Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

How strongly do you feel about your brand and the unique services that you deliver?

Those of you that follow me on Twitter know that I’ve been in Miami for the past two days. One, well the only one, thing I love about my old home town is the incredible sense of opportunity and the enormity of the markets to make your dreams come true if you work hard. I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and I feel that many are mentally crippled by their own small vision of their world and the possibilities – some are so scared and petrified of it that they have mentally locked themselves down to their routine that they can’t even think of a way to grow into the future.

Time for a field trip to Miami.

I kind of grew up around this culture which in no small part accounts for what drives me to keep this stuff moving and growing, here and abroad. What kind of culture is that? Well, true story (cause you can’t make this stuff up):

Earlier today I was driving back from breakfast down Broward and a silver Tahoe pulled up to my Vette. Guy rolls down his window, leans out, starts pointing at me.

Did I leave my trunk open? Is there a hobo I’m dragging behind me? Who knows, I roll the window down:

Vlad: What’s up?

White dude: Hey man, we install home theatre systems and we just had a cancellation. I can give it to you half off!

Vlad: Sorry to hear man, appreciate it but I don’t need one?

White dude: I hear you but it’s over half off, everyone needs one!

Vlad: Thanks man, but I live in Orlando.

White dude: <shrug> It’s a great system, maybe for an extra room? We can have someone come out and install it for you there.

Vlad: I appreciate the offer, good luck with the sale.

Now, was the system hot? Unlikely, company logos all over the car and he wore a logo shirt.

Could it be that they really just got an order pulled after they drove all the way to the place to be rejected at the doorstep? Doubt that too.

So what is the deal really?

The deal is that you can count on wealthy or busy business people not to be aware of what the things are actually worth. But one way they got to that point was by working hard and taking advantage of every opportunity that comes across. You want to come into my home and install some stuff that I’m practically stealing on the street? Who am I to say no?

The unique selling opportunity is that these guys likely travel up and down the street all day long between installations and they pull up to the cars and run a sales pitch that is far more sophisticated than most of the people reading this post can ever pull off.

Profiled audience (expensive car) with vanity issues (“VLAD” license plate) and most of all a captive audience stuck in traffic likely bored out of their mind.

It’s like ghetto Skymall – I’m stuck here with nothing to do and someone wants to entice me to play with shiny toys?

The largest component of marketing for sales and leads is originality. Most of the time it’s not about the price (that comes later) and it’s not about the features (remember the purchase is emotional for the benefit not logical) and everything else comes only after you have their attention.

Folks complain that their marketing isn’t working because they are operating in a crowded market with indistinguishable alternatives all trending towards being commoditized. So the only way to uniquely distinguish yourself is your marketing – and many opt out for the cookie cutter advertising, pre-canned and sent by other people in your own market. Your ability to convert a disinterested third party into someone that will pick up the phone hinges on your marketing budget to continuously slam the person with junk mail and phone calls – all of which they receive all day long from your competitors.

How much money could you possibly save if you could clearly communicate your differentiation on the very first interaction that sets you apart from the others – good or bad?

This is how I roll..

I know you’re probably thinking that this is a nice story but how do you implement it. If I told the 60,000 of you reading this then there would be 60,000 of you doing it and the whole concept would fall apart. Does it actually work to stand out? Well, you are reading this, so yeah, it works.

The last bit of unapologetic, shameless, slimy vendor whore, pimping I’ve done was in Dallas a few months ago. I have long term hopes of replacing my staff with a webcam and a Lego robot. It’s a dream.

I was installing a webcam that pointed at my development server rack (read: fire hazard compiled from things Vlad found on eBay) and while I was working I invited people to hang out with me. So people came on, chatted with me, I talked, did tours.

One of my Twitter followers emailed me for the first time and told me that they were thinking about going with us but got a contract in the works with RackSpace because they didn’t know what the infrastructure looked like.

Oh reeeeeeaaaaaly? 

Hard selling – 4 TB on my shoulder, bitch!

I added the guy to my MSN messenger, started the webcam on my laptop and took him on an impromptu tour of the data center. This is the server room. This is the switching cage. These are your options of racks. This is the cage we can do when you want to grow. This is the HVAC. This is the readout on the A/C – 65 degrees, brr.

Then I showed off the raised floors, the Diesel generators, the different cage configurations. I did a on-demand pimp session of the data centers that I never could have recorded on the camera and put up on the web – nobody would watch a goofy guy run around a data center blowing his pants off by the air flow output from a huge 42U rack.

But by the time I had made it back to my development cage and put my servers down there was a quote copy in my inbox that we beat by 20% the same day and by Monday closed a huge contract.

Aaaaalways be pimping.

Is it so different from the guy leaning out the window trying to push a home theatre system? Is it so low to take pride in your work that you can sum up the courage to show what you’ve built and can offer people?

If you are in this market and you’re struggling… you need to step your game up.

Got a pretty disturbing IM earlier yesterday, which will probably explain why some of us keep such a watchful eye over the economic events:

“side note most of your AUS clients are now getting screwed hard by the AU/US Dollar changes.. we lost 35% in the last 3 weeks”

Ouch. Now, if you’re only charging 30% markup on ExchangeDefender you’re better off just burning money. If you are letting go of it for less than $4/month you’re really missing out on the point of the product – people pay hundreds of dollars for just Exchange backup features in their backup software – to get the client back in business a few hours or days later – you mean to tell me you can’t show the value in having their exact Exchange 2007 replica on a 10 second notice (or however long it takes you to open Internet Explorer and type in https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com)

That’s besides the point though, if you are doing business with any foreign entity you are at the mercy of exchange rate fluctuations which means your profitability margin is tied to the economic prosperity (or perception thereof) of another country – not to the value add that you provide.

Food for thought people. The world may be flat in terms of communications and idea exchange, but it ain’t flat when it comes to money. How do you deal with the fluctuations in pricing that impact your profitability margin by an unpredictable amount each month? This isn’t just a pricing change that you can announce, adjust and move on…

If you’ve got an idea people are listening…. 🙂

To this day Office Space is probably the best depiction of what life is like in corporate America. You show up after a great weekend just to face the crap from everyone you interact with – then you pass the buck on to someone else and hope that the person downstream from you doesn’t have suicidal tendencies that would loop the problem right back to your desk.

By now you’re pretty familiar with my business model – we are the big data center provider for apps and services to resellers, large corporate IT departments, etc. This means that Monday morning is when we get every complaint about everything that has popped up on other peoples networks. I know exactly how this process works:

“Ok, I could fix this in 45 minutes… or I could watch youtube and say that I’ve alerted the vendor who is working on it. Ah well, it’s Vlad’s problem now.”

So what we’ve instituted to keep entrepreneurial laziness from affecting our support flow is “Case of Mondays” blog post. Every Monday by 9 AM folks are to report the issue they are working on across product groups. Consolidate down to a single paragraph or hopefully a short bullet point list.

This way we can preempt questions and close them out on the spot as problems that are being worked on. This will hopefully optimize support time because requests will no longer be investigated individually but will be tracked by a team and notified through the blog. This also eliminates the followup questions from people that obviously didn’t read the manual. “It’s an issue, being worked on, we’ll fix it and update the NOC site.”

Then when the resolution is here we can neatly document it under our KB and NOC as well as Shockey Monkey announcements so that everyone gets to stay in the loop with us. This is just a first step of the goal to integrate our process and support flow into ConnectWise and Autotask and eliminate a lot of waste from support cycle.

I know many of you are MSPs and are accountable to your customers for the state of the network. Take a look at what we are doing, what do you do beyond that to keep the clients who want to know in the know about your activities?

Wayne started this one on his blog but his issue is more about the tighter economic times than what I’d like to address here tonight: the underlying change in the service delivery model for IT is an opportunity, not a threat. The commoditization of a portion of the IT space spells doom to the one-dimensional quzi-businesses and IT consultants who

For the rest of us this is a tremendous opportunity to expand our businesses across new markets and new client bases using the core businesses as the base for the buildout of a versatile technology business that transcends beyond computer repair and installation.

This thesis is the subject of my first newsletter that you can sign up for here.

I decided to leave the free signup ride through the weekend since new signups are still coming in fast and strong. Since I am already tipping a hat that this will not be another piece of SPAM of self-promotional gloating but actual IT content, I figure I also ought to come clean and say that my readers that already signed up will stay on the subscription for free while future subscriptions will be for pay.

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It seems that the worse things look on Wall Street, the more people start to pay attention and show their disbelief at the way the financial systems actually work. Do companies actually borrow funds in order to keep operations flowing? Are bad financial decisions actually bundled, bought and sold without regulation of any kind? You mean the SEC doesn’t regulate the quazi-markets in which banks play with funny money loans in much the same way as the people in the ghetto shoot craps at the wall of a stop-n-rob convenience store?

True.. True.. True..

So what is wrong with the markets? What is wrong with my stocks?

Most stocks carry a P/E multiple. That means that the price you pay for a stock is generally at a higher (at times much higher) multiple of the actual profit the company generates annually. For example:

Microsoft’s P/E is 12, meaning for each share you buy at $23 you are actually paying 12x the amount of their annual profit. Apple is at 18x, General Electric at 9x, and Google at 22x.

Why are you compensating a company several times their income potential? Isn’t that just insane? Yes. It is. You do it because these companies are not valued just on their income, profits, dividends and general financial health, but the hopes and dreams of the investing public that these companies will continue to grow and with growth improve your portfolio and over the long term be worth far more than you paid for them initially.

Ah, the American dream. Full of hope, promise and expectations.

Alan Greenspan coined the term “irrational exuberance” as the .com boom was just getting started, to explain how investors become irrationally excited about the prospect for stocks and investments to do better as the fundamentals of the economy (low unemployment, low interest rates, low inflation, low energy costs) concern your average investor less and less.

Stock markets, and investments, are emotional reflections of our faith in the health of our country and businesses that make up it’s economy. We buy stocks because we believe the country, and all its citizens (particularly corporate citizens) will be better off in the future than they are today..

As you can tell by the numbers, the legacy of the Bush Administration and the prospects for the next one, are signaling that most people believe the worse times are ahead of us, not behind us.

All the more reason to learn about the economics, free markets, globalization and run a business that answers to the customer demands and needs.