Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Man, what a fun exhausting and adjusting few weeks it has been. Since I’ve come back to work (my little guy is almost 5 months old) we’ve completed an audit, shipped two products, put in some huge partnerships in queue that I never thought I’d ever see. Speaking of hell freezing over:

That’s Arnie Bellini, CEO of ConnectWise, hanging out in the ExchangeDefender booth at the ConnectWise conference. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we’re up to here.

I am not ready yet to talk about things in great detail but suffice to say, I am coming back from my break with a lot of objectives that will effectively take us to the next step. This past week, both leading up to ConnectWise, booth stuff, talking about my company and our solutions, slimy vendor whoring, hanging out with Dave and Erick, spending a ton of time talking to Dan from LPI, Akash from Zenith, meeting so many of my partners and really talking about what truly matters and creates for the possibility of success..

Let’s just say that the “Turbo” button has been pressed 🙂

I really appreciate it when you folks email me. My address is vlad@vladville.com. I do read all of it, if it impacts what I work in I even respond (if it doesn’t you’re more likely to get a response by posting a comment here and calling me out on it in the open and letting the world judge who the bigger fool is) – so yesterday I got called out for being unpatriotic for my previous comments:

“In this struggle the last thing we need is for people like you to be second guessing funding for people in trouble. Very unpatriotic Vlad!!!!”

Ok, so here is the difference between “funding” and “bailout” and why it’s not a good thing for anyone.

Love me or hate me, I have a fairly consistent set of what is right and wrong and bailing out the idiots for their catastrophic lack of work ethic or competence is a dangerous long term proposition. Once upon a time I wrote a blog post titled “Is the IT community a good substitute for training” where I argued that helping people bridge the gaps across their areas of incompetence is a practice that endangers the end users that are then serviced and damaged by the consultants, sometimes beyond repair. Needless to say, ’twas not a popular thing to say.

Yesterday, I pretty much said the same thing about corporate America.

I’ve been saying the same thing about people who reject the notion of taxing and expect someone else to fix their mistakes.

Here is the bottom line: When you fail, and fail big, there should be consequences. That is what keeps people in line and always calculating tradeoffs, being risk averse, responsible for their decisions.

That is what keeps companies honest and less likely to float the entire company down the tube in order to gain massive payoff at the expense of everyone losing their jobs.

That is what makes people put reasonable investments, work with others, compete on price and services.

The initial .com boom was fueled by the “do-no-wrong” Venture Capital funding that basically encouraged people to build castles on sand beaches as close to the wave because the oceans were going to freeze over real soon now. How did that turn out? Everything but the biggest telcos went under and now we have no choice and no competition. We have three telcos with effectively the same pricing.

When you eliminate risk you encourage people to be irresponsible. If you’re well taken care of and have nothing to lose and the more you fail the more likely you are going to get saved with a huge severance, you not only get encouraged to dream big but you are almost penalized if you fail little. You have to fail huuuuge.

That is not the American dream, that is not corporate America, that is not how this country was built and how the great industries and innovation we have here came about. It came from some frugal people (Ford, Walton, Gates, Jobs) who kept a tight ship and did all they could to optimize their workforce and their offering until they had their own bankroll to change the world and call the shots.

If we change the rules now, and we have, we have effectively become worse than Russia. When you take the incentive out of the markets to perform and be responsible to your clients and employees you end up with stagnating companies on one end with a totally demotivated and depressed workforce not interested in education, and megalomaniac assholes with world domination goals on the other. Russia came under fire a few years ago when they institutionalized (i.e. Government came in, claimed taxes weren’t paid and they jacked the largest oil company in the country) a successful and growing industry. Our government is buying out and covering for the failing industries who are failing due to their own overindulgence in their excesses. Who got to this point by fueling the real estate boom where credit was extended to everyone with no questions asked.

Congress is set to vote today to give the White House the blank check to buy out distressed properties. You remember what happened the last time we gave the Bush Administration a full unaccountable control over anything he wanted to do with no checks and balances? Iraq War. Patriot Act.

Folks are scared of a massive failure. They are afraid to let the system implode in a public way ahead of elections because their jobs are on the line if it starts to seem like they sat through some really bad events. America be damned and all its hundreds of thousands of employees that are about to be homeless.

All so we can save a few politicians.

One day we will return to the days of accountability and risk–reward tradeoffs and maybe at that point people will be able to start investing and creating a promise of returns for the hard work. That day certainly doesn’t look to be close.

Woke up this morning a little low on cash with a worthless I.O.U. certificate for AIG up my crack. Government lended $85 billion to a worthless insurance company that leveraged itself to the eyeballs and with a 5% market drop found itself basically becoming a part of the government and part owned by every American that is bailing it out. So this is what Communism feels like?

The biggest and richest companies that make money offering Americans financial advice and financing “the american dream” are going out of business in a blowout meltdown. If that’s not a sign of how fu*ed we are I don’t know what is.

Everyone likes to talk about the keys to success.

But what about the keys to failure?

I’m dealing with my own today. I am sitting here with two people in the the Adobe Connect conference and we’re working on the new partner guide. As we are writing, revising, second guessing and questioning the way we phrase every other word I am left with a mixture of remarkable boredom and nausea. Kind of like after the thanksgiving dinner with the inlaws you don’t like. Except I’m hungry too.

My sincerest hope is that I don’t pass out from whitepaper-induced coma before I finish writing this sales-contraceptive.

This is what we’re going to give our partners to help them sell our products? I think we should just slap our competitors logos on it and ship it to their partners and see if we can kill some competition.

Maybe I am just dead wrong and the car salesman route to selling bits is better.

I wonder how much money it would take to get Eric Ligman over here if he doesn’t own all of Microsoft SMB already 🙂

I am this || close to shooting an infomercial. Just me, camera, fake Rolex and 3 bottles of fake Viagra.

Hey there. This is our web site. Yeah, no words. Why? Because you’re probably illiterate. Congratulations on finding the f’n Play button. Now let me tell you what you need to do to give us money so you never have to see ANY of these (pointing to the fake Rolex and Viagra) again. (Buy it now action sequence) If they are still watching segway to some really disgusting pr0n that someone keeps on #@%@% clicking on or it wouldn’t keep on showing up every damn day.

Well.. I think I just regained my passion to promoting what it is I do for a living.

Over the past week I have been complaining about burnout and the ongoing audit and process implementation we are doing. This affects everything from payroll to billing to support to documentation to yes, even me.

You see, we all have a responsibility to the company as a whole and that means sticking to the mission.

So why am I so deeply involved in fixing the mistakes? Partially because this is my company and I either made the mistakes myself or didn’t spot them when they were being made.

I would like to note that I could really care less if the mistake is something we are doing wrong or if it’s just something we are not doing as efficiently as we should have. As a software company we are in control of the code and experience our clients have, so if we aren’t doing everything we need to in order to please our clients we are making a mistake.

I feel that a sense of responsibility is key to leadership when it comes to managing and running a company. If you can’t be held responsible for your actions how do you expect anyone working for you (with a lot less of a profit share at risk) to feel responsible?

Have I never heard of delegation? Yes. And don’t take me wrong, I am not doing this by myself. I am possibly not even the hardest working one here. But when something is broken it is your responsibility to give it your all to fix it. People pick up on that. If I am asking my people to work weekends and longer shifts just so we can get to where we need to be as an organization what sort of a message do I want to send to my team:

Good luck working this weekend. I’m going to Disney World and after that I’ll ride around in my Ferrari while watching you on a webcam to make sure you’re working fast enough.

Pull something like that and you may as well flush the loyalty of your staff down the toilet. It’s much easier to keep the good people than to try to hire, train and nurture new ones.

Metrics

We have a little thing around the office that we call a fuck-o-meter.

We use it to gauge the partners that are on their way out of a business. You see, direction, vision, perseverence, worth ethic… all of those come from the top down.

So when we find a perpetual entrepreneur at the top that seems to do everything but actually run their business we can easilly see a company that doesn’t stick to its mission and it’s days are numbered. I’ve been running this business for a long time and I know that sometimes the problems are so large that it’s almost impossible to see a way out of them. Sometimes you are just blindsighted by the problems you never could have forseen. For example, just yesterday I learned that the trade show booth we purchased for the ConnectWise event did not get proofed by anyone and the vendor failed to notify us until we noticed that it hasn’t arrived. Now I get to look like a total jackass while people around me scramble to get something put together on a 48 hours notice. The fun of this gig is that things like this happen on a weekly basis for one reason or another, in one department after another.

I know that there are times when the grass is greener on the other side.

I know that the constant cycle of wins and losses takes their toll on the leadership that actually cares about their work and the client base.

This however is what separates winners from perpetual entrepreneurial failures.

The company whose leadership is not capable of even sticking to the mission they have built for themselves is doomed.

The staff of the company that is stuck working overtime while the boss is on his 4th mini-vacation this month is looking for a new job.

The company whose supposed leaders are starting up new businesses and taking away from the main mission of the company take note.

If you work in such a company – grab a pen: Your owners are shifting focus and starting new companies because they think the company is well.. as the meter implies 🙂 %*#%ed. Start searching for a new job.

People always ask me about the motivation, how I do it, what to do. It’s pretty simple: If you are asking people to bend over backwards for you and you’re a no-show then you clearly communicate to them that you have no faith in them

And believe me – as they are stuck sitting there 10-12 hours a day working for you they have more than enough time to think about it and become totally disgruntled.

The all seeing, all knowing..

How do I know this with such certainty? Well, as the CEO and the guy that has contacted every single partner we’ve ever signed up, my email address is on at least 20,000 email accounts out there.

That virtually guarantees me the front row seat to a corporate failure as people email their entire contact list about the exciting new venture they have set up in sellling wine. Or distributing Oxyclean. Or becoming an IT person and also a licensed distributor of DishTV, Coffee or whatever the current MLM scam happens to be.

Responsiblity to the Mission

So let’s loop back to the beginning. Every member of the team has the responsibility to the mission of the company. The mission of the company isn’t just a blind Dilbertarian view of corporate jargon – it includes what a company does to create value, how it makes money and how it compensates it’s people.

Nobody is more responsible to the company, to the clients and to the staff alike, than its leader.

And if the leadership isn’t involved in the company than their visiblity to the company activity also comes into question and ultimately the future of the company is bleak.

As you can tell, the course of action is pretty simple.

Your PR as a leader goes both ways. To your clients on the outside, to your employees on the inside. Want to be seen as a hard working guy thats on the same page with the company that cares about what you do and the people you work with….. or do you don’t want to be seen at all?

The “work” is the easiest part of running the company. And nobody cares that you are tired or burned out.

We’re about to embark on the largest hiring and marketing bump in the history of my little company. With growth come not just pains but the inevitable fix cycle to prepare and execute the company plan.

That sounds all nice and pretty, strategery as George Bush would put it, but the reality of the situation is pretty grim. At it’s most pessimistic level, it is a week of grueling torture where you are forced to sit through months and years of your mistakes in a slow and drawn out process attacking virtually every vital statistic of what you’ve dedicated your professional life to.

Once the shaming is done comes the realization that there are two ways to fix it (three, if you consider burning the place to the ground for insurance money and keeping a straight face while trying to explain how 30+ data center suddenly melted down): throw more people at the problem or throw away more money. Then you sit and watch people draw on the whiteboard, or pretty binders, their plan and recommended course of action.

Then when the plan is together and we actually start the hard work of bringing everything to perfection you as the leader get to hear all over that this stuff is so easy, how come we never did it all along…. which is sort of like giving everyone on your payroll a free license for kicks in the family jewels. Repeatedly. Daily.

Every mistake is a learning opportunity. Cultivating the process of continuous learning, change and adaptation across everything we do is something we still haven’t figured out completely. But it is something we’re trying to do.

But with this new plan we’re taking a week a month to attack top 10 problems with our company. This way we can fix the little problems as we go along without allowing them to become giant problems that we can’t do anything about. As we grow, it’s important to keep the standard of quality.

The only difficult part is coming to terms with spending a week each month on the floor in a fetal position while the ego and the crotch are repeatedly deflated and swollen to the point of looking like a coconut tree.