Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

In January I ran the WDW Marathon and 26.2 miles, which truly kicked my ass. Having completed my winter tour of flu, cold, stomach bug, AIDS, west nile and possibly other tropical diseases, I got back to my physical training in anticipation of bringing back the Ironman for the rest of the season. I wanted to offer everyone an honest heads up about what is going on at OWN and put the announcements you will be hearing over the next few months into some context.

Own Web Now has been a big geek firm for many years.

Unfortunately, for many of those years that is all it was.

Fortunately, we did a very good job with it.

Now, this is where it gets a little complex. Rising tide lifts all boats, some with real IT solution providers, some with good salesmen with a few missing planks. The partner demand had shifted, the focus changed from building technology to deploying and consolidating it and we played a huge part in it. We’ve been so successful at it as a matter of fact that we’ve pretty much lost a year to bring our business processes to the level needed to support what we were doing. We also had to step up our game as the IT space became more consumerish (and by that I mean nobody RTFMs any more) and that lead to some shuffling of the talent within OWN.

Basically, the demand for the “technical” company went up to midmarket and enterprise where we do exclusive contract work. Meanwhile, the SMB part of the business required more professional handling and management. This required a change in the way we approach SMB and grow it along with the way our partners are growing. We’re not just a backoffice anymore.

Unfortunately, this means my role in it all becomes a lot more limited. For example, I used to handle all partner relationships. But these days we’re fielding idiotic questions from people who ought to know the answers (“So, what’s the hosted Exchange like?”) and that now has a dedicated team that sits around and demos our solutions to the solution providers that need to learn how to position, sell and deploy the solutions.

Frankly, I don’t have the time for that.

You’ve already seen some hint of what I’m actually up to through the SPAM Show. This year we’ll be sponsoring the entire MSPU circuit. Today we lined up to sponsor the SMBTN event. Towards the end of March we are sponsoring the Autotask event and showcasing our integration there, and at the end of August we’re doing the same with ConnectWise. In the middle we will be getting more involved with HTG groups which we just started sponsoring and will have booths at Microsoft WPC and a few ASCII events as well.

Why? See previous line. I want to stay in touch with the partners and continue to help when I can, but my time is progressively being taken up by meetings and product development, so my ability to pick up the phone and explain business cases and what I’m hearing from the IT field out there is going to be rather limited.

I think all this will benefit our partner base significantly.

You will see a few things show up on this blog over the next few months, all of which relate to my professional side of life.. If you work with us this will make you more money and make you more profitable, so I urge you to get involved. Serious upgrades to ExchangeDefender are around the corner. There is a lot of new stuff coming down the Shockey Monkey tree. We’re bringing additional products and services.

I talk a lot of shit. But you have years worth of archives that back up what I’m saying and what we’re doing about it to compete. You’d very hard pressed to find a more open company or a more partner friendly one at that. We haven’t had technical issues creep up in months, no discussions over ExchangeDefender delays, the offsite backups have been flawless, our technical support has been getting stellar reviews and new communication, billing and automation are getting congratulations around the world. At a time where most IT / Software vendors are cutting jobs, we are growing.

Not to be curt, but this is a partnership. If you aren’t interested in making my company more profitable, don’t expect a warm welcome when you ask for things like Shockey Monkey and Offsite Backups – those are meant for our loyal partners – not for guys looking for a deal while propping up our competitors at every turn.

I look forward to working with you all in the coming months as we set ourselves up for a fantastic 2010. Yeah, we’re kicking ass right now, but if we take our eyes of the ball that will certainly change. Moreso, I feel like we have this huge competitive edge and I’ll do all I can to make sure we take advantage of this economic chaos and the need to slash IT budgets. I wish there were more than 24 hours in a day so I can bring everyone in at the lowest level, but the ugly truth with huge audiences is that the intimacy gets thin, so in the meantime I sincerely hope you support what I’m doing to keep us and our growing enterprise on the right track.

The other day we were recording the SPAM Show with Erick Simpson (MSPU), Bob Godgart (Autotask) and Mark Crall (Tech Care Team) and talking about the Web 2.0 of all things. Show will be published @OwnWebNow at some point this week as usual, if you’d like to hear about it please join our partner program.

This one is going to be funny. Or at least my opinion of that word.

First, I’ll admit, Web 2.0 means a lot of things to a lot of people.

However, when it comes to running a business, things have not changed a whole heck of a lot in the past 200+ years.

It’s all about how connected you are and how hard you work. Those two happen to be the complete opposites of one another. For example, I know a ton of people who do a remarkably good job but still make chump change because they refuse to be social. On the other hand, I know hordes upon hordes of remarkably useless people who seem to do nothing but party. To put it in even clearer terms: Some people spend too much time talking shit and not enough time doing anything valuable at all – tough luck, not all of us can be marketing people.

Somewhere along the Closet Sociopath – .COM Stalker graph is a happy middle that helps you extend your social footprint with the minimal effort while still being able to do your job.

This is what I use things like Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and a few others. It’s not a science or a best practice, it just works for me. So even if I explained it in full detail, it wouldn’t be very useful to you.

Vlad’s Guide To Becoming a Complete Sociopath

First, understand that there are 24 hours in a day. Come up with a list of your social objectives. Mine are knowing which events in the industry are hot, who is working on what and which problems are developing out there. So I can sit around the clock and listen to opinions of Bored In Office, Outspoken but Completely Worthless, Professor Indecision Loop as they write paragraph after paragraph, blog post after blog post, discussion after discussion. Hence why I nuked my v@vladville.com account and everything that came along with it. Now I follow people that I know and have met personally and I see what they find important, 140 chars max at a time. This reduces my time and personal involvement in matters that do not directly impact me in any way.

Second, understand that fewer rich relationships are more valuable than many worthless ones. Crudely put, you’re more likely to succeed in a small real estate office than as the Commander-in-Chief of Hobo Posse. Small, personal sentiments mean more than a ton of broad, less valuable ones. This is one of the many lessons I had to learn the hard way. Interpret this as you wish and need to, personally, these days I make more effort to work with the fewer people and let the benefits of that spread to the wider audience if possible.

Third, and perhaps most important – The beauty of Web 2.0 and all these mechanisms that are turning us into ADHD monkeys is that there is a clear value in being a scatter brained workaholic. If I gave everyone I worked with and everyone who wanted to talk to me my full and undivided attention, I would work 22 hours a day. You know, like I used to. The Jackass Years. Today, I’ve trained people I work with to only come to me if they need something specific that I can produce. I’ve started treating others in the same way as well. “I need exactly _______.” Fill in the blank or find someone that can.

Blueprint

Right now we live in the time of great uncertainty, as we do every four years during election cycles or every 2-3 years during financial panics (good and bad). People certainly have a heck of a lot less patience, want immediate response and things done that way.

You can ignore this demand, pretend that you’re Michelangelo and sit on the plank painting the friggin ceiling for years uncertain if you’re going to get paid for the painting…. Or you can take very small brush strokes, very quickly, and get adjusted along the way while collecting pennies.

What I mean, quite simply is:  This is the time to act quickly. There are tools to enable and facilitate that. If you can take advantage of that, you won’t get stuck and passed by everyone else.