Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Dire predictions from The Times:

“These jobs aren’t coming back,” said John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia in Charlotte, N.C. “A lot of production either isn’t going to happen at all, or it’s going to happen somewhere other than the United States. There are going to be fewer stores, fewer factories, fewer financial services operations. Firms are making strategic decisions that they don’t want to be in their businesses.”

Now, it’s easy to dismiss this because it comes from the mouth of someone that was involved in advising top levels of the most decimated industry in America. On the other hand, most of the greed that fueled it was lead by the typical Dilbert management and marketing characters.

I for one agree with him in the short term. As do the markets, as do politicians, as do the banks as do the foreign markets.

We’re now where we were at 10 years ago, financially, as a country. So were the years of Clinton and Bush (prior to bombing the wrong country) a lie? Not at all. Look at our little scope of IT. We built all these things at an enormous cost because there was no alternative. No broadband. Today we can do a lot for a lot less, remotely, which is why our business is growing.

But what if your primary business was making high end laptops? Not a good time.

This is a great lesson to learn. In order for your business to grow it needs to change.

Will soon come a day where Hosted Exchange and ExchangeDefender are not as hot? When we’ll be running at the fraction of employees? I don’t doubt it at all. Gotta keep on innovating if you want to stay around.

Not doom and gloom, just reality.

If Karl ever brings over a big enough truck full of money for me to write a book, this will be it’s title. Think of it as a business model that emerges out of the state of utter confusion, complexity and let’s be honest – bullshit – that is IT consulting.

I seem to spend more of my time talking to a very polarized audience – on one hand I have a ton of people that are skyrocketing in their business, on the other there are a few folks that just don’t seem to get what is holding them back.

The answer: their bull.

Really. There is no seeming characteristic that separates highly profitable folks from highly unprofitable. I have folks with severe speech impediments rolling in four and five figure contracts. I have one man shops signing up larger customers than my enterprise wing brings in. There are companies in the rust belt and financial services that are growing their business faster than the “hot” verticals of medicine and telephony.

Every day I talk to people who don’t seem to want to do anything to reach a new audience.

Every damn one of them is reading Vladville.com, listening to my podcasts, going through my videos and documentation.

All of this is just a huge friggin ploy to take all of your money. There is no real value here at all. For petes sake, start copying this grammatical abortion and focus on growing your business!@$!$!@$

If what worked yesterday isn’t working today, change it.

If what worked yesterday isn’t working as well today, change it.

If what you have is working, do more of it.

We had a killer February, biggest on record. March is already 30% ahead of February. Every day counts. Every effort counts. By firing employees, cutting products and trying to save money? Hell no. By adding more people, cutting deals and growing the portfolio.

Let me get straight to the point: You need more variety in your offerings. If the crappy crappy cardboard marketing RR crap you’ve been spraying your SIC codes is hardly cracking the 3% return rate, even if its thousands of dollars in return, should be returning more. If your customers aren’t responding to your message it isn’t because they just haven’t seen the light and don’t understand the value of your model – it’s because what you have on sale isn’t peaking their interest and you need to add more.

People are buying. If they aren’t buying your crap, you need to talk to me. As of late, I’ve adopted the phone greeting to:

Hi, my name is Vlad and I am here to make you money.

This goes on every level. I spoke to some high level folks at a company I talk about here often, they have a + in their name. Guess what I told them:

I am not sure if the partner is willing to pay or if the vendor is willing to pay. All I know is that there is a demand for it out there that people are willing to pay for and who am I not to take their money and make them more?

Always. Ladies and Gentleman. Always be pimping.

I think at some point about two years ago Erick and I were going through a collection of Mojitos at Downtown Disney, talking about a concept for an MSP conference. I believe that the less colorful version of what I said was “Oh no, not another one.” Back then the conference market was pretty much a glorified vendor festival, with barely enough content to even attract attendees. Things got a little obvious when the attendees were left to eat on the soccer field, in the parking lot and entire “content” sessions were just infomercials. Oh please, not another distraction I thought.

Erick really changed my mind when I visited the first Intelligent Enterprise MSP bootcamps. The setup of their shop was very professional, the training was… well… an ass kicking. Almost Matrix-like. Geek walks in. CIO walks out. The session I got to watch was basically Garry, two sales executives and the geek is trying to pitch to them. Watching the “CEO” and “CFO” shoot down the proposals, watching the video recording of the whole thing, trying all the different sales scenarios. Impressive.

So when Erick told me they were going to do a conference bootcamp I was not sure what that experience was going to look like. Obviously the “close combat” training works  very well, but does it translate to the crowd of people?

Amazingly enough, it did.

Not your usual conference by any means. The content is basically nonstop, 7 am to 7 pm.

Party at night as usual, right? Nope. Folks have homework. Videos to watch, projects to complete, surveys to do.

This is not your usual SMB conference.

Well, first of all it’s free.

Second, there is an actual agenda and a deliverable. As in, when you leave this place you’ll have stuff you can use immediately. Stuff that let’s you compete in business, not in the techie bs being done by Indians for $1.50 an hour.

I hope if/when Erick throws one of these again many of you reading this blog get a chance to attend. For years many people in the IT field were able to coast through simply on the pent up demand and customers actually wanting servers and services.

Now that things are tougher, that projects are more complex and that competition is intense… you have to step your game up.

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