Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

I’m extremely biased (because as an Autotask integrator we stand to make and save a ton of money) in my opinion but I’ll offer it to you anyhow: The Autotask acquisition of VARStreet is perhaps the biggest announcement to hit the MSP space in quite some time. How so?

Think of VARStreet as an “App store” service for software companies (like mine) and service providers (like you) where the nightmares of partnerships, paperwork, agreements and licensing junk are reduced down to the point and click.

I was at MSP University event when Len DiCostanzo started discussing this subject with the MSPs in attendance. The premise of having an integrated shopping cart for the MSP is huge in terms of time savings and prospecting. I can tell you that because the biggest obstacle in doing commerce in the MSP world (as far as vendors and MSPs are concerned) isn’t the golf or the partnership or the handshakes with the owner – it’s making the solution easy to price, quote and position for the sales staff that actually makes the transactions happen.

The MSP industry and the associated PSA & RMM tools have made significant progress over the past year in the area of integrations – we can at this point pretty easily support your purchases directly through Autotask, we can sync your seat counts for reoccuring services, we can streamline the process of getting into the clients service through LiveLinks, etc – so what happens after the line which is dotted is signed is pretty smooth.

VARStreet is about the only thing out there, in my opinion, that will make the process that happens before the purchase smoother. At this point OWN distributes “Sales Cheat Sheets” for our products, brandable marketing collateral, go to market pamphlets and all this stuff you can “attach” to the quote or proposal – something that typically involves further complexity with a quoting tool, etc. In other words, we have a good bureaucracy of a process behind trying to get the sale.

With VARStreet all that changes.

Kudos to Autotask for spending their money wisely. We’ll be at the Autotask Live Conference later this month and I’m very interested in learning how we can further automate the process of selling. Nearly all the MSPs I talk about have growth goals – and you grow by selling more. Interesting times indeed.

Last night I had a very interesting conversation on where the line is drawn between producing a quality product and maximizing profitability. Believe it or not (software, MSP, IT Solution Provider, SPF) there is a tradeoff between perfection and profitability – the better you try to get your product, the more it costs and less it makes because it diverts money from sales and marketing efforts to make a better product that fewer people will buy.

But where is the line? Let’s for a moment forget the beta culture most of us younger entrepreneurs have brought up in and assume that there is a happy place between shipping shit for money and burning the midnight oil checking all the t’s and dotting the i’s.

The question is: Where is the line and how do you find it?

I don’t have an answer, earlier in my career when I was very close to the product development and support I spent far more time focusing on perfection but we made a lot less money. I worked very hard and we grew slowly and patiently – but we didn’t take it to that “next level” until I focused on the product distribution and growing the scale of what we do here. In the end, we’re able to deliver a product that has a higher quality and reliability with a better profit margin.

One piece of advice I have for people that are just starting up is to focus on building the business, not the products. You can always hire amazing people and build amazing things – once you’ve got the money. The line between where you can be proud of your solution and run a profitable business – that I don’t know. I’m proud of what we’ve build and what we deliver but I also know at least a dozen holes that we’re working on and I have another 200 that I haven’t even thought of yet. But by the time I perfect ExchangeDefender there won’t be any SPAM around to block anymore 🙂

We’re on our way back from a long week in California, closing some fantastic meetings in Los Angeles, an awesome Xchange Service Provider event and the CharTec Academy. Fantastic partners, great people, ton of fun but not easy stuff by any means.

I had perhaps one of the most interesting conversations in a very long time that started with the following questions:

They seem to work really hard – barely seeing their kids.

He puts in insane hours just so his wife can stay at home and raise their kids.

But here is the response that my best friend shared with me last fall when I went to visit him and asked why his wife seems to be stressed out:

“She’s at home stuck with the kids and she wants time off but I just can’t give it to her right now.”

He works so that his wife can stay at home and can get the joy out of raising their kids. Yes, that too is a sactifice because there are times when we’d all rather do something else – but we all sacrifice for what is really important in life.

One thing I’ve learned in life (at my old age of 31) is that really successful people tend to sacrifice (at times a lot) to get to the next level and become successful. One of my friends in the industry recently shared with me that everyone thought she was a lesbian because she didn’t have a man and worked so much. Ouch.

I won’t speak for those people. And please understand, I am not trying to preach here – this is my life and this works for me, your life is your own and I am not trying to change it or challenge how you live it. At all. Please don’t look at this as anything other than an explanation of how us weird “workaholic” people see the world.

Believe me, if I could do this on a sofa in my tighty whities eating M&Ms from my bellybutton (oh yeah, you pictured it didn’t you?) I wouldn’t be writing this blog at 30,000 ft on a redeye flight on a Saturday night after an 80 hour workweek. Alas, Ferrari’s are expensive. As are Porsche’s. As is kids private school and college education. As is a big house, big house cleaners, insurance, Disney passes and Snaussages.

I was raised to respect money and my parents always told me that they both worked hard because they wanted me to have an opportunity to make something of myself in life. I don’t recall mommy and daddy ever handing me the Corvette keys – I had to earn those myself. And now that I have a family of my own, I want my kid to have a chance to have a better life than I did.

I wouldn’t trade my life with anyone I know. So it takes a few extra hours to earn it, will I really remember this redeye flight in a year? Doubtful.

About balance..

Lot’s of people seem to talk about “balance” in life. I for one don’t really find my life unbalanced, I’m blessed to love what I do and I would be on this computer doing this stuff at 2 AM no matter what. I don’t particularly enjoy the meetings with lawyers and accountants, or apologizing when we fail, but there is no such thing as perfection.

I also do not believe there to be such a thing as “balance”; Oh, I know a lot of people that talk about balance – and talk about it a lot – but truth of the matter is that someone always feels like they are losing out no matter how much you think you’re balancing it out.

— “ Your spouse thinks you’re working too much and you’ve got problems at home. Your boss doesn’t think you’re working hard enough so you’ve got problems at work. You bring your home problems to work which affect your performance which affect your compensation which leaves you to go back home to your loved ones and unload on them when they hit the wrong button during the “how was your day” talk. So you stay awake past your bed time to try to make it up with sex, wake up exhausted and just can’t wait for some sucker to call you up and as John Wayne put it – “Go ahead punk, make my day”  “

That little bit of darkness is courtesy of my friend Steve who delivers the above rant to a perfection in person. Gloomy, ain’t it? But there is a grain of truth there, we all have to sacrifice.

So why do it?

The reason I am writing this post is to tell you that there is an enormous sense of urgency among the technology providers to become a full technology solution – because so much is now possible without physical presence, all of the traditional “suppliers” and “vendors” are going direct to the consumers and the old “business2business” world is no longer an entity onto itself – it’s just an extension of consumer experience.

Everyone is racing at a frantic pace to offer VoIP, BUDR, cloud, commodity monitoring, remote services and support. We all want a spot on that clients org chart.

And among my hard working friends there is an understanding – hard work and dedication over time breeds winners. We become so critical, so essential, so core to the success of our organizations and our clients businesses that the payoff is guaranteed and proportional to our effort.

It’s the equivalent of the universe saying: the money is yours, all you have to do is put in the effort pick it up.

Some people only want to reach down for $10. Some will reach deeper for a $20. Some will roll up their sleeves and try to pull out a $50.

This is the greatest, most profitable time to be in business. And what you build now will stay with you for years. Make yourself indispensable.

So from the 30,000 ft in the air on the red eye flight after a 7 day workweek, with my laptop in one hand and gold plated revenue digging showel in the other… good night and happy Monday.