business
6 Comments

The answer to this question is relative to where you live and what your socially acceptable norms are. For example, the French look at Americans as people who are so fast paced and frenzied that never get to enjoy the finer things in life or have a 3 hour dinner – in fact most of Europe gets better benefits and far longer vacations than we do. And as fast paced and career oriented as we are, most people in Japan that are working over 300 days a year would think we are just lazy. And the factory workers in China don’t think shit because they have to put together an iPad every few seconds during their 18 hour shift.

Here is an interesting article that I hope you take a moment to read:

How U.S. lost out on iPhone Work

Now it depends which bias you read the article with. If you’re an extreme Republican, you’re probably thinking that Corning lost the glass cutting deal because of too many government regulations and insufficient labor force that is getting too many entitlements. If you’re an extreme Democrat, you’re probably going to point out that the reason China won was because government subsidized the plant, the housing and more. What our leaders (who let’s face it, are pretty much the same behind closed doors while pandering to different extremes in the public) would point out is that we’re not flexible enough and need more education to modernize our workforce, more (insert empty government promise) to entice private sector to compete more and create more jobs. So much for the fantasy.

The reality of the situation is that China won because of access to the slave labor force. They are not more flexible because of less government employment and regulations, they are more flexible because of a totalitarian government that calls all the shots. They are not smarter or more educated than us when it comes to manufacturing, but they are willing to work 18 hour shifts and live at work.

The whole article could have been summed in four words:

slavery

As long as I’ve been following the American politics, it’s always been someone elses fault that there are fewer jobs. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, illegal immigration was taking away good American jobs like janitorial duties at Walmart, landscaping and unskilled construction. These days it’s the fault of corporations that are outsourcing the jobs overseas.

It’s always someone elses fault. And damnit, someone else needs to fix it.

The reality, however, is that we have it so good here and we’re unable to sacrifice or roll backwards in the “quality of life” department. When we are buying products and services we want the cheapest possible one – we’re ultimate capitalists. Yet when it comes to work, we’re the ultimate socialists – hours and benefits even if we don’t deserve them.

The way these conflicting stances are resolved is through shifting the labor and production to the area where costs are minimized and profits are maximized. Those that take the risk stand a chance of higher than average returns. Everyone tries to participate. For example, #OccupyWallStreet largely objected to the salaries and bonuses of the financial industry that bankrupted the US economy and was perfectly permitted to do so under the policies of President Clinton & Bush. Yet nobody points to the lack of responsibility of the general public that bought properties it could not afford, signed off on forged and misleading financial statements and only did so in order to flip the house and get money for nothing. Politicians blame state financial woes on overpaid high school teachers while the college graduates blame corporations that won’t hire an English or Architectural History majors with no experience to high paying jobs.

Nobody wants to do the hard work.

Internships and long hours are beneath us.

Steve Jobs is the devil for outsourcing and not bringing the jobs to America but the slave factories can’t crank out enough iPad’s to meet the demand. 

Self Selective Slavery

I blogged a while ago about the lifecycle of employee disenchantment. When an employee accepts a job they are excited – they are getting paid! But after the first few paychecks are spent, they are underpaid. God forbid they are a few minutes late to work and someone points it out – now they are both underpaid, unappreciated and harassed!

Most people immediately go to living beyond their means which ultimately always assures lack of happiness with their social status.

This is where it’s again someone elses fault – likely their bosses. Employees both know more about their job than their bosses (“I’m the one actually doing this after all, you don’t know everything I have to put up with!”) but also deserve better pay. To the degree that it may be accurate, it’s also true that the employees have no idea what their bosses, management or company owners have to put up with.

So they look for a new, better job. It’s always about looking up and ahead because everything else is instantaneously beneath us.

That is why those jobs will never come back to USA.

It’s not because of Obama. It’s not because of the corporations. It’s not because of the Wall Street. It’s not because of the regulations – and remember that those regulations are in place because of the abuses corporations got away with for decades that made us a great and overly entitled nation.

For example, general pro-business opinion is that regulations are bad. They limit corporations. True, but everyone wonders where the regulators are when the financial system implodes due to fraud, when the planes are slammed into highrises and when the oil rigs explode and destroy the environment. It’s of course always someone elses fault that the rules are not followed – but it’s the rules fault that we can’t compete.

No. It’s because of you. It’s because you want an iPad but don’t want to work an 18 hour shift at the minimum wage. It’s because you want government services but don’t want to pay the taxes that fund them. It’s because you want an acre of land but don’t want to pay $20 to have it mowed or do it yourself. After all, you’re better than that.

As long as we’re expecting to get out more than we put in the world of leverage will rule.

The Middle of ExchangeDefender

Own Web Now (ie, Shockey Monkey, ExchangeDefender, CloudBlock, etc) is a small technology company. We actually make stuff (we’re not just repackaging other peoples stuff) and some of our products have very long development cycles.

Truth is, there are very few high paying jobs here and they are almost exclusively reserved for people that are working on eliminating the low-end disposable jobs. Just because you’re necessary doesn’t mean that you’re important – so it’s on to you to become more important.

This is something that majority of people understand and accept as a norm. Majority of job applicants do not – which I think only serves as a qualifier for either their unemployment or looking for a job. Prospects with no employment history or entry level skills expect mid-level compensation and the responsibilities of an advanced engineer role. They are not willing to earn it off the clock and expect on-job training. They want clearly defined hours and no responsibility but they want the salary. They don’t want the pressure of timelines, SLA or due dates but they want the “flex schedule” and executive benefits.

As the CEO (entrepreneur) I look at every dollar spent as an investment and every dollar earned as a return. Over time, I look to maximize my returns – so I’m only willing to overpay for the personnel that does more work than they are paid to do. Over the long employment cycle we all benefit.

But what about the people at the bottom who choose not to invest, not to evolve and not to compromise?

That is why the middle class is dying.

Now to make this self serving.

At Shockey Monkey we look at the death of the middle class as a model for the eventual death of the middleware.

The solutions that were once too expensive, too cumbersome and too specialized were priced accordingly because nobody had a way to mass produce them, create alternate revenue streams or benefit from a consumer that was flexible on the training and high end customization.

Shockey Monkey is often unfairly pinned up against similar solutions because that’s the easiest point of reference. But those solutions were written for a single industry and over time became so specialized that it’s made them lack the flexibility to serve others.

When I look at Shockey Monkey I don’t see a budget ConnectWise, I see a process oriented system that can be used by lawyers, service shops, retail, architects, etc. My potential client base is not the dying technology middleman trying to optimize the response time between LPI noticing the problem and monkey being dispatched to fix it. My potential client base is everyone that corresponds with their clients via email, uses web site for marketing, needs a computerized way of tracking interoffice communication and hours worked, that needs to track clients and bill them for goods and services.

The era of unbalanced compensation due to location is over – and it’s nobodys fault other than our own. We reward competition and winners.. so long as that is the case, nobody will be willing to bail us out unless we are willing to do it ourselves.

…

P.S. Some people feel that the service sector is immune to this. I remember walking through Mirage in Las Vegas a few years ago and seeing folks gambling with a virtual blackjack machine that was basically a 42” screen displaying little more than a massive cleavage shot. Less than 10 feet away from a real life blackjack dealer. Most of the human interaction jobs (ie, service) will be replaced by the self service attendants – you already see it in the self-checkout lines. What if you wanted to go to the bank and interacted with a virtual banker working in China for $1/hour? Would you do it? Judging by the outrage that Bank of America faced when they tried to charge folks a few bucks for the privilege of a check card, you can’t fault them for cutting costs in other ways. 

Shockey Monkey’s open letter to the IT community

Posted: 4:17 pm
January 19, 2012
Shockey Monkey
3 Comments

Hello community, Vlad here. I wanted to take a moment to openly write about some of the questions that I have received in private that I feel should be a matter of public knowledge. Things are going great, we’re enabling more of you to do more with your day and we’re working on some great features that you keep on suggesting.

We got some great and insightful coverage from MSP Mentor and SMB Nation last week and I encourage you to check it out for additional perspective.

As for mine, you can go through years of blog posts on the Shockey Monkey subject, or IT Business for that matter to figure out what I think. But this isn’t about me, this is about you – all of you: our users, our partners, our vendors, our competitors and generally curious technology employees trying to kill some time.

Here are some of your questions with as candid (as in “get me in trouble”) answers as I can provide.

Why would you even do this?

It’s better that I say what’s on my mind and deal with the consequences… than have my partners, vendors, sponsors, users or competitors get some rumored “oh my god, you know what Vlad is doing..” stuff that just puts strain on stuff. I can count the number of people I don’t like in this community on one hand – and believe me, they know it. As for the rest, I love you, let’s kill some drama.

What is the biggest criticism Shockey Monkey gets?

Shockey Monkey has, does and forever will be seen as Vlad’s side project.

This is kind of annoying considering that Shockey Monkey has been available since 2006 in various alpha, beta and commercial stages. Not sure what more I can do to say that we’re serious about it but I can tell you that we’re making (lots of) money with it so the opinion overall doesn’t bother me a lot. Software development is not like Subway, one sandwich artist can’t just go back and add extra lettuce or cheese on your sandwich, for every change we need to deal with review, documentation, marketing and involve multiple people in the process so big features will take a while to get. However, since 2010 we’ve been rolling out significant updates to the monkey on a monthly basis and at this point thousands of people use it every way.

It will always be an evolving process as we continue to build Shockey Monkey further into the IT business and use it to replace more and more components that we currently (over)pay for.

Can Shockey Monkey replace what I’m currently using to manage my business?

This is apparently the second most popular question with the presales support. The answer is obviously yes.

You can absolutely replace your existing solution with Shockey Monkey.

Now that assumes that you are willing to live with the sacrifices and compromises. Which of course you’d only know if you tried the software and embraced it completely. Which of course should be dead easy to do because it’s completely and absolutely free of charge.

But it’s free because there is a catch, I’ll have to pay for stuff eventually?

It’s free and it’s going to stay free.

Shockey Monkey users resell the heck out of our cloud services – ExchangeDefender, ExchangeDefender Essentials, Exchange 2010 + SharePoint Hosting, Exchange 2010 Essentials, Offsite Backups, Web & Email Hosting, Blackberry, etc. Not because they are forced to – but because we make it dead simple and easy to do so – and we’ve even opened up sponsorships for Shockey Monkey so other vendors and providers can also make it easy to get tools you can make money off of.

True story: A few years ago Arnie and I were sitting around at some HTG event and we talked about working together on a global cloud services push. “You know Arnie, I already have that in place.” He seemed very excited about tying the two systems together – that’s why you have such a kickass ConnectWise integration with all the ExchangeDefender services – with billing data and agreements available in ConnectWise YEARS before they made it possible through their API. You don’t have to push people down under the guillotine to make them sell your software, you just have to make it easy. This is the core value of Shockey Monkey and why it’s going to remain free.

I make more money with Shockey Monkey being free and being exposed to more people than I can ever make by selling it or by turning it into a display advertising model (see next section).

I am not sure so sure if I want advertisements in my portal.

I understand and I appreciate the concern. However, these aren’t your typical display ads where you’re going to click on the wrong thing and have to scramble to turn your speakers down. We’ve only extended a limited number of invitations (I haven’t even sent all of them out) to people that we feel fit well strategically into the Shockey Monkey business model.

If you don’t want ads, it’s only $29/month and $9/month for any additional staff you have in your company. If it’s the sight of an ad that bothers you, that’s an easy problem to solve.

However, consider the power that these sponsors will have with the platform. Not only will they be able to get their message in front of you but they will be able to position it when you’re having an issue. Say you’re dealing with a support request about an infected machine – wouldn’t that be a good time to know about a product you can use to fix the issue? How about your sales opportunity – selling a new server, what if there was a tool (QuoteWerks) that would make it easier for you to get the right pricing right away and push it directly into Shockey Monkey. Dealing with lost data – well Intronis will show up on the side with the info you would have otherwise ignored or saved for later viewing.

We as software vendors have an annoying habbit of always being there when you’re in a middle of something but never there when you need us – this is a complaint I have been getting since I started this business – well, Shockey Monkey changes that. Sponsors are not just embedded into the solution from the display standpoint, they are there from the solution standpoint as well.

For example, all of the sponsors get space and time not just on Shockey Monkey portal but also on LooksCloudy.com, the site I have dedicated to educating the channel. We can guide people along and deliver exponential amount of value to you and your staff – without ever having you leave your desk.

So you’re making money by pushing us to Pro?

This is another common misconception, folks are constantly trying to figure out how we’re going to make money like we’re some Silicon Valley startup – even though I’ve been very clear that majority of our revenues comes from our product and service sales.

Just to clear the air, I’ll explain the four revenue streams for Shockey Monkey:

Advertising / Sponsorships – Revenues from third parties that want their solutions featured in Shockey Monkey and LooksCloudy.com

Pro Subcriptions – Revenues from Shockey Monkey subscribers that want SSL certificates with their own domain name, advanced technical support and no advertising in their portal.

IP Licensing – Revenues from third parties that want a business management, helpdesk and customer relationship platform embedded in their existing solution.

ExchangeDefender – Revenues from our products and services sold through the portals.

There is no gateway drug inside Shockey Monkey, there is no hidden toll, limits on the number of users or administrators or your usage. It’s out there, it’s free and thank you for selling our software J

How is the relationship with ConnectWise, Autotask and Shockey Monkey?

This is the drama that some folks want us to play a part of and I’m sorry to disappoint but things are going great on that front. I can’t comment on who has chosen to sponsor Shockey Monkey but I can hint that you’ll see some of these relationships taken to the next level very soon.

There is no tension or problems and we’re committed to making a deeper integration with both platforms. There are just some things that they do better than us and then there are things that we will just never do because they don’t fit our MO.

But you know what’s interesting? We’re bigger than both of them. How is that possible? Well, drama focused MSPs and channel experts only look at the 10,000 or so companies or MSPs and don’t consider all of the other companies out there in the VAR chain that provide technology and support services (hint: it’s an obscenely large market, much bigger than the little MSP universe). By bringing those folks into the fold we make a transition to Autotask that much simpler – so the referrals will always outpace folks that may want to switch from Autotask to Shockey Monkey for example.

But secretly, they must hate you.

Listen, I’ve been to both headquarters. Neither one had a Vlad voodoo doll. My foot doesn’t suddenly hurt for no apparent reason every day at 11AM. I’ve never had my car spray painted nor has my house been TP’d.

The problem that we all have is that we’re aiming our solutions at a very limited number of companies and it’s natural to see us as competitors. However, it takes a lot of effort to sell the service and presale/marketing/support for something that may not pan out is ridiculously expensive and requires an investment on the side of the clients themselves.

With Shockey Monkey, we remove price as an objection. Here you go, use it and see how it fits. It’s clear to see not only why they wouldn’t hate me but why they’d pay for me to be their best friend and make sure those referrals float up to them instead of a SalesForce or elsewhere.

I noticed that ExchangeDefender is required. But we have Postini and..

ExchangeDefender is required for inbound mail functionality (email-to-ticket) and for advanced outbound mail stuff (mailing lists, marketing, etc). This will get more and more prominent as we add some cool new features to ExchangeDefender in 2012 J

Now, our API is open and another email provider can choose to write an API to replicate the email-to-ticket functionality in their product. As a matter of fact, ExchangeDefender has a free email-to-ticket gateway to Autotask.

I would love to have you resell ExchangeDefender compared to anything else, if we’re being honest, but the restriction isn’t in place to lock others out – others just aren’t interested. Don’t blame me J

We would like to host Shockey Monkey in our data center.

I know. We have Shockey Monkey running on an appliance and are going to be offering a HaaS and a VSaaS model later this year. Basically, you’ll be able to put Shockey Monkey on your network.

Right now, everyone is hosted and we have users on our databases in UK, Australia and United States. From the regulatory standpoint, you’re good. And once we make Shockey Monkey appliances and virtual servers available we’ll hit you up first. Folks that use Shockey Monkey most actively get the first dibs and we go down the list from there. So if you’re serious about using Shockey Monkey and want it in your own network, you better start using it now or it’s going to be a while before it gets down to you.

What is next?

Sponsorships officially kick in Q2, so April 1st. By that time we’ll know who our strategic partners will be and which solutions we’ll have to develop on our own and which solutions we will develop deeper and deeper integrations with to make them nearly seamless.

Beyond that, ExchangeDefender as a company needs to take a more active role in the cloud service marketing and deployment on behalf of our partners – we’re being pushed to offer billing, support and management services. Our most successful partners are slammed with work and they are letting opportunities slip – stuff that we will be able to deliver on their behalf. In order for this to happen we need friendly customer service staff that faces actual users, we need an RMM platform that can be used by our techs to provision the service, we need a more sophisticated training and service oriented process and so on. Expect to see all of those in Shockey Monkey in 2012.

Trojan Monkey no glasses

Strategy-wise, like I said, Shockey Monkey will first firm up the few holes we have left as a technology tool and then expand the verticals a little and make Shockey Monkey an all purpose business operating system that helps you manage customer, vendor and partner relationships as well as human resources and overall social functionality that is a given. Big part of it is backwards integration with your email, mobility and service.

So there you have it. No drama. No catches. No hidden trojan monkeys – we’re giving you this for free and hope you like us enough to resell and use our services. If you need more than what we offer for free, we got you there as well with the Pro. If you need sales funnels and have issues with silos of chaos, I know a guy. If you need a quoting tool or a backup tool or an ERP tool, I got you there as well.

ABP. A Always. B Be. P Pimping. Who loves you?

The Difference Is In The Effort

Posted: 3:25 pm
January 10, 2012
Boss
4 Comments

Every year I do something stupid that doesn’t involve sitting in an Aeron chair.

I run a Disney Goofy Run – Half marathon (13.1 miles) on Saturday followed by a full marathon (26.2 miles) on Sunday. Well over 40 miles when you consider the distance to the start line, losing your car in the Disney parking lot, etc.

v1

Now, I wouldn’t really call it running. I barely averaged 5mph.

I’m also fat. At least according to the mirror, scale, BMI and other stuff biased by physics and gravity.

Long story short, I’m not winning many of these things. There aren’t many Kenyans out there worrying if they’ll have to outrun me.

Oh, and I friggin love McDonalds. Cluckin’ Surf’n’Turf (that’s a Big Mac, Fish Filet, Chicken Sandwich):

v2

So do I set myself up for such an obvious failure?

It’s not for the humbling aspects – of which there are many.

It’s because I have this personality flaw – I’m impatient and I don’t like to lose.

Turns out there aren’t many self help books out there for this problem. Mostly because it’s something you’re supposed to be slapped out of when you’re very young and you learn how to deal with a loss and move on. I apparently didn’t go to school that day.

So as I’ve grown up, built a business, started a family, assumed responsibilities and so on.. this personality problem started getting worse and started consuming more of my time. Suddenly I had to worry about kids about employees about business partners and competitors and as much fun as it may seem being successful, it’s not exactly easy or flawless.

You fail a lot.

I haven’t yet figured out how not to fail. Or how not to be stupid – if you have an answer to that (aside from “Don’t try.”) let me know.

What I have learned how to do is deal with the losing and just moving on to the next one.

At some point in my life I realized that I’m just incredibly lucky to keep on getting another shot to do something every single day.

Running marathons helps me strive to fight another day.

When you’re fat, out of shape, IT person.. any core physical activity is a miracle. Learning how to push yourself to the next bush, next mile marker, next water station, next race eventually gets you to the finish line. It’s a process of selling yourself on the fact that “Yeah, things may suck right now but you can do this.”

If you can’t have that much faith in yourself then what’s the point of getting out of bed?

The difference between success and failure is motivation. Yeah, you’re going to fail at times – that’s a given. All you have to do is brush off the dirt, get back up and work at it some more. Yeah, you’ll get knocked down again. But once you’re no longer afraid of getting knocked down – good things will seemingly come your way.

Why I wrote this…

I know a lot of you are struggling out there and it always seems other people have it figured out.

I assure you they don’t.

Don’t confuse luck with perseverance, arrogance with confidence.

Every day you wake up you have a choice of either feeling sorry for yourself and your problems or doing something about it and being happy you can do so.

Some of you hate your jobs. Some of you hate your businesses. Some of you can’t find a job – while others are struggling to fill open positions. Everyone has something they don’t like – don’t stress over the situation, focus on working towards a solution. In a really motivationally pessimistic sense, at least working on a solution will take your mind off your problems temporarily Smile

The difference between winning or losing is less with the external perception of how you’re seen, it’s more about what you’re pushing yourself towards.

Know when to quit. Just never quit on yourself.

2012: The year of core competencies

Posted: 6:08 pm
January 5, 2012
SMB
Comments Off on 2012: The year of core competencies

January is the month in which I’m obligated to offer my opinion on the coming year and what we will see. For the past few years I’ve had a relatively consistent opinion that cloud will continue to drive growth and displace the more traditional technology providers as they both have less to manage and customers spend less on technology that needs high end management (instead buying consumer devices). I’ve been fairly accurate in that assessment.

This year we will see something different.

This has been brewing for some time.

The major industry trend is the bet on vendor consolidation. While I agree, I don’t believe this will be a major driving force in the world of IT Solution Providers.

I think the major play this year will be the IT Solution Provider consolidation. Lot’s of people are looking to either exit or cash out on what they have built because posting remarkable growth numbers gets more difficult with each passing year once the business matures.

The marketplace is already saturated with events, coaches, experts, speakers, advisors and various groups that do not have an actual tangible product.

So with more people looking to exit the ranks of IT Solution Providers and become mentors to those solution providers… who will be left to actually deliver these solutions to end users?

In my opinion, business owners and managers will start to reverse the trend of outsourcing and will start doing majority of their technology sourcing themselves.

The pressure vendors feel to post ever increasing numbers will fuel acquisitions but also further competition with their partners.

Regardless of which way the economy goes, the spending on technology is going to continue because we’re only going to be using more technology.

What all this really means is that you’ll have to work a lot harder for the dollar but thankfully: your costs will go down.

Now here is the beauty in all this: Everyone is aware of it. So if you have a business model and plan that’s a few years down the road, you’re going to focus on further development of your core competencies and more sales/marketing activity. The distractions over “next big thing” or “paradigm change” or “blue oceans” will quiet down as people look at their cards and go all in.

Looking forward to showing you what we’ve got on deck for 2012. If you haven’t already done so, go sign up for Shockey Monkey at http://www.ShockeyMonkey.com – yes, it’s free.

Shockey Monkey Sponsors & Ads

Posted: 1:31 pm
January 3, 2012
Shockey Monkey
Comments Off on Shockey Monkey Sponsors & Ads

Two weeks ago we sent out sponsorship invitations to a few companies we work with closely (if you haven’t gotten one please email kate@ownwebnow.com).  Shockey Monkey and I wanted to offer you the big picture of where things are heading. As you recall, we launched Shockey Monkey Reloaded (2.0) in November with the major news being that the entire solution is now completely free with all the features included free of charge. It is vendor sponsored so you will see ads in it (and yes, you can opt out of them as well as pay for support and onboarding assistance).

Now, here is some background that I hope puts it all into context.

We are still very much in the huge development cycle for Shockey Monkey. I have some very big plans for it that mostly center around how small businesses actually manage their businesses.

We’re a small business. We’re also a rather modern one at that – with iPads and remote workers and multiple offices and SAS 70 Type II audit / compliance needs and a global client base. We cover a lot of ground that costs a lot of money for very sophisticated stuff that we barely use. So we look at those essential components and we build it into Shockey Monkey. For example, here is what I mean:

If you’ve gone beyond scratching the surface of support and client tracking information you’ve probably discovered chat integration. You’ve also noticed the alerts system that allows every Shockey Monkey event to be discussed, tracked and commented by the whole staff. Now how is this useful?

Think of it as Facebook. People upload pictures, friends comment on it. People update their status, friends comment on it. Now apply it to your business. Employees update tickets, employees comment on it – Add it to documentation, bill them for the hours, escalate it to the boss or send them a thank you note. Every business event worth tracking is an event worth commenting on and driving towards the well oiled machine we all want our businesses to be.

This is why Shockey Monkey is so important and why it’s free. We want everyone to use it.

Now, by the end of 2nd quarter, all of OWN partners will be using it. That’s a given since that’s how everyone will be managing the business they resell from us. And we’re more than happy to cover that bill.

Now before you start thinking I’ve gone crazy and am just burning through what is a multimillion dollar business line on it’s own, slow down and think about it for a moment.

The money (Vlad’s Ferrari Fund money) is not in the software. The money is in the services that are sold through it and supported through it. The money is in end user / end business support.

Sponsorships

Last week we sent out a sponsorship package to a bunch of folks we work with. We’re looking at max of 17 sponsors with total revenue accounting for about $500,000.

That’s about a half a dozen developers and some support and marketing money.

As you can tell, it’s all about the product for us in 2012 and the low # of sponsors backs that. We do not want to turn Shockey Monkey into some sort of a free adult entertainment site with banners and spyware everywhere and sponsors are tied into our LooksCloudy.com site whose mission is event coverage and partner development. So there is more to this than pure sales as well. It’s about more effectively connecting partners with their vendors, in the same way that SM will better connect our partners to us.

Where this leads is sort of up to the vendors that choose to sponsor our solution. I sincerely believe that Shockey Monkey is a great stepping stone to some very mature solutions in the channel with a very advanced feature set. I think a lot of companies will choose to sponsor us to assure that it’s their solution you step up to, not their competition. What we’re pretty much guaranteeing is that Shockey Monkey will be the entry point for all aspiring and growing MSPs – because we aim to keep it free – but where they grow from here is up to the market to decide.

The future of the monkey is up to the users and to the sponsors, we have to please both.

Certainly the revenues are in the services and we run that business better than most.

With Shockey Monkey we have a unique opportunity to build a huge platform and expand it. Most of my investment is to tie Shockey Monkey further into the backoffice and the way small businesses run their operations. This means connecting the monkey to email, Facebook, twitter, instant messaging, payment services and more.

This is the point at which Shockey Monkey goes from being worth a few million targeting IT Solution Providers (now) to being worth a huge multiple of that to just about every small business out there that leverages social networking.

We all seemingly use things like Facebook, twitter and Gmail for personal interaction.

And the biggest trend in IT is consumerisation.

So connect the dots. Consumers using a social backend for business management.

Shockey Monkey.

Smile

So to sum it up: Shockey Monkey is free and it will remain free. The sponsorship opportunities are available in a limited amount because we want to make sure that ads do not interrupt your ability to work and give those that sponsor a solution good ROI. The roadmap for 2012 which will be released later will include two major updates and is aimed at tying more backoffice automation into the Monkey. The big picture goal is to build Monkey into a broader SMB process automation tool tied into the web, social media and email – which will help you expand your client base while also improving you own operations. Win, win, win.

Update: I just wanted to make it really clear that Shockey Monkey will remain free for the long term. We killed “Shockey Monkey Free” and “Shockey Monkey Fro” and all the features of Shockey Monkey Pro have been made available to everyone. You can still buy Pro if you want phone/email support, onboarding assistance and more.

ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency

Posted: 5:05 pm
December 29, 2011
ExchangeDefender, IT Business
Comments Off on ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency

As I’m sure many of you have already seen, we’re really beefing up the ExchangeDefender Essentials lineup before we announce the final move in the 1-2-3 punch that will carry our partners up in 2012. This time, we’re adding an ExchangeDefender LiveArchive-like feature to ExchangeDefender Essentials, our budget-friendly solution.

Now on the corporate blog I have to be friendly and make it seem like sometimes you need to make tough decisions with tight budgets and make calculated compromises.

On here I don’t.

Now that little fact in itself makes some of my friends, employees and partners cringe because they try to imagine what’s it like to be on the receiving end of this. Those folks, fundamentally, do not understand how social media works. The main goal of this blog is not to beat down MSPs. It’s also not to pump up products and webinars. When you do that stuff too much people tune out in the most worthwhile way – they stop talking back. Feedback is the primary reason I write this blog – it gives me the opinion, insight, marketing research and everything else I could ever need to get the perspective needed to run my business. That’s also how we stay ahead of our competitors and why our products find so much success, as if they were built to order. Because on a really fundamental level, they are. Even when they conflict with one another.

So with that in mind, let me explain the Essentials, Emergency, all of ExchangeDefender and how it fits and where it fits and why even bother doing it.

The Basics

Typical abusive opinion should be written this way:

If you’re an MSP running a clients server without a failover like ExchangeDefender LiveArchive, you’re a fucking moron. Do you really think saving pennies and dimes is going to come even close to the losses you’re about to incur when the Exchange server goes down – and it will go down – and the client blames you – and they will blame you – and ruin both your reputation at worst and your ability to sell them additional products and services at best? Seriously? The business that is sitting there deciding whet her or not they need to be put out of business temporarily or permanently over a few bucks a month is a business that is gambling with it’s existence, do you comprehend the level of risk you are undertaking by trying to play into their nickel and diming games?

Now there are grains of truth in the above paragraph (I’ll get back to them in a moment) and to an aspiring IT industry sociopath writing a blog post like that would be incomprehensible. Oh my god, who would do business with someone that speaks in such a way? Turns out a lot of people – because the fact is that we don’t necessarily do business with people because we like them but because the product fits. When it comes to business all that personal stuff goes out the window.

I wish someone had told me that years ago, it would have saved me a lot of time and grief.

Eventually I figured it out on my own by accident and it’s what’s brought you our cloud services, expanded ExchangeDefender, LiveArchive, Shockey Monkey, Looks Cloudy, etc. In order to be successful you either have to be the best (the odds are against you on this one) or you have to work the hardest (this is really just a matter of choice). 

The Essentials

Technically, I held back on approving the buildout of Essentials product for years mostly because the profit margins in the high end product were great and I didn’t have the resources to support more than one product per category. There were also a shitload of problems and scaling issues that took years to resolve, but those are minor details.

Emotionally, I also grew so tired of people who had to sit and think about whether or not a $2 hit to their MSP bottom line would be worth it. I also grew tired of explaining how my $2 product did what my competitors charged double digits for.

Insecurely, I felt that introducing multiple products per category would lead to cannibalization. Surely most people will just switch to the cheaper solution from the more expensive one if they are not using it completely. Right? Right? Wrong. I was wrong about this.

Finally, the essentials product came about because it was a fundamentally different product (even though it is built on the same base with same features at the core) because it appealed to different kinds of partners/clients and it had an entirely different marketplace.

Initially I felt quite dirty about the Essentials product because I felt like partners were selling a product that would ultimately serve as a death trap. I spend millions of dollars building redundancy around redundant systems and really am consumed around making sure things never go down. Yet there were tons of people knocking down my door saying outages were not an issue.

Well, which is it?

Turns out, it’s both. There are just different requirements. And over time the products pick up critical mass and create a profit margin that allows us to include additional features without an overwhelmingly large cost structure associated with it. For example, the Essentials Emergency will cost us less than what it would cost us to sponsor a conference circuit aimed at low end and startup clients. In fact, it will cost less than a half.

Now quick question – what do you think will sell more products: word of mouth and referrals or me in a white suit in a hotel in Baltimore?

The way I see it, ExchangeDefender will continue to appeal to high end partners and MSPs worldwide. The Essentials product will appeal to those who only need the very basics. But with both, our entire team will be able to sleep at night knowing that we’re doing everything in our power to deliver the feature set that backs people up even when they make a decision that doesn’t make sense – because you know what, every software developer feels their features are the most important.

So I’ll introduce you to ExchangeDefender Essentials punch #3 shortly and I guarantee you’re going to like it. My opinion (and that of OWN) is that the MSPs will continue to grow in the cloud – and that the old infrastructure business support services (filtering, security, backups, management) are up for grabs and prone to more consumerisation and consolidation.

For years, I only chose to do my business on the high end. And for years, Postini kicked my ass simply by offering a barebones product for a $1.  But if the clients chose a competitive product based on cost, how loyal would they be to it once they could switch to a product to boost their margins? And at what point is a switch no longer worth the effort?

Ah, the fun of running a business. Here is to an awesome 2012!

The trail of broken promises is paved with the bricks of best intentions

Posted: 9:10 pm
December 22, 2011
Shockey Monkey
2 Comments

So you know how you suck at being organized?

There are people out there that are perfectly organized in every way. They know where everything is, they can find it in a split second and you probably feel like they spend every moment of their time organizing their junk.

Personally, I like to stack my junk. Then pile it. Then push it around and every now and then toss it into a box to move somewhere where it can be less unsightly. I call that activity cleaning.

I designed Shockey Monkey for people like myself.

Helpdesks, PSAs, CRMs and SharePoint portals probably have a higher failure than success rate. Why? Because people spend more time trying to plan organization and processes that the first time something falls out of the process they fall back to what is more convenient – and completely untrackable.

We didn’t want Shockey Monkey to be SharePoint.

As a matter of fact, that was the design cornerstone.

You don’t have to plan onboarding yourself for months. Or weeks. Or days.

You don’t even need to spend the time talking to us. We actually designed Shockey Monkey so that it would be quicker to do stuff on your own than to call us and do the same.

Check out this 10 minute getting started guide to Shockey Monkey.

It will take you less than 10 minutes.

Step 1: Setup portal settings. Step 2: Add portal address to your email signature. Step 3: Add your largest client company & contacts. Step 4: Upload your logo. Step 5: Customize the postcard and mail it out or hand deliver it.

The first four steps take less than 5 minutes.

And that’s all I ask.

For the love of god, do not try to figure out every status, every email template, every setting and every little nook of the system.

Baby steps.

Just start tracking your activities.

Start tracking your time.

Then start posting it to an invoice.

Then add other clients and start sending invoices to Quickbooks.

The more of the system you use, the more efficient you will become.

But don’t do it ackbasswards and try to build this huge process flowchart that you will never implement. All that activity serves to do is scare you with your inefficiencies and take time away from actually tracking what you do.

Start small. Build up. You can’t fail at that. Hey, it’s free get on it!

Shockey Monkey Reloadeded

Posted: 1:47 pm
December 14, 2011
IT Business, Shockey Monkey
1 Comment

It’s been over a week since I said anything on the subject and nearly two weeks since we officially launched Shockey Monkey Reloaded.

Watch the Shockey Monkey Reloaded Launch Webinar

Since that time we’ve signed up nearly 1,000 new portals and you keep on coming in strong as is the interest for sponsorships, etc.

Most of all, I want to thank to the many of you that have taken the time to talk to my staff and work with our support and developers on the bugs you’ve found. We’ve been squashing them daily and all the development resources have been assigned to making it flawless which it pretty much is. Hank got a much deserved vacation (I sent him to Las Vegas) and he’ll be back in the saddle next week with the priority being new integrations and some of the incredibly useful features some of you have brought to me.

Again, I can’t say thanks enough… well, short of giving you a free portal to run your business and serve you customers. That’s a good deal right? Smile

Next Up..

We will be holding a webinar next week to discuss some of the questions that we get often. We also want to talk about the “Getting started in 10 minutes” which we feel is kind of critical for everyone signing up right now. We’ve hired two new people in the past week to help deal with this. And we’ll hire more if it keeps on going this fast, so please tune in and hear what we’ve been up to over the past two weeks.

Tuesday, December 20th, Noon EST

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/236053112

Many of you are good to go and are set to use Shockey Monkey full on in 2012, if you aren’t yet the great news is that it only takes 10 minutes so what are you waiting for?

Before I forget..

The Shockey Monkey training video has been updated for Reloaded. It used to be 67 minutes. Now it’s 17 minutes. That is hopefully the evidence of the commitment we have to making this software simple enough for anyone to use – you, your clients, your clients clients and everyone that doesn’t have an IT experience. Why? Well, the reason why portal and CRM deployments fail (SharePoint) is because nobody uses them, even when forced to use an industry specialized PSA solution folks use less than half the features and that’s among the best of the best! The goal for me with Reloaded was to make you more efficient without having to do more to gain that efficiency. In street terms: money for nothing and monkey for free. (que Dire Straits)

Finally..

Listen, I know I get a bad rep out there due to the many (many, many) blog posts I’ve written about the shortcomings we as an industry get. I don’t tolerate rude people, under any circumstances.. but it’s the stupid ones that bother me more. Everyone reads this blog with their own opinion of me, OWN, Shockey Monkey, ExchangeDefender and so on and I don’t spend much time putting lipstick on pigs.

Yeah, we’ve fucked up a lot over the years and we keep on chugging along, services get better, people get better, products get better. Everyone works on stuff.

What I’d really like to say is that we’ve got your back and we’re putting enormous resources behind this stuff because it’s important. I know a lot of you would rather see me spend it on Exchange or support or customer service or direct sales people so you don’t have to deal with any of the cloud stuff… and I understand. But it’s my money on the line in this company and I’m not running this company for the next month, quarter or year. I am looking to establish a portfolio that will make OWN relevant for another decade and that unfortunately (as some of you have put it) requires me to take an eye off the ball… in order to setup the next few plays.

P.S. As for the title.. I’m just going to keep on adding –ed to the subject as I go along with Reloaded. Kind of how people name their kids Erinn when it’s exactly the same as Erin. Why not Erinnn? While I’m on that subject, congratulations to my buddy Erinn Davis who got engaged this week!

Antispam Business Endgame

Posted: 3:36 pm
December 6, 2011
ExchangeDefender
Comments Off on Antispam Business Endgame

Some of you that are my friends on Facebook (www.facebook.com/vladmmd) have heard me talk about us intending to drop a nuke on the antispam industry. Since we’re way ahead of schedule at Own Web Now, this is getting to market sooner than expected. Here is the basic idea:

In the past year, volume of SPAM to be filtered has gone down over 60%. How about your antispam bill?

Vendors make an excuse that most of the cost in providing the service comes from support, marketing, management and maintenance so the impact to the price you pay cannot be changed.

If you’re an idiot, go ahead and believe it.

The smarter ones among you know the reality of the situation, if the client is not complaining about the price why bother lowering it? Even if you are pressured to do it by the client, it makes no sense to do it because you’re technically better off letting them go through the pain of switching than consider lowering your pricing. What are the odds you lose all of their business, right? Correct, unless you’re building a growing company.

We’ve always operated ExchangeDefender as a growing business and the ExchangeDefender as a antispam product has continued to get additional features that you get charged huge premiums for at other companies that don’t write their own technology but instead partner and license someone elses. So things like LiveArchive, Encryption, Web File Sharing, Web Filtering and so on are incredibly expensive addons everywhere else… so sometimes comparing ExchangeDefender that gets all of that for $1.50 to $2.00 depending on volume with something that just does antispam/antivirus can become a losing battle.

So I should offer just the basic (“Essentials”) product for $1.00, bring it to apples and apples, and call it a day?

Where is the fun in that? Smile

If you’re currently reselling our ExchangeDefender Essentials product, or if you are currently selling the full ExchangeDefender product and facing questions about the pricing… I’d like to talk to you. You know where you can find me – Facebook, email, etc.

We’re about to drop a nuke on the antispam business and clear out our competition in this space because honestly… $1.00 for the basics is way too much.