Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

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Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those that dwell on it never make any progress.

The arbitrary, synchronized change of calendars is the opportunity to evaluate 2008, see what went right and how to pursue it further, see what went wrong and focus on improving it.

The point of these posts is to clue you in on the fact that for the most part you are in control of most things. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you just get the unexpected – but you continue to deal and work towards your goals.

If you don’t have 2009 mapped out, right now is a great time to start.

This blog has been a frequent snowball fight over the very definition of that word. It simply means a lot of things to a lot of people. This year, perhaps, is the first time in my life that I’ve seen a more broader view in the way OWN has been able to contribute to the overall community, both technically, business and fund-wise.

Personal contributions are easy to measure. For the most part they are reported to IRS each year. Professional contributions, where companies sponsor events or send it’s employees to college, have a long lasting impact that is difficult to achieve on an individual basis. I am, on behalf of OWN, very thankful for what we’ve been able to do throughout 2008 on that front.

One of the interesting developments of 2008 has been the clear separation of businesses. SPFs simply ran out of business because it’s hard to scam people in a tough economy when people watch their money and double-check their decisions. Riff-raff went to the riff-raff festivals and joined hug groups that are milking them to a slow death. Lifestyle became a job. Arlin finally got money out of Microsoft to sponsor something meaningful. People, and companies, set themselves apart.

One of the new communities that I joined this year, which fundamentally changed my thinking and the further development of Own Web Now, is the Slimy Vendor Whore club.

We partnered up with Dana for a hosted security model.

We put a lot of muscle behind the offsite backup software we didn’t develop in house (first time doing that).

We sponsored ConnectWise summit and are going to be sponsoring AutoTask summit in the spring because the tide is rising and our partners demand integration.

We partnered up with competitors. A lot.

In 2007 and 2008 something interesting happened that radically changed the voice of the technology community out there. It is no longer a top down model, of Microsoft dictating the technology sector and platforms, putting some partners over others and abusing the monopoly. You no longer have to be “authorative” to speak nor do you need to be remarkably loud to be heard.

This has been a true game changer in the technology community and you can see it all over the place. From the technology magazines dying to IT conferences struggling to Microsoft flipping the middle finger to their partners – 2008 has been the year in which technology decidedly got a lot simpler and a lot easier to consume.

I for one feel that trend is set to continue and if the economic activity continues to decline we will see further demand for ease of use and straight forward pricing.

Every business places it’s bets, be it with people, spending, technology or the services that are being provided.

So once a year comes that ugly realization that you’ve simply been wrong. Admitting that to yourself is tough. Getting through it without attempting to resurrect a dead horse is even tougher.

Some people don’t know when to quit. When you get emotionally invested in a particular activity it is damn hard to admit that you’re failing. Even when all the indicators tell you so. Even when you’ve avoided cutting the losses for months.

What makes great companies and great products is the passion of it’s creators. It also makes it very hard to admit when things aren’t going well and dealing with failure is tough.

However, that is just a part of business. Nobody sets themselves out to do a remarkably mediocre job intentionally. Nobody goes about their work without passion (ok, some people really hate their jobs which I’ll argue is still passion) and that which drives you forward can also beat you down.

So sit back and think about all the things you didn’t do right this year and how to deal with it in the past.

First: We never thought it would be this good..

While we expected our hosting business to continue growing we did not expect it to be growing this rampantly. It totally caught us by a surprise. Many of the manual processes that were in place were simply incapable of handling the load, which eventually fell on me and my people. I wish I had committed more resources there because of #2:

Second: We never thought it would be this bad..

The economy. The last thing you ever expect to fail is a bank. Boy has that changed in 2008. The demand for our lower-tier offerings has since exploded – we have done more business on the web hosting and $1 offsite backup side in November of 2008 than we did in the entire 2007.

It even lead to the creation of the cloud storage solutions (read: affordable) plan with our friends from Intelligent Enterprise and Secure My Company.

Ultimately, it lead to the creation of a new company completely separate from OWN in order to address the new market that never existed before.

Times are a’changin! 

Third: Role Hires actually work!

It’s like casting people for a movie. You hire based on the ideal match for the role, not their fit with the “culture of the company”

This is perhaps the only reason I am who I am today and why I am not working for Walt Disney. The easiest way to hire people is to try to push them into the mold that you require, break them down until they will conform with what you want them to function as.

Works for the military.

Doesn’t work for relationships. Damn sure doesn’t work for corporations.

This year, as my hiring took a big uptick, I started hiring people who were not like us. I took on people that I would avoid like a plague because some of our clients had the same mindset and I could no longer relate to them. I started hiring cheaper labor. I started hiring people who weren’t true and tried experts and I allowed them to grow in their roles while creatively enhancing us and our partners.

That sounds like something that just fell out of Dilbert so allow me to explain: When you hire exactly what you want and need you end up with exactly what you were hoping for – which does not improve the company at all, it just grows capacity of the same thing.

Some key hires in 2008 allowed us to build  products and even a company on top of something we would never have considered before.

Wish I did it a long time ago.

Fourth: Reward Loyalty

See previous post.

Being right sucks, especially when you are right about doom and gloom. Lot’s of IT shops closed their doors this year. Lot’s of IT blogs disappeared. Lot’s of community “fell apart” and lot’s of stuff simply moved around.

2008 was the year to use laser focus on what works and eliminate what doesn’t. It also signified a great level of maturity and novice in our industry. Lot’s of service providers grew – a lot. Lot’s of companies went direct – to the vendor.

This year was the great time to reward people who appreciated your business and your service and a great time to explore new business models. To an extent, we didn’t live up to that and we’re instead moving it to 2009.

What sorts of regrets do you have about 2008 that you’re man (or woman) enough to admit to?

I will preface this by saying that this is one of the areas I have been wrong about the most in the past. Implementing has been equally gut wrenching and I don’t recommend it.

Truth is: Not everyone deserves to do business with you.

I owe this to my friends Amy Babinchak who once said “I can usually tell within 30 minutes if someone wants to do business with me” and Karl Palachuk who has written numerous articles on just what kind of businesses should build your business. Sometimes you gotta fire clients. Sometimes you gotta fire vendors. Sometimes you gotta fire employees. Sometimes you gotta fire partners. Sometimes you gotta fire yourself from the role that is increasingly producing diminishing results.

After all, your business is a reflection of your customers and the community your products and services serve.

Every year top performers get rewarded, bottom feeders get fired.

In past, my modus operandi was to cast a wide net, empower employees and try to help guide people along as they grew their business. Don’t get me wrong, we made a LOT of money doing that. The larger we have become though, the more susceptible to abuse we have become and many people took advantage of us.

The only downside is that this was a very emotionally draining role for me. I tried all I could to give to people and would instead get “courtesy” calls telling me that they appreciated everything I did for the community but business is business and they sent their clients elsewhere. I had people who would listen to the SBS Show on the road trips, call me and tell me how much they enjoyed it, signing up for services for their clients and then refusing to pay for them. One of the more fantastic losers was a guy from UK, who had a thread with over 20 messages between me and my staff asking pre-sales questions – when I checked his web site (none to be found) and called him out on it he didn’t have too “British” of a response to it (classic case of analysis-paralysis where he spent too much time playing with the toys to actually build an IT business). Folks that claimed they loved the independent and unbiased content free of agenda were shooting the very company that was putting money on the line to provide it!

In 2008, I tried to take Amy and Karl’s advice in a more proactive way. We became very selective about who we do business with. This came at a bit of a backlash as people you turn away do everything to smear you in the public… but I’d rather have them hate me than be a drain on my company and a representation of my products and services. We eliminated non-performers – both internally with our staff and externally with our partners and clients. We developed a fair process to help us identify when the things are going down the wrong path. We have setup a review and escalation model to make sure we effectively identify internal issues and external issues.

Which brings me to… A very simple conclusion.

In 2008, Own Web Now community projects didn’t get much love and certainly did not translate into much defense from our friends when we did get attacked. So while I will personally continue doing what I do because that’s just who I am, expect Own Web Now to cease spending money to support the SMB community. Say goodbye to the SBS Show, SMB Buddy, freebies and community building incentives. Votes have been counted and the market is more responsive to trade shows, biased webcasts, blatant sales and marketing gimmicks. So we’ll go down that path instead.

It’s really as simple as: I can’t spend OWN’s money to support you because you didn’t spend your clients money to support  OWN.

While this is a big personal defeat for me because it crushes what I fundamentally believe in, it is great news for people that do business with Own Web Now and promote ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey. 100% of my efforts will now be dedicated to that. Expect announcements and many surprises in January.

As I mentioned previously, big part of overcoming problems and running a healthy company is admitting that things aren’t perfect. If things seem perfect you should probably count your profits and quit because 1) your feedback loop is broken and the problems you have aren’t reaching you (see Ken Lay, Enron, Financial crisis of 2008-) and 2) you have low standards of excellence.

Our tagline is “Global network infrastructure, security and application management.”

Everyone on the team is aware of our corporate mission, they are reminded of our values and how we go about business. And just as everyone gets a fair review every other quarter, so must the company.

The trick here is that numbers do not tell the whole story. Sure we have key performance indicators to turn to as a quick indicator of how we are doing. # of users is up. Profit margins are higher. We’re growing worldwide, even Canada eh! Support case load is down. Support resolution time is down. Revenues are skyrocketing.

Yay, we kick ass!

Years ago I had a choice of what kind of a business I wanted to run. I had a choice over whether it was my money on the line or not, if I was going to work 7 days a week at 20 hours a day. I had a choice to let go of the creative helm that kept me close to my partners and design of our services. What I have done has been chronicled pretty well on this blog and by many of you that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.

That investment assured that I would always get the honest, kick in the balls, feedback dished out in the same way I was handing it out. I get to eat the humble pie every week and thankfully I work with so many professionals who are connected with just about every organization out there from your biggest to your smallest orgs.

So do we rock? Well, let’s see what our feedback loop says:

Vlad,

I’m writing to let you know I’m not happy with the services we are getting. We currently have about 100 hosted exchange mailboxes and no clue how many on exchange defender accounts my guess is around 250 or so. Some of our issues are as follows:

The good

· Most often your response time on issues is good

· You guys seem to do a great job at blocking viruses

· The features of the new email plugin seem to work well; deployment is another issue

· You have really helped us resolve long time issues with email from/to AOL and others

The not so good

· We are having an enormous amount of spam mail hitting an entire company and until we fill out a ticket nothings seems to help. After the ticket is closed it just says the issue has been resolved. We have no clue what was done.

· Sometimes specific users within a company receive spam mail and others don’t receive the same spam email. I know how this can happen but when we again report it; someone does something and it sometimes clears up and we still have no clue what happened or what corrected it.

· We still don’t have any way to reconcile our monthly bill to our customers. This makes our billing a manual process to reconcile and a real pain in the butt. In fact we have stopped doing it because it takes so much time.

· When we make changes via the new interface; it says it is processing but never changes. Then we open a ticket – again someone does something then it works but the interface still says processing hours later. We really don’t have a clue when things are working and  when they are not. This causes us to miss our SLA’s with our customers and we are falling down on setting their expectations. If I could trust what we were seeing we could deal with it; but when a minor change takes days – that’s unacceptable.

· Our customers really want the ability to block spam on keywords. I know this isn’t your policy but there are some words that should just be blocked. These are businesses we run; not porno parlors.

· The new web interface console isn’t very user friendly and reporting is horrid. One customer wanted a list of all their accounts. We found no way of creating this list besides creating the list for our entire customer base in the system, copying the information out, stripping out all the HTML, sorting then creating a report. The entire process took about an hour. We should not have to do this just to get a report for one customer.

· Just a perspective but at times things seem to fall between the cracks; we both know this is usually due to an overworked staff.

This is just an FYI – I’m not asking you do to anything, this is just  feedback from a frustrated client. I am always looking for feedback (positive and negative) from my clients and thought you would like to know.  We are going to start a project to determine what direction to take the hosted email, spam/anti-virus filtering and remote backup.

Thanks for listening,

So, how do you think the next staff meeting went? 🙂

The point here is that had we not worked as hard and as closely with our partners we never would have had these issues brought up to us. Had we not shown that we actually care about what we do as passionately as we do our customers would just switch to another provider and that would have been the end of it.

Truth is, most organizations simply don’t care or don’t want to change. Did you know that Microsoft Hotmail has a 50% churn ratio, on an annual basis? Have you ever worked at anyone from Microsoft  Hotmail? Have you ever even heard of anyone that worked “at” Microsoft hotmail? As closely as we work with Microsoft I have never met a Microsoft Hotmail or Microsoft Online person, ever.

What most companies miss out on is that working in technology means working with people whose job it is to integrate technology in the workplace or lifestyle. It’s not a grunt monkey job.

Does it change the fact that we suck, at least for this customer? Not at all. But does it uncover a serious problem that needs to be addressed, pronto? Oh yeah. And in the last quarter we have addressed just about all the complaints brought up here. The staff was just thrilled to work on these issues because nobody wants to see their work criticized. Critical part of driving the organization down the right path is establishing that connectivity between the clients needs, partners promises and what we deliver.

The Scorecard

You start at 100%. People pay for 100%. But in the real world things are hardly at 100% and consistency is what matters most. People that give you the negative feedback are the people you need to work on the hardest because they are the ones that actually care and share your 100% belief. I’m sure nobody here would be surprised that 99.9% of people simply don’t care.

So here are my objectives for 2008 and how I think Own Web Now did as an organization. These are grades I give myself relative to my expectations for my organization.

Globalization – B+ – In 2008 we’ve taken our Exchange and SharePoint hosting, web hosting and email to Canada, Europe, Middle East and Australia. We have taken the offsite backup product to Canada and Europe. The only reason this isn’t an A is because ExchangeDefender LiveArchive did not get to Europe in time.

Communication – B – One of the biggest issues in prior years has been that of communication. Frankly, we sucked at it. In 2008 we rolled out our blog, our realtime network operations site, extended our personal reach via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. This would be an A had we taken better care of the following bullet point:

Release Schedule – F – Now F is perhaps a high mark to give in this area, we’ve pretty much operated in the dark in 2008. We blew deadlines, we blew bug fix reports, it’s just been a disappointing year in that area but we did turn it around towards the end of the year.

Support – A+ – While I can be critical of my guys and things do fall between the cracks, every time I ask anyone (who brings me negative feedback) why they work with us it is always the same response: “I can always count on OWN to back me up”. The reality of this business is that we work on some very high end, very complex very “state of the art” stuff. We support people who at times don’t watch the videos, don’t read the manuals, don’t do any troubleshooting – they just bring it to us.

Financials / Accounting – D – I had really hoped that 2008 would be the year we finally fixed the issue with the accounting, reporting and collecting funds. We did, I just wish it didn’t take all the way up to November/December to get it in order. This is something I’m glad has finally been fixed.

Staffing – I – I am going to give myself an incomplete on this one because I honestly don’t know where we are on this. You have to understand that for years now we’ve had a four-figure-percent-growth in revenues year over year and we just haven’t kept up the staffing as we should have. In 2008 we really broke the bank on building up bigger teams to address the sudden growth in the services and contracts business. I think we’re good now but I always think that and get the rude awakening.

Products – A+ – We build stuff people want. Simple as that. While there are tweaks that are needed here and there and stuff is far from perfect, our feature set differentiates us from just about anything else on the market. This is the first year that I can honestly say that all the deals I have been personally been involved in have closed in our favor. We didn’t lose to Postini, we didn’t lose to Microsoft, we didn’t lose to EDS or IBM.

In Closing

As you can tell, I have clear areas of focus for the first quarter of 2009.

The other day I was talking to one of my monkeys that came to OWN from the retail sector. We were discussing the “attrition factor” (partners that are simply closing up shop) and I noted that:

“Hey, it’s a tough economy out there, everything takes a hit”

and the response that I got is something I really want you to think about:

“In retail you don’t close stores that can’t make money in bad times. You close stores that can’t make money in good times.”

Think about that one in your services, products and lines of business.

As you can tell, I’ve got a lot on my mind. Running business really is an art.