Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Yesterday was a slow day, with all the 1st of the month stuff wrapped up people tend to sit back, refocus, adjust their appointments and plan for the week ahead so Monday morning doesn’t start on a bad note. It’s also time when we look at what others in the company are doing, developers look at support, support looks at ops and facilities it’s all a part of oiling the machine. At some point in the afternoon I get an IM:

Stamantha says:

Why is Sheldon updating tickets? I have him on vacation this week.

Now, what I’m about to share with you is not in any self-help book, HR guide, socialist pamphlet or Islamic fatwa. Perhaps it should be. Ready?

There is no award for doing your job.

There is no award for doing what you’re expected to. Meeting expectations is.. well.. a requirement to remain employed. If you sit on that line you will be the first one gone. Hate to break it down like that but it’s the truth. People who do the bare minimum do not get promoted, they do not get raises, they do not get bonuses.

Same goes for delivering services. If you simply do what you said you would do you’ve earned your pay. Nothing more. If the five people around you are doing the same but also picking up the slack, documenting their work, contacting the customer for courtesy followups, managing their schedule and their customers demands.. well, those people get more money.

Somewhere between stupidity (working harder than those around you) and insanity (knowingly working harder knowing that no raise or bonus is guaranteed) there is a little thing called work ethic and that is what elevates the excellence of the team, the company and the solutions we deliver. If that sounds like Dilbert’s pointy haired boss saying our people are our greatest asset then I’ve hit my mark, because…

… because for the most part that whole thing is total bs that companies give their employees to keep them under delusion of future for just one more day. Efficient and flexible companies are not built on psych profilers, blank incentives and meaningless perks. Employees are not motivated by a shocky stick and a output measure every 60 minutes. Companies driven in such a way guarantee only one thing: that your employees will only do the bare minimum required to get to the next step, and they will resent you when they do the bare minimum for the next step and do not receive the anticipated result. Those folks are not on the same mission you are, if that is how you value your people, in an inverse proportion (the less I pay you, the more I make) then your employees will work the same way (the less I work the less stressed I will be and I will be happier)

Companies are built by example. Define goals, define requirements, define the effort required and then publicly reward the people that align themselves with your mission. Reward them publicly and excessively – you will find more of your people taking the same path.

Companies are built by leadership. Why are people working on vacation? Why are they looking at their case work after hours or getting stuff done whenever they get a chance? Because they see me do it. We are on the same page. I don’t jump into a room, smack a deadline on the wall and say “We’re going to get this done – Oh by the way, I’ll be in Hawaii next week, please try not to bother me.” This is not a Michael Jordan commercial, this is the truth about the American enterprise – if you are any kind of a leader people will follow you and try to be like you. So why not give the best possible example of working towards the common goal?

Companies are built with hard work. This doesn’t go without saying, it has to be said: If this stuff were easy everyone would do it and we’d be making minimum wage. But it’s not, and for us to stay where we are and get even better we need to work hard. We are not in this to just manage, to get by, to slide, to coast, to barely register. We are in this to be the best and it’s not easy.

So back to the question, why is Sheldon working while he is on vacation? Maybe he is a fool. Or maybe he understands what we are all about and is dedicated to the same goals that we’re all dedicated to. That’s not something you can profile, thats not something you can influence with the minimalist salary baits for incremental improvement..  That is something you establish by example, leadership and hard work.

For years Dell lead the way of ugly PC manufacturing. Their claim to fame has been the cheapest and most generic PC on the planet, delivered to your doorstep in any variation of ugly you want.

Beige, duotone silver, black did not matter in the rainbow of ugly because the competitive matrix was between price and performance and Dell had solutions in all the corners.

But then a funny thing happened.

Little fruit company out of Curpentino started making flashy computers that did pretty much what Dell’s solutions did. The little fruit company grew from obscure single digit percentage to being the third largest shipper of personal computers in America.

Suddenly, Dell could not grow its business and grow its margins. Suddenly things like design became important. Green became important. Style became relevant.

Dell was no longer just another fish in the ugly pond. It did what all the great companies do when they get told they simply aren’t keeping up with the marketing expectations.

It evolved.

Dell didn’t roam the desert for subjects to trick into thinking they are better than the market tells them they are.

Dell didn’t turn and say that it simply didn’t compete with pretty and flashy.

Dell didn’t sit back and choose to fight with the same tools it has used to get to the top, they completely redid their product line, changed their values.

Dell reinvented itself.

Little lesson for all of us. It doesn’t matter if we think we are right. It doesn’t matter what the perception is or who is causing the disruption.

What matters is listening to the clients, to the line of people lining up around the door to give us their money, and making sure we satisfy them.

There are parts of business I truly hate, one of those being collecting money.

Yeah, I know, as a CEO I’m supposed to be taking the balance of accounts receivable every month and exchanging it for quarters and nickels and dimes to fill my money bin so I can swim in it like Scrooge McDuck.

Alas, it’s not that pretty.

It’s more like going through the endless list of ignored invoices, expired credit cards, moody credit card transaction processors and processing rules, fee adjustments and other fun stuff.

Every 2nd day to the end of the month we do the same shaking the money tree routine and frankly it ruins my day. Why? Because every month there is some schmuck that refuses to pay an invoice for the service that he isn’t using. Even while using the said service to send us an angry email telling us that he isn’t using it.

I refuse to pay for ExchangeDefender, we cancelled months ago!!!!!

ExchangeDefender Message Security: Check Authenticity

Argh!

I feel like a mafia kingpin on the 30th.

I’m making phone calls asking where the check for protection is at.

You gonna pay for your antispam or am I gonna have to break some kneecaps?

No, I will not barter offsite backup fees for rum, it be gold I’m after!

Where my money at……

Anyone been terribly successful with hiring collections staff that would like to share a way to build a business that collects reliably and doesn’t annoy or beat down its customers in the process?

Summer months tend to be dead for us, and with the tougher economy out there I’m checking our KPI’s every day to see dip in either services or subscriptions. As bad as things seem, we going to have our strongest month on the books even for god knows what month in a row and with Shockey Monkey 2.0 and ExchangeDefender 4.0 online launching in August things are looking remarkably good indeed.

So why the paranoia? The bottom of the market is eroding. That’s about as politely as I can put it. The SPFs have long disappeared and riff-raff is on it’s way out as well. As I have written many times, with very very very few exceptions, being small is rarely a choice. It reflects in the service dropoffs and client quality of the bottom tiers as the service losses aren’t to a competitor of ours (Postini, MessageLabs) but back to the server or more commonly just null routing (as in company gone). And as the bottom client base disappears, so do the solution providers. We’re seeing a lot of people teaming up with other smaller IT shops but by far and large most people are out getting jobs.

That in a nutshell is my greatest going concern with OWN. We have worked very, very hard to leave SMB and count on our partners but not a day goes by that we do not get a former partner account call in direct and say that their consultant simply vanished. This forces our hand – if we cannot find a partner to refer to, we have to decline and lose a client to retail-based services organization. There is some talk here of providing direct support though I am not sure how we can figure out the numbers for level 1 staff around the clock and maintain our service levels where they are. So that’s a problem.

 So far we haven’t figured it out. Smallbiz disappearance is something that I’ve written here at length, much to the dismay of many of the people that self-identified with the SPF term I coined a long time ago watching the MAPS resellers at TS2 events that called themselves consultants. But apparently the choice to focus on small business for a lot of the shops we work with has been a wrong one. When you are small you cannot reach a significant diversity in the verticals, and most of the time geographic bounds are insurmountable (though I know a lot of people that will fly around the country to service all the branches) so if you are bringing in $50 – $75K a year you’ve got a pretty good life, but when one or two out of ten clients go south and your cost of doing business skyrockets you are facing pressure on margins as well as account loss. So much for a lifestyle, eh? I had a guy call me last week and lay out his “lifestyle” business plan and his challenges… and I felt like crap because there was just nothing I could tell him. I have degrees in business and engineering, I’m programmed to seek diversity, grow and solve problems. What this guy saw as his competitive advantage is turning out to be an Achilles heel to a lot of partners who in a tough economy have to face reality, partner up with the others in the marketplace and take a good look at their business processes and reevaluate direction. From talking to a number of them, it seems looking at the EBS/SBS launch didn’t quite resonate with their clients and they figured they could make more money working for someone else.

As for us, we keep putting more money in talent, equipment and services and people are lining up around the building to sign up. Remarkable growth with ExchangeDefender which with 4.0 enhancements will pretty much decimate everything else on the market (thats just my unbiased opinion), the offsite backup business is growing insanely and with 5.5’s addition of continuous data protection available now and hardware independant restores expected around Thanksgiving, with the global demand for Exchange+SharePoint $10/10GB combo.. our biggest issue is finding a direct compromise and how to deal with the small business partner attrition. I wish it was as simple as if ($revenue > $level1_support_salary) count_de_money();

Advice? You know the #….

You have never been in charge of data center ops if you have never turned to your staff and said: “Can we just burn all this s#it and start over?”

What a messed up day. Everything crashed today. Including a Linux server that has been up and running for over 500 days without a restart. Everything from a $399 server to servers with $399 network controllers.

And then people look at me sideways when I say we will not support EBS/SBS. I will no longer approve purchases and deployment of single point of failure solutions. It’s 20-fn-08, overpowered hardware is dirt cheap and we are designing infrastructure like we just got out of the great depression and are trolling up and down the L looking for coal rocks to trade for parts. Come on, who needs this stress!!!

Drinking it away at Chillis and blogging from my iPod.