Full Throttle

Posted: 3:05 am
January 30, 2010
IT Business, IT Culture
1 Comment

With about 47 hours left in January, I wanted to hit the neglected-as-of-recently blog and update everyone about how things are going here. Having wrapped one of the bitchiest weeks I’ve had in a long while I can now look back at what happened in January.

Louis Vuitton

For Christmas I asked for one thing: A Louis Vuitton agenda. The damn thing cost more than my iPhone. I like to doodle and as my lifestyle got so digital that paper is something I rarely see (unless it needs my signature) my ability to use my “distraction” medium as an organization platform became impossible. Maintaining management focus on the same device that you use to exchange dirty jokes with your friends about why men like DisneyWorld and what wouldn’t wake up Cinderella if you were Prince Charming (think about it!) is like trying to have a fine dining experience where everyone’s seat was a toilet. Ahhh yea. Picture it, imagine it! 🙂

To those of you that said my blog wasn’t filthy and entertaining enough anymore: I demand your apology 🙂

But back to the topic: I’ve laid out the entire year in this agenda and it’s made me infinitely more responsible for hitting the milestones I’ve committed to.

McBeefy

One agenda I have for 2010 is to run everything from Orlando. That’s easier said than done, and it’s required a lot of us to grow up. In order to get to that level, and keep everyone comfortable, was to make the office more like home.

At one point someone remarked that there was more food, snacks and booze at the office than there was at their home. “Ditto” was my only remark.

The biggest challenge in making the work a place where people can grow is aligning it more with what they expect from life, instead of making it a prison they must rot in to sustain their lifestyle.

So in January we had massages, drinks, party time, TV, etc.

Most importantly, we went McBeefy. Here was my original pitch about two weeks ago:

As for social stuff, we’ll be going to <insert random downtown bar> at 4 PM every Friday. The first two rounds are on me. After that, back to work to plan the next week. Social stuff is optional, you don’t have to go. You can’t take off early though and you can’t go straight home after the break.

When you work in close quarters with people you notice a lot about them. And you count on them, a lot. One of the big things in having a functional team is not letting anyone boil in their discontent and wiping the slate clean at the end of the week.

Doing this type of stuff has allowed me to open up to my team about the reality and balance of what’s going on and it’s resulted in them putting in a lot more effort and taking charge of things.

What are we doing tonight, Brain?

The same thing we try to do every night Pinky: One of the big things we’re doing in 2010 is global expansion. Not of just Own Web Now, but lifting up of our partners as well. Trying to survive on tight margins by staying in your zip code is not be viable – and we have about a decade worth of experience in running a business globally and connections with just about everyone.

In January we really reinforced our focus on customer service and followup – and we’re still hiring across the board for that in service and level 2 support.

The bottom line here is: If we really suck as much as some people would lead me to believe, how come we’re growing so much and getting so much praise from so many of our partners and clients?

The answer is simple: it comes down to consistency. Some people cannot handle not getting the same level of service at all times. Some people don’t like working with women. Some people don’t like the phone. Some people don’t like the email. Some people don’t like the support portal. Yet, everyone makes it through the day. And what we all count on is consistency in whichever preferred way we work in. And the only thing that counts in sustaining that is knowing when we fail.

Make no mistake, Own Web Now went from me writing control panel software in high school and constantly listening to what people wanted and delivering it. It gets somewhat more complex when you grow a few million times over 🙂

We beefed up support – our Tier 2 will extend direct support from 4 AM to 10 PM EST next week. Our Tier 1 will also have more control in terms of dispatch and escalation. And we’ll also announce a strategic escallation to Tier 3 for people that are beyond FUBAR (means F’ed Up Beyond All Recognition).. or is that Third Tier? 🙂

Innovation

Our product agenda in 2010 is to extend our products and services in a direction where they become manag(able)ed services. What I mean by that is that there is a lot of business intelligence that can be collected from an extensive amount of data we collect and can process intelligently. It’s all about extending ourselves into our clients businesses and becoming valuable beyond the benefits they purchased the software for in the first place.

If you think about it, it’s inevitable. The software will eventually be free, but the knowledge and organization that will come from having access to all that data will cost a leg and an arm. That, and only that, will be making the difference going forward.

Note on Competition

In December, when we announced ExchangeDefender 5, we saw our competitors sic their partners at us trying to figure out the strategy behind the all-in-one, no-addons business model for enterprise security, business continuity and compliance. Yes, we know who you are. Yes, we check records. Yes, we see you on Facebook. As they frantically cried on the phone: “This is going to kill <insert vendor>!?!?” I somewhat laughed inside that people think about business competition in a primal way of one company trying to kill another like we’re MMA fighters.

The reality of the “next” decade that we’re in (2010) is that the skills and expertise we all claim in technology are not that far more advanced than those of a teenager. Our latest hire is a college freshman that is 18 years old. On her first day at work she had me on her Live Messenger, added me as a friend to her Facebook and managed her way around Office 2010 Beta and was on the same technical level as the rest of us in the office in her first week of work.

What does this say about businesses that pretend to be social media experts or computer services shops? Are you any more real/human than an 18 year old girl, or think that you can sell “double click, next, next, next, finish” for $100 an hour?

With the concept of “niche” gone, the “blue ocean strategy” turning out to be a fable in the world of global commerce, the “technology business” has to evolve or die. I see so many of my partners waste so much time trying to figure out how to be awesome at the exact same thing they were doing five years ago, all while their managed seat counts go down every month.

The.. technology.. world.. is.. changing.. Nothing new there – the news is the speed at which it’s happening.

My goal in 2010 is to take out the “pricing” and “feature set” from the consideration when our partners consider the competition, because the client base we serve expects it all to be free anyhow. Aligning the technology with the business management is where we’ll thrive.

Full Throttle

I hope you’ve enjoyed my rant for the month, please join our partner program if you’d like to be more involved (and informed) about what we’re doing. For obvious reasons, I can’t just dump it on Vladville anymore because the way I crack jokes among my friends is quite different from how I run a multimillion dollar global business. Damn that feels good to say. 😉

Hope 2010 is all you’ve hoped it would be so far!

Be Nice, Be Honest

Posted: 11:35 pm
January 27, 2010
IT Business
Comments Off on Be Nice, Be Honest

It’s been a long time since Own Web Now Corp and ExchangeDefender were all about me. We’ve grown tremendously through the years, with a fair amount of pain, that is almost inevitable with success.

With February 1st right around the corner, I am proud to run an organization that has moved forward in a very big way.

Frankly, we’ve delivered what we’ve promised we would.

Now, I have a favor to ask. As we grow at this next level we’ve earned, it’s more important than ever to do things right. Over the next few months you will be receiving calls from people at Own Web Now. It won’t be from me, or even from anyone on my team. In USA, you’ll be talking with Sheila. In UK, you’ll be talking with Susanne.

I am asking you that you give them your time and your opinion as if it was me waiting to speak with you.

We want to know what we’re doing right and wrong, what we’re doing too much or too little of. Basically, we want to deliver the level of service you expect and make sure we keep all of our partners involved and benefiting from things we do here. Many of the programs you’re seeing us roll out right now had my direct involvement in them – and I didn’t create them for the Ferrari California fund, I created them for you because you asked for them.

I understand that along the way we may have lost some people and shaken up some confidence, but day after day I am getting an overwhelmingly, amazingly positive comments and praise about OWN. I want to make sure that we deliver consistently and stay in the leadership role in this business.

Thank you for your time. And if you ever feel you’re running into dead ends, I am very easy to find. It’s still my company. It’s still your feedback that guides it.

Is it time to revise 2010 expectations?

Posted: 1:31 am
January 25, 2010
IT Business
1 Comment

This is the question that has been thrown at me time and time again by partners that I’ve talked to in the last week. The euphoria of the new year had passed. The “Windows 7” migrations didn’t materialize. World in January 2010 is the same as the world in November 2009 – new calendar though.

And it’s getting worse: Walmart to lay off 11,000 people with 5,000 let go last month. Everything from Dollar Store to Louis Vuitton is getting downsized, even the jewelry stores and luxury car dealerships are closing doors: And when even the rich tighten the spending you know nothing good is around the corner.

I don’t have a prediction to share, nor some great insight that I haven’t offered before but I would like to offer two personal opinions:

1) We’re still growing. But… we’re growing rapidly across the products and services that the market demands. If your mind is still stuck in the “that’s not what we do” gear, you need to grow out of it and fast. Bottom line, people are still paying for IT services and they are paying well. If that’s not the case for you, either your marketing sucks or you’re selling the wrong thing.

2) It’s never too early or too late to make changes. If January 25th, 2010 is not what you envisioned when you put your plans together, go back to those plans and figure out how the current measurements compare to your estimates and goals. Look:

We all make mistakes and there is no such thing as perfection – and the measure of the man is what he does after he’s made a mistake.

If things aren’t working out, talk to someone that’s doing well and copy them. Or back to the drawing board. But flooring the accelerator in a car that’s driving on the wrong side of the street is just foolish.

Again, bottom line in difficult times is having a solid plan and being responsive to the demands of the market. You’ve got to keep on moving.

Quiet Before The Storm

Posted: 10:05 pm
January 19, 2010
IT Business
1 Comment

Many of you have been emailing and calling to ask what I’m up to and what’s going on – yes, I have been quiet but not on purpose. We’ve been working remarkably hard on ExchangeDefender 5 and a few other projects and even with 20+ hour days I just haven’t found the time to put anything insightful on Vladville. Certainly nothing you haven’t heard a million times. I apologize if I haven’t gotten back to you via email as well, things have been just amazing and the response to OWN’s success has been remarkable. We’re thankful and we’re working hard to continue earning that business and deliver on our promise. We worked very hard to get to this point and I must admit that I’m enjoying it.

But we have had a fundamental change of philosophy @ Own Web Now. It’s no longer about relationships. This company was built on my back, my money, my instinct and my work ethic. But it didn’t really blow up sky high in profits and revenues until I decided that our technology will speak for itself and it won’t always be pushed by one loudmouth ambitious jackass. 🙂

Here is the realty of the situation: Microsoft, Google, Apple, AT&T, Verizon, Dell, HP and the like are coming hard and there is no more niche out there. There is no undiscovered, untapped, imaginary market for goods and services because business technology has become ubiquitous that anyone can consume it. Right now, we know the stakes, we know what it takes to market, sell, deliver and support the solutions people are asking for and (someday soon) I want to be one of the names at the start of this paragraph.

That’s right, we’re focusing on fundamentals here. In November and December we got to test our bandwidth and capabilities – we ran 4 marketing campaigns in the span of 1 month. It rocked! We also found out some minor holes that we needed to kick ass at. I’ve been front and center in the effort to guide the company through that and just get as close as possible to perfect. One thing I learned in the process is that perfection isn’t so much in not making mistakes or delivering the service flawlessly – but setting the right expectation. And with so many people, and so many levels of experience – the expectation varies and if we are to take that next big step we need to get rid of the “we won’t” and “we can’t” ways of limiting ourselves – because it’s not our decision to make, it’s the clients.

I have setup the people and processes at OWN to make a material enhancement to all our product lines – on a monthly basis throughout 2010 and beyond. If ExchangeDefender 5 and the 75 cents / mbox we’re now letting our partners build little empires on is any indication – we are way ahead of our competitors. And it’s not a lead I’m willing to give up. Want to know why?

1

That’s why. It’s time to go big or give up2

Not to forget the home office..

3

If you don’t work with us @ Own Web Now & ExchangeDefender, you should. I can’t ask for your business, or contribute to your business, in a more plain way than that.

Taking Technology Seriously

Posted: 11:17 pm
January 15, 2010
IT Business
Comments Off on Taking Technology Seriously

own_university Earlier today we launched the OWN University. That is to say, we formalized the process by which we will be creating, distributing, managing and enhancing the way we will aggressively get businesses into the cloud they can trust. Please check it out here:

http://go.ownwebnow.com

In the “less is more” era, old dogs have to learn new tricks. Next week, we will be applying the same concept to ExchangeDefender, followed by all of OWN cloud solutions – public ones and private ones that just a few hundred of our partners work with us on. Naturally, we’d like to see that number grow 🙂

As for the details, I’ll explain them later. For the moment, I’m glad to see this all unified and pushed forward.

University Training?

Posted: 9:50 pm
January 9, 2010
OwnWebNow
3 Comments

Last week I launched the series of ExchangeDefender Lunch & Learn webcasts. Basically I get together with a marketing person and we launch a live presentation covering 30 minutes on how to setup / configure / sell / support ExchangeDefender and then follow it with another 30 minutes of Q&A with up to 5 partner organizations.

My primary goal in doing this, aside from being nice to the people that fund my car collection, is to figure out how we can better support our partners and offer great training.

One of the initiatives that came from last weeks lunch & learn was a need for a partner university. Here are overall requests:

  1. Present information in an easy to understand, easy to follow, low attention span way (3 minutes at most) as a video.
  2. Allow company owners to assign these videos to their staff and be informed when the video is viewed.
  3. Offer a brief comprehension quiz at the end of the video to give business owner an idea if their staff actually learned something or if they were browsing eBay while they were being paid to learn.
  4. Give partners the ability to post these training videos on their own web site so that end users an learn how to use the product.

So I have two questions here.

  1. Is there anything else you’d like? We’re putting in some overtime tomorrow evening at 6 PM to design this and outline the videos we’d like to record.
  2. Does anyone know of a way to determine when a video has been played from beginning to the end? Maybe embedding something into the control at the end of the video so that it requires a click that is not obvious to the user (without viewing the source?).

Let me know. I’m vlad@ownwebnow.com or 407-536-VLAD. If you can’t reach me you can also discuss this with Stephanie Hoffman, I believe at x737?

For the record…

Posted: 9:09 am
January 8, 2010
Misc
2 Comments

There has been a lot of conversation about the FCC regulations as of late and since now my Inbox is piling in with questions and comment requests I guess I’ll address it in public.

I feel the FCC established these guidelines to help the general public (idiots) and discourage the business models that have been built online to deceive the public. There are endless blogs that are nothing more than paid third party infomercials for products that the manufacturers paid for. That’s like me writing a check to all of my IT community buddies and asking them to write an independent review of ExchangeDefender in exchange for $500.

To me, it seems pretty simple. If you’re taking money or discounts or $ under the table and promoting the heck out of them, disclose the sponsorship and move on.

As for the long arm of the law overreaching again, the government turning into a dictatorship that’s clamping down on free speech, Obama trying to censor the Internet, etc, please see the following site for instructions.

Disclosure: Reynolds Wrap and Alcoa are not sponsors of Vladville. I however fully endorse their product.

What’s the biggest change from ExchangeDefender 1 to ExchangeDefender 5?

Posted: 1:56 am
January 6, 2010
ExchangeDefender
Comments Off on What’s the biggest change from ExchangeDefender 1 to ExchangeDefender 5?

Honestly, the dog snores a lot more:

photo

This very same German Shepherd dog (Benz) has been by my side during the long sleepless nights of coding ExchangeDefender since the first version in 2001 and he continues to be my sidekick and the “face” of ExchangeDefender since he’s clocked the second most hours of ExchangeDefender development. When you consider that his pay over the years consisted of 2 italian leather sofas and Snaussages, he’s among the most profitable employees as well 🙂

On Thursday, I will be talking about the stuff I’ve personally built in this fifth major revision of ExchangeDefender: the web sharing. You can register for it here. As a CEO of a software company, I spend all day in a Dilbert real world listening to all the ways people fail at using technology – some rather spectacularly. And on the few times when it doesn’t frustrate me into fantasizing about a career in well digging, I use it as an opportunity to solve a problem. And hopefully make a few bucks in the process. I feel web sharing is a good representation of a very big problem so many people have had to deal with for years.

So hope you tune in on Thursday. Vlad & Benz, signing off.

Dry-erase Vision

Posted: 8:31 pm
December 31, 2009
OwnWebNow
3 Comments

My company has grown remarkably over the past few years, at times unfortunately way ahead of its capacity, and I am always asked about how our ideas come to fruition. “Do you just pull it out your a$$ Vlad?”

Truth is, every concept we have is drawn out. Out of all the brilliant ideas we have, all are either born or killed on the 25 feet of whiteboard space in an awkwardly large conference room we didn’t know what to do with. The entire team is encouraged to doodle and we all have our own whiteboards in our offices (some more than one) on which we draw out our proposals and bring to one another for review / ideas / suggestions.

b2

At times these drawings sit on the wall for days or weeks. We keep on adding to them. Everyone significantly contributes to them at times because it’s sometimes hard to visualize and beat down everything until you see it.

We approach business this way.

We draw out business concepts and ideas this way. Not just software. The screen above is of our onboarding process. The screen below is for our marketing workflows that we’re arming our clients with so they can demonstrate how the service functions:

b3

Once we’ve agreed on what we’re doing, we let creative people have a crack at it. In marketing, this is done by Stephanie Hoffman. In web and design, this is done by Judy Scmidt. We go through the doodles and they make it beautiful and consumable. Here is an end result:

Own Web Now Onboarding Process

Check it out live at: http://go.ownwebnow.com

s1 s3 s2

One thing that is very hard to convey to the young staff is how to deal with failure. Not all ideas are winners and sometimes even great things get killed by the most unlikely and unforeseen of circumstances.

The biggest challenge in business is picking yourself up when you’ve lost and moving on. The 25’ monster board is the test of resolve, consistency and ability to see beyond the problems. The goal is to constantly be drawing and focusing on the progression – dealing with what we’ve got now, what we’ll have 6 months from now and what won’t see the light of day in a year or longer. Nothing breeds creativity like giving yourself time to look at the same problem over and over.

As you’ve read here, and heard from me on the road, 2009 was hard for me personally. I had to deal with a product that wasn’t quite 100% because we spent so much time developing ExchangeDefender 5. All the while I got beaten, bruised, cursed out and called names but I didn’t sit home and let it crush me, I beat up the board hard and now we are where we are. Kicking a$$.

I am the most optimistic about our future than I’ve ever been. Even when I had big dreams, $0 money and no idea just how dumb I was 🙂

And now to 2010…

The board is blank. We finished clean and strong and now…..

b1

Our goal in 2010 is triple digit growth. 100%.

My goal for you is the same – if you aren’t already a partner and haven’t spoken to me, I encourage you to do it today. Right… now. In 2010, we will push our partners like we have never even pushed ourselves and it’s a challenge I am looking forward to like a fat kid looks at desert in a buffet line. Game… ON!

2 0 1 0

Posted: 6:59 am
December 30, 2009
OwnWebNow
8 Comments

Last week I recorded a SPAM Show podcast with my buddies Erick and Karl about the exciting stuff that 2010 will bring. This has become a tradition of sorts, and we’ve generally been right (hey, we’re still in business) about what’s coming down the pipe. If you aren’t following the SPAM Show, you should – it’s available in the OWN Partner Portal and from our Facebook fan page (you must be a fan in order to download it).

But on to 2010, right? For the first time ever, my prediction is not just something I’m making up and hoping I’m right: I’m actually betting a significant amount of money and 2009 efforts on it. I also believe that the big change we’ve started to see in 2009 is not a short term economic factor but just the start of the extinction event I’ve privately called “Vladville 2012” – hey even if you don’t like what I’m saying the Mayans predicted it centuries ago 🙂

2 0 1 0 – Beginning of The End

In 2009 we saw people sink expensive projects, shelf long term licensing agreements and outright refuse to commit to anything complex or drawn out.

Several factors played a role in this: recession, cash flow challenges, global competition, alternatives and substitutes, aggressive cost cutting, etc. Which factor was the biggest or most prevalent is a discussion of it’s own, the bottom line is that the client expectations have changed and you won’t get 2007 conditions back again.

What this means for the MSP industry is that we’re now at the beginning of the end of businesses that were built on delivering an SLA on top of the on-premise infrastructure alone because value is harder to justify in light of the availability of alternatives and lowered costs.

One question has been asked more than any other in 2009: Can we live without it?

For many, particularly large, companies the answer has been a resounding yes and the tangled web of licensing, infrastructure and legacy solutions got cut. This extended beyond just computer solutions and applied to everything corporate: including human resources.

As the fat get’s trimmed, the realization that fat is actually your margins (what keeps you profitable) was a painful sight for many businesses in 2009. Time will tell if this was a learning lesson or just a part of my hypothesis.

Meanwhile, in 2010..

We will see massive consolidation, from the bottom up. Typically, consolidation is from bigger fish eating smaller fish. In 2010, I see it going the other way.

In 2009, we saw the extinction of the shady businesses I’ve spotlighted for years. No need to speak about them anymore because they no longer exist. People that never were a solid business to begin with are now gone.

So now we’re looking at solid businesses. Speaking from experience here too. Trying to hit a million dollar revenue with a handful of employees is difficult. When at the end of the year you look at your low six or even five figure take, after all the hassle and sacrifices, the 9-5 life at $50,000 with benefits starts to look like a pretty good deal.

Don’t lie to yourself, we’ve all been there. And truth is, we feel that pain no matter how much higher revenue goals may be.

In 2010, I believe many of the larger MSPs will be taking up smaller MSPs for the benefit of having a seasoned veteran on their staff.

It is an inversion of the MSP pyramid (extremely business savvy personnel at the thin top with a wide base of lower cost technicians and helpdesk staff at the bottom) – changing to a wider assortment of business people on the top with very few or completely nonexistent technical staff (mostly outsourced) on the bottom.

As for my other predictions, all you’ve got to look at is our roadmap with ExchangeDefender and Own Web Now. The future is very bright but one thing remains: you have to fight for success, it won’t just happen.