Here is a long insight into the mind of a madman…. Or perhaps something planned and executed very well?

I have written about this at great length and how we arrived at this very point in time is an incredible mixture of planning, luck and fortunate coincidences. The SBS Show is one of the most widely distributed podcasts on earth and among the principal influencers of small-to-medium business IT managers and IT solution provider owners. Here is the past, present and future.

Roughly about a year ago two friends got together on Skype and one bad voice check after another came up with a format and a way to distribute the many fortunes of the SBS community to the wider audience. The problems in the community at the time were:

• Limited Audience
• Limited Expression
• Lack of Portability
• Lack of Entertainment
• Lack of Credibility
• Lack of Globalization

We saw the SBS Show as an opportunity to break through those barriers and to pat my own back, I believe we have! SBS Show is downloaded on the average of 40-60,000 times during the first week and some of the more popular episodes have been downloaded more than half a million times, distributed through numerous venues and have spread like a virus. SBS Show engulfs the SMB technical and business expertise of consultants that are in it every day and provides it in a portable and entertaining way that is as encompassing as a four week thread on a newsgroup.

The benefit of the model is two fold. Experts and business leaders are willing to come on the SBS Show because of the tremendous audience and a friendly format that associates little pressure or committment, from people that make a small fortune doing what they are talking about. In turn, the audience is willing to give these folks an hour of their time because it is convenient and gives that inspirational push to get the audience started and thinking about the topic at hand. In the end both the contributor (guest) and the audience mutually benefit. Third intangible and unaccountable benefit for everyone is that the loop feeds on itself - the guest sells more books / software / solutions, raises profile in business and community, works with more people on a higher level and now has a brand new perspective to share with the audience that has grown yet again.

Rue Congdon

As Chris mentioned on his blog, he has decided to leave the SBS Show. He has listed his reasons for it but I’ll offer you mine as well.

I explained the model above to Susanne and Chris at the Microsoft WWPC. I explained the kind of impact we have been able to make with it and I further explained the kind of benefits we can expect if we worked harder at it. Although we have never directly benefited from the SBS Show, nor was there ever a financial incentive to do it, the show and the audience have certainly benefited all of our careers. The better the show, the more important the content, the bigger the audience, the more attention…. the more attention we get as its facilitators. Does that extend to job offers, insight at a higher level, powerful business and community connections, book deals or speaking engagements? Who knows, the bottom line is that anyone that listened to all 24 SBS Show episodes is ammasing a collective intelligence that spans dozens of books and hundreds of years of combined experience. How would you like to bounce ideas off someone that has that kind of access to some of the very best. Keep in mind that what you hear on the show is just a tidbit of what goes on in the discussions… because thats all the SBS Show really is. It’s a discussion.

The SBS Show is not for sale - but individually we are.

I feel this is where Chris got the raw end of the deal. You see, his business card does not read Chris Rue, Hee-Haw Hick Comedy Relief. It reads Chris Rue, MCSE, Master CNE, CCNA. If you spent 5 minutes with the guy that would become very apparent, but in the condensed format that the show takes he is more of a comedic relief than an expert.

I have to say this very feature is of a particular (emotional) problem for me as well. I get access to some of the brightest people at Microsoft but instead of talking to them about things that interest me the most I am reduced to questions like “Guy, tell me about expanded licensing rights” or “Peter, tell me how you walk someone through a support call if they panic.” Because the audience is the main beneficiary here I have to stoop down to the level that most of the audience is at. After all, we do it for the audience, not for our benefit. If it were for Vlad & Chris the discussion we’d have with the top level engineers and managers responsible for direction of products in a multi-billion dollar industry would be far different.

Even in the more socially friendly environment it is difficult to ask the questions that are on my mind. Instead I am left with “So Amy, what is a firewall” and at the end of the day it is hard to respect oneself.

But I am not complaining. The show is a lot of fun to produce and promote and it has brought in a lot of friends. It has also done a tremendous amount of good for a lot of people. 

This is where I, Chris and Susanne have to make our park in the snow and decide for ourselves whether the future benefits of the show to our personal careers are justified, whether they lead in the right direction, whether time is well spent, whether this is a community service or a service to the community, what level of growth both personal and professional is going to make sense. Chris had to make that call for himself.

Momma Didn’t Raise No Fool

There is a mad rush on the Internet to sell… everything. Every ear, every eye ball, every conference ticket, picture, blog entry and vlog frame has a monetary value attached to it. And as a result a lot of hacks are trying to jump in and cash in with the minimal of effort.

This is where the whole model falls apart.

If the SBS Show was for sale in terms of advertising, sponsorship, payola-style incentives from people to come on the show… it would lose credibility, fast. Listen to the SBS Show #23. What would you think about us if Karl Palachuck gave us even $20 to do him a favor and pump his book? You’d stop reading this post right about now because I obviously would be a sellout who no longer believed in the value being created for the community as a whole but as a greedy personal grab. Truth is, we promoted the heck out of Karl’s book because we loved it. Karl didn’t send us a book with a plea, a tshirt, a personal note. He just sent us a package and I couldn’t stop reading it. I kept on saying in my head “Holy s***, someone finally dumbed it down for everyone to take advantage of it.”; I told Chris, Chris came back and said let’s do the show.

I do not write about this a lot but there is a nearly endless line of people looking to give me a book deal or sponsor one thing or another. When I share this with others I do see dollar signs in their eyes, an opportunity to cash in. I got one such offer just yesterday, here was my rejection letter to them:

Thank you for the offer.

 

I am really flattered that you’ve taken your time to offer this to me. I love Exchange and love writing about it but fortunately I already have a real job that I love in running thousands of SBS/Exchange systems and wouldn’t trade it for the world.

 

Again, thank you for the offer. Very kind of you.

That is the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. I love what I do. The SBS Show, despite the audience, is just an extension of who I am and what I do. It is not another product line. It is not another asset to be leveraged, measured and sold. If and when it becomes that it will become as worthless and pointless as it can be.

I had this very conversation with Chris yesterday. He said “You should totally write a book” - So I did the math for him. I can sink 300 hours into writing a book fighting my deamons of illiteracy, get my name on the cover and make $50,000 maybe even six figures over years. Or I can sink 300 hours of equal effort into my company and make millions.

Momma didn’t raise no fool. What people that look from outside in do not see is the little thing called opportunity cost. Look it up.

Of Fortunes and Futures

There are really only two legitimate outcomes on every challenge: Live each day as if it were your last or pursue a long term strategy with predictable payoffs over time. These are great concepts to apply to a business, horrible concepts to apply to a hobby. Guess where on the pay scale SBS Show comes.

So really the future of the SBS Show today is no different from the future it had on the very first Skype call. “How do we get people to do ____?“

The future is in informing as many people as possible, in floating them up to the higher level, in opening more doors and providing more opportunities. You have to have a certain level of faith to accept that because it is vapor in the truest sense of the word. I already have a successful business. Chris already has a great job as a techie. Susanne is a brilliant business developer. Every guest that comes on is an expert at what they do and happy with who they are.

So thats the future. The future of the SBS Show is in what benefits the most and does so with a great deal of satisfaction and opportunity. The second it isn’t it fails to exist at its very core and it eventually fails to exist at all as its main proponents abandon it. The overall message and karma of an idea with an honorable goal is immortal. That message will persist long after Chris, Susanne, Vlad, SBS Show and community is around. That message is quite simple:

Help others be better. In turn they will make you better than you ever could be by yourself.

Post dedicated to the only person that can see through this and read what I’m actually saying.

SBS Show #24 features an interesting conversation on communication, design and management of a small business IT provider. Dave Sobel, CEO of Evolve Technologies, based in the metro DC area, joined us to talk about how he has and continues to apply lessons and strategies from the popular book e-myth to his IT practice. Why Dave? First of all because Dave had nothing to sell, he simply was very successful and very passionate about the way his business runs. As far as credentials are concerned, his company is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, 2006 Sales & Marketing Partner of the Year in the Small Business Specialist category, blogger, Mac User and one of a dozen or so SBSers that showed up at TechEd. We (myself, Chris Rue, Amy Luby, Dave Sobel) had lunch at WWPC and talked about sales strategies, process management, documentation, documentation, documentation. I felt it was imperative to get Dave on the show as soon as possible and discuss how to do things right. Consider this episode the e-myth for IT business owners. Dave talks about strategy, management, HR, documentation, training, communication, community and the importance of harmony and repeatability in all those areas.

You can see and hear Dave Sobel on Vladfire #14. You can see Dave’s company Evolve Technologies here. You can subscribe to his blog here. But I know what you’re most interested in so here it goes:

Download the SBS Show #24:
http://www.vladville.com/sbsshow/sbsshow-episode24.mp3

Note: I am turning off the comments for the time being for a major announcement about changes and news at the SBS Show. The show is not fully published, ie, it will not show up in iTunes today as I want to give my visitors the advantage on beating the thousands of people that will hit my network almost instantaneously by publishing the feed. Pass it on, if they want the SBS Show fast and hot off the presses today would be a good day to download it

Tropical Storm Ernesto landed on the Key West shores a few hours ago. This is our first large scale storm of the 2006 Hurricane Season so let’s be smart about it.

First of all, you can track the status of the hurricane at weather.com. They have a new trajectory map and tracking that is better than most news reports. As we all know these storms tend to change in power, trajectory, speed and danger so if you have not evacuated please bunker down. Better be prepared than to think back..

Stay tuned to the FloridaDisaster.org, our state division of emergency management. They have full advisories and most up to date information feeding from all other emergency organizations and reporting systems. Look to them as the first source in case of wide-spread damage.

Finally, and most importantly, all IT events this week have been cancelled.

Orlando IT Pro meeting has been cancelled.

Orlando events by Microsoft Corporation have been cancelled. The following email is courtesy of Matt Sharkey, the events cancelled include Microsoft Connections, Microsoft TS2, Microsoft Technet and Microsoft MSDN. Please do not show up at Waterford Lakes location on Thursday:

Subject: Microsoft Event Session Cancellation Notice to Registered Customers 

Thank you for your interest in Microsoft Connections.

Unfortunately, the event that you are registered for has been cancelled.

Event: Microsoft Connections

Event Code: 1032299248

Location: Theater - Regal Waterford Lakes Stadium 20 

We apologize for any inconvenience to you and your schedule. Please visit www.microsoft.com/connections to find the next event in your area, register for a webcast or download an episode of connections:unplugged.

Finally courtesy of Chuck Poole, if you are in South Florida and this turns out much worse than expected, here is a PDF file of Palm Beach Publix and Gas Stations operating on generator power. This is important in case you have not planned or have extenuating circumstances after the disaster as all refrigerators, pumps, payment processing systems, etc require power to run. Power is among the first things to go so thse will be your best bet.

Will keep you updated in case things get worse. Please stay tuned in to your local emergency management organizations. This is a very weak storm but a very good opportunity to practice, evaluate and revise your plans for the real diaster possibility as mentioned yesterday.

Dave Sobel is the President of Evolve Technologies and one of the more generous newcomers to the SBS community. We first met Dave at TechEd, place where you don’t get many people willing to admit they are SBSers and we talked about a number of advanced topics that will never see the light of day in the SBS world. Sad to say it but its true, most people in SMB just do not focus on these technologies. I taped the following video blog at Microsoft WWPC earlier last month and asked him about what makes his company so special and how they managed to become a finalist for an award as a Microsoft partner.

Runtime: 7 Minutes 5 seconds.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (37 Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (12 Mb)

P.S.: “Susanne rules” apply. Dave was actually my guest on the SBS Show yesterday (a link to which I’m going to hide right here to give you folks a head start on the thousands of downloads that usually cripple this box)

In the IT field we work tirelessly to prepare our clients for the eventual technological disaster, be it tape failure, disk failure, network device failure or outright infrastructure collapse. Very little time, by comparison, is spent on preparing the business for continuity during and after disaster. Continuity is how your business reacts, responds and communicates during the disaster and the expected level of service you provide immediately after the inevidable interruption to your business occurs. This post gives you a few hints on how to prepare for under $150 in under an hour.

Are you Evacuating?

I am in the infrastructure business. Ironically, the question I am forced to answer too many times is why we do not have any infrastructure in Florida. Even more ironically, it is the Floridians with the attention span of a fruit fly that ask that question. Let me answer it myself and let me provide you with the answer my coleague just gave me. OWN does not have any infrastructure in Florida because of the image to the right.

My friend Rich gave me this colorful response:

richwalkup says:

son of a damn weather – wouldn’t be so bad if the infrastructure down here wasn’t put together by toothpicks, legos, and dental floss

Let me preface the article by saying that no matter where you live your infrastructure is similar to the above. If you happen to be an optimist let me assure you (having gone through four hurricanes) that no infrastructure is prepared for a massive migration of millions of people.

The $150 business continuity

Regardless of the extent of the disaster, your clients will expect you to be able to serve them. Hungry people will show up in front of a McDonalds that has no power expecting a Big Mac. Manufacturing plant you provide IT services for will expect you to be able to address and assess their situation no matter the circumstances..

The key to business continuity is communication.

People will forgive you for many things. People will not forgive you for ignoring them. So if you only have $150 and an hour make sure you can have a steady communications channel between you and your client base. It is not too late to prepare for this even if you have an hour to go to the impending doom.

The shopping list:

Disaster Cell Phone

Skype Dialin

Analog Phone

Disaster Blog

Here is a quick breakdown of what all of these will help you do and how.

Disaster Cell Phone

First of all keep in mind that the disaster cell phone is something you purchase as a failover, not as a primary line of communications with your client base during and after a disaster. You can purchase a prepaid cell phone anywhere and get 1000 minutes (expire every year) for $100. I personally use Tmobile because of the network reliability I have come to enjoy in my travels. Nearly every carrier has a prepaid offering you can take advantage of.

Pro: Cheap, mobile, effective, low footprint (easy to grab and go)

Con: Will likely not do you any good in the area that suffered from disaster because cell towers are the first to go.

Skype Dialin

Skype dialin is your mobile voicemail. If you happen to get your telco services from a local CLEC that also happens to be in the same geographical area you are the disaster effect is twofold – they will either be destroyed along with you or will suffer extreme delays and outages due to call volume. Skype Dialin will run you $30 a year for a phone number and voicemail that you can check from anywhere. You will not have to deal with voice messages and SMS being delayed hours or days when you are supposed to be responding in realtime.

Pro: Cheap, effective, virtual.

Con: Requires network connectivity or access to a payphone.

Analog Phone

Analog phone is for the ride-it-out-warrior. Many chose to ride out the Wilma hurricane which was only category 1 when it hit South Florida last year. Most were without power for at least four days, some even longer. When all else fails you can always rely on a 100+ year old technology. Remember that phone service is operational even if power goes out. You can buy an analog phone at Walgreens for $5–10.

Pro: Cheap, reliable.

Con: Ugly.

Disaster Blog

Even if you are not a blogger, even if you are illiterate, you need to have a place to organize yourself after the disaster. Like it or not you will become a news source for people because the first action everyone takes is to start surveying what is left. If your clients were smart to evacuate they can access your blog (makeshift web site) that can be updated as you find out more and more information and news that may not make headlines. For example, lets say your town in NW Virginia floods. Will CNN cover that in detail if you’re in Ohio? Highly unlikely. So you turn to local sensationalist news channel and newspaper which is more interested in the drama than the reporting. They also are unlikely to report on the technical issues. You should. You can get a blog at blogger.com, wordpress.com, typepad.com or any place you wish.

Pro: Free.

Con: Audience will need a network connection to access it.

Execution

The real key to success here is to prepare yourself to communicate with your clients during and after the disaster.

Preparation is what you do BEFORE the disaster.

Your clients need to know your failover phone numbers, they need to know your blog address, they need to have a way to contact you. So start informing them NOW. Putting up a blog as your roof is coming off your house is not a great way to start. Emailing business owners while they are ankles deep in water is not a good way to initiate a conversation. Telling them about these resources after they haven’t been able to reach you for two weeks is not going to build goodwill. If they have a choice between printing out your email or printing out their insurance policy I assure you that you will lose out.

So start today. Send out the blog address today. Fax over the info today. Call the office manager and ask if they are evacuating. Ask them what they have planned. Well prepared and organized business is not afraid of disasters, it is ready for them. It took you 5 minutes to read this post. It will take you another 55 to get it all together. So hold that CTRL button down and click on these links to put it in motion:

Skype Dialin – Tmobile Prepaid – Blogger.com

The clock is ticking, hopefully the survival of your business is not. 

The biggest problem not just with WordPress but any blog is the eternal vertical list. Bloggers use lists of all kinds to fill up their blog and often abuse lists to show connections, interests and affiliations their posts do not. This post is all about taming those vertical lists and making WordPress categories comma delimited (means separated by commas).

Great Ways To Fill Your Blog

First of all, the problem: endless vertical lists. Nothing says “mine is bigger” like a huge vertical list. Here is what these unordered lists actually represent:

Blog Rolls - The list of people I met once that haven’t updated their site in 6 months

Categories - Watch me pretend my rants are actually organized and coherent thoughts

Links - Show people you’re a true intellectual by linking to Club Jenna, The Collected Works of Shakespeare, Vivid Entertainment and Michio Kaku’s String Theory. 
 
Comment Rolls - Nothing says “I am thought provoking!” like showing recent comments as a list with the top one being “PrinterCartriges4Less on Contemporary Evangelical Literature“

Vertical AdWords - All the cash I’d make if people actually found me interesting.

Flare - Nothing screams Blogosphere like a collection of Web 2.0 crap found all over the net. First you link every which way someone can subscribe to you. Start by listing every feed format known to man. Then you help idiots that can’t cut and paste add you to MSN, My Yahoo, Bloglines, Google, Live Links, Kinja. After you have collected every icon on the web put that “Bloging Loser” crown on your head by putting in a ClusterMap. Nothing shows people your irrelevance more than a dead map of hits, most from random search engine spiders. Congratulations, you’re a blogger!

And the best for last Post Calendar - Show people just how dead your blog really is.

So now that we’ve identified all the flaws with standard blogging templates let’s look at the positive side. Let’s assume you actually had something interesting to say but still wanted to put up some flare. The problem you run into with even minimal use of side items is that your main content gets squished down to the point that your main thoughts look more like haiku than an article. Your options are to either stick these items in the header or the footer but if you had a lot of relevant stuff to put in, such as categories, your lists would take up more than half the page. The answer to taming lists is through hacking and css. I’ll let you pick which one is better.

Hacking Lists with CSS

The simplest way to comma delimit the category list in WordPress is to simply style the list accordingly. Mark Newhouse has a great article on taming lists in general but here is all you need to know about managing your categories in WordPress.

First, stick the following in your css stylesheet:

#inline-list {
 }

#inline-list p {
 display: inline;
 }

#inline-list ul, #inline-list li {
 display: inline;
 }

#inline-list-gen ul li:after {
 content: “, “;
 }
  
#inline-list-gen ul li.last:after {
 content: “. “;
 }

Now you just have to enclose your category list and apply the above style to it:

<div id=”inline-list”>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_cats(); ?>
</ul>
</div>

By default wp_list_cats generates <li> items (list items) which can be ordered, unordered or sorted any way you wish. The simplest way to consolidate these lists is by coma separating them so they take up as little room as possible.

Hacking WordPress code to Comma-delimit

Unless you’re a web monkey hacking the code directly is a lot more fun. Not only is it dirty but it also brings you closer to the code by making you maintain a list of changes every time WordPress is upgraded.

First, disable <li> formatting by passing ‘list=0′ parameter to wp_list_cats:

<?php wp_list_cats(’list=0′); ?>

Second, hack the code. When you pass list=0 parameter Wordpress appends <br /> after each category. Sticking a comma instead of a line break can save a ton of space. Using other separators (% | o x) can be even more stylish. So how do you make WordPress do this? Edit wp-includes/template-functions-category.php and replace <br /> with , on line 375 (in WordPress 2.0.4)

if ( $list ) {
 $thelist .= “\t<li”;
 if (($category->cat_ID == $wp_query->get_queried_object_id()) && is_category()) {
 $thelist .=  ‘ class=”current-cat”‘;
  }     
  $thelist .= “>$link\n”;
} else {
 $thelist .= “\t$link <br />\n”;
}

BEFORE:
$thelist .= “\t$link <br />\n”;
AFTER:
$thelist .= “\t$link, \n”;

Simple as that. In the PHP code sample above an IF construct is used to evaluate the $list parameter you passed through wp_list_cats(’list=0′); It’s a simple boolean (0,1 - false, true) comparison. Top part of the code is executed if the $list value is true (‘list=1’) and else is executed if it’s.. well, guess

So there you go, from a 6 foot vertical list to a pretty block like this one:

How tall IS this ladder?

Some template functions implement before and after arguments to allow you to pass values before and after inputs and outputs. Unfortunately, wp_list_cats() does not support that so your only option is to write a filter. That however is a discussion to have much later.

Please keep in mind that I’m just showing you how to get your feet wet and how to edit and tweak the simplest of things in WordPress code. Hopefully this gets rid of your fears of things exploding and buildings coming down if you make slight changes. Hopefully it also makes you think about code, the simplicity and ease of transforming it to do what you want. You’ve got to start somewhere and this is just the least painful way.

As you know I use WordPress as my blogging platform simply because I love PHP and the simplicity that comes with a beautiful syntax. This post shows you how to create a rotating banner for your WordPress blog.

Getting Your Banners Together

First of all this is just a dirty template hack that will not go away as you upgrade your WordPress distribution. The first step is to create a set of banners you want to rotate and name them sequentially. For example, mine are named vladville-bar1.jpg, vladville-bar2.jpg, vladville-bar3.jpg and so on. Here they are:

Look familiar? Great. Notice how only one number in the filename changes? Now upload all of these banners to the same directory, mine are in /images.

Hack The Template

The second step is to actually hack the template file. Because WordPress is PHP based you can embed PHP code anywhere in your template. Mine is in the header.php but you can use this trick anywhere you want to.

Remember how only the number was different? The only thing I did was instruct PHP to select a random number from a range and insert that number in HTML code. So here is the entire mastery:

<table background=”/images/vladville-bar<?php echo rand(1,23); ?>.jpg” width=”800″ height=”155″ border=”0″>

Thats the entire mastery right there. When the template is parsed by WordPress and PHP it will call a rand function which returns a random integer in the range between 1 and 23. I happen to have 23 images on the server so returning a random number between 1–23 will return a number of one of the images in that range. The <?php part tells the server to start interpreting the next block of text as code instead of just plain filler. The ?> stops it. The echo sends stuff back to be printed and 1,23 are parameters sent to the rand function. Every time the page is reloaded the rand() function should return a different random number between 1–23 giving my visitors a different random banner from my pool of 23. For example:

First time rand(1,23) executes it returns 5. As a result, you will see vladville-bar5.jpg

<table background=”/images/vladville-bar5.jpg” width=”800″ height=”155″ border=”0″>

Second time rand(1,23) executes it returns 17. As a result, you will see vladville-bar17.jpg

<table background=”/images/vladville-bar17.jpg” width=”800″ height=”155″ border=”0″>

Thats all there is to it but I figured I’d start slow and build up. Imagine the possibilities here, you can insert greetings based on the time of day, display random quotes, insult visitors by guessing their IQ with rand(5,30) and so on.

So get creative. Your blog does not have to be borg it should reflect your individuality. After all, its all yours.

Welcome to the fully redesigned Vladville. As you can tell all the pieces that I’ve been integrating into this site have slowly come together. This post is to announce what I’ve done and to explain some of the ambiguous posts over the past month or so.

Hey, check this out…

I originally started Vladville because I could not handle the volume of mail our partner mailing list generated. I had roughly 4,000 businesses on a distribution list where I’d post daily tips about deals, security, opportunities, etc. This is where the law of large numbers kicks in: no matter how irrelevant of a tip you give there are usually enough bored people that will find it useful and try to research it through you. So yes, a $850 Dell 1800 deal might strike an eye but because we know each other and it’s email let’s start a chat – “Thanks for the link Vlad, by the way, does this come with rack rails”

I looked at other blogs and saw them as a great solution to make it inconvenient for people to waste my time. It worked! Even better, it drew even more people into the business and gave me a creative outlet that I did not have before. It’s easy to create a braindump online or throw advice at unsuspecting strangers like a monkey at a zoo when you know you will not become the support staff behind that post for all eternity. Try that with a channel partner and you’ve not only created a dependant addict but also a lawsuit when you tell them to figure it out on their own.

Then something interesting happened. When you have a large enough audience that is not in a particular pigeon hole you start to hear things that you may not hear on the street or a phone call. People blow up their servers. People blow up their workstations. Why? Because they didn’t follow the documentation. So as a joke I figured that if people were illiterate I can perhaps serve it to them over radio. That’s where SBS Show came from.

So you read the documentation, you follow community sites, you listen to the SBS Show and you learn more and more about these people. They become your friends. Naturally, you want to see who you are dealing with. Sometimes that image is pleasant and causes people to call you and ask for the girls cell phone number. Sometimes the image is of Die Fuhrer and people wonder where she hides the pitchfork and horns. But by providing the audio and video to complete the picture you realize that we’re all people, all interested in pretty much the same thing and that inspires communication, drops reservations and preconceived notions we have on one another. Email is the worst way to convey a message, not to mention mood, attitude or character.

Selling out..

So about eight months ago or so I officially sold out to Google and put up Adwords on Vladville. I figured with all the traffic I could at least break even on the SBS Show traffic. I did. More than broke even. I believe I even bragged about making more money off the blog than the Jr. Crackwhore working at McDonalds.

Unfortunately, McDonalds was exactly the place I would end up at if I allowed Adwords to stay. You see, every time I posted about Exchange all the ads would target my competitors. I was literally sending people out of my wallet every time I said something useful. When I didn’t I would get all sorts of things that I either did not believe in or I found outright offensive.

That’s the problem with selling out you see. When you sell out you no longer control the message, you are forced into a spot where you might have to promote things you do not believe in. No thanks, I like to sleep at night.

Back to Basics..

So everything went really well on this blog until TechEd wrapped up. Someone left a relatively innocent comment that really rubbed me the wrong way. In short, they likened me to Paris Hilton of the IT scene because I seemed to be everywhere, know everyone and have pics, video, sound and everything short of the smell of the place.

Now I didn’t fail at an extended list of careers to end up in IT. This seems to make me more of an exception in this business these days. I’ve actually done this since about age 7. I went to school for this, went to college, worked and started a company based on IT services. As bad as it sounds, that’s really all there is to me when it comes to a profession. To be compared to some brain dead monkey that knew nothing about infrastructure or development that just hopped around conferences collecting business cards really hit close to home. Many (many, many, many) fights with Susan Bradley over just what we were doing and what we were encouraging or reinforcing by catering to the lowest common denominator brought up this post and I don’t think I’ve ever, prior to that moment, felt worse about what I had allowed myself to do.

So I changed my mind. I decided to look at all the positive things Vladville does and eliminate all the negatives. I pushed forward to open up Shockey Monkey to external parties for development input. I decided, against lawyers advice, to put the name of our business in the SBS Show. I decided to step in front of a camera and say who I am, what I do and then show people I respect in their own element. I firmly believe you can learn something from everyone you meet. I don’t mean that in a tree-hugging way because some people are complete fucking morons so from those you can learn what not to say and what not to do. You can follow the advice and suggestions from people that are at the top of their game.

Chris and Susanne really encouraged me in all the stuff I was working on while at Boston. I think I slept maybe 6 hours total in the span of a week but I came back with a lot of approval and encouragement that has allowed me to really crunch through a lot of stuff internally and externally. As Eric Ligman told me, sleep is overrated. I took that to heart. I don’t have to tell you what my sleep pattern has been lately but you can see by the times my posts appear on the blog.

So what was the deal with the suicide note? Well, the epiphany that I got from Susanne specifically is that whatever we do, we have a choice. If things don’t work you change them, if things are working you work harder at them. I really do not want to be Paris Hilton. Last years SBS conference in Redmond gave me pages and pages and pages of insight into what makes a successful IT practice and we’ve been implementing it ever since. I firmly believe you lead by example so I’ve put in some long days and months since last September. I am happy to say we’re almost there. How much effort you put into something usually directly dictates how much you are going to get out of things. I did not want to be the Jack of many trades, master of none. I did not want to be a billboard for half-assing things by letting projects I was temporarily not interested in fall by the wayside. After all, if it was so important to start them and get most the leg work done, what kind of a moron would drop them when they were finally showing some promise?

So?

So this blog is about me. It is about what I do. It is about people I look up to and who encourage me to be better at what I do. Most of all, it is an encouragement to get you to think for yourself instead of blindly following what others tell you. I’ve done that fairly well over the last year as I’ve posted 549 messages (this is 550) but 2,418 people chose to talk back. Over 48,000 people choose to come back to Vladville every day to see what I’m up to. Thousands of people have tuned into Vladfire to see what SMB IT is all about. Millions of people have listened to the SBS Show. All the work I put in at Own Web Now and all the stuff I pour into Vladville is making a difference, is starting conversations, raising profiles of people in the community and it’s making people think.

Now that I’ve got your attention I hope to do something with it. Over the next year there will be more media here. I’ll open up a few more doors into my business and into the SMB IT community. I’ll give you something more to think about here in terms of both technology and business. Over the last year we’ve done a lot of hard work to make OWN capable of doing more and make it a lot more fun. I hope that shows in the posts and I hope what I want to talk about in the future inspires you (or upsets you) enough to look at things in a different way.

Andy Goodman is one of the nicest people in the SBS community. Very down to earth, very knowledgeable and very honest. I think the video speaks for itself, unfortunately, we had Mark Stanfill fill in the role of the audio engineer so what you will hear instead is 5 minutes of Andy impersonating Mr. Roboto.

Andy talks about his business, his web site, his SBS user group, his chat and a lot more. Enjoy.

Runtime: 5 minutes 51 seconds.

Download a WMV (Microsoft Windows Movie) | (30 Mb)

Stream Quicktime (Fast, Streaming, Requires Quicktime) | (10 Mb)

P.S. Susanne rules apply.

SBS Show #23 with Karl Palachuk covers the world of Service Level Agreements and a whole lot more. We talk to Karl about the importance of documentation, ways to build and manage a business, community involvement as well as many tips, tricks and ways to do it all. We talk at great length about Karl’s new book “Service Agreements for SMB Consultants - A Quick-Start Guide To Managed Services” and whats actually in it. We try to dispell some myths in the SMB IT, ask Karl about the community and the concept of paying it forward but most of all we just rave about his book and discuss what value an SMB owner can realize from a properly documented business.

Additional Resources: Karl’s Book Karl’s Blog

Download the SBS Show #23:
http://www.vladville.com/sbsshow/sbsshow-episode23.mp3