Yesterday was a bit of a homecoming for me, I was going back to the town where I grew up and I got to talk about Shockey Monkey. The fun part of what I do is that people ask me to come and talk about the products that I’ve designed and I actually get to meet people and hear how they are working with our solutions, making money, etc.

I hate to sell, so I basically gave them an option of talking about anything I do and Shockey Monkey just seems to be the most uncommercial thing I can do because well.. the product is free, it’s designed by over 3,000 IT solution providers that are constantly filing bugs, feature requests, etc. So I came up with a pretty cool (read: extremely arrogant) tagline for it:

I am not saying this is the best thing out there. The 3,000 people that use it to run their business on it do.

It’s better than the other insulting taglines people have offered me for it in the past. The cool thing about Shockey Monkey, organizationally, is that I got such a deep understanding for how the SMB consulting works and really a feel for the variety of what people do and how they make money – not everyone is the TS2 subscriber that pushes SBS or a blindfolded MSP, there are many models out there and its those that don’t subscribe to the herd mentality that make the most money.

It was so nice to be there again. I remember a few years back Alex and Richard telling me about the idea of the SBS UG, asking me if its worth it, etc. Really, I would not recommend the SBS group leadership to even my worst enemies. You get to deal with thankless bitter people, play a wedding organizer, teach people how to act like real human beings and businessmen (like thank our sponsors, give them the business whenever you can, clean up after yourself, wear shoes), you have to put your reputation on the line and keep things fair and not kick out people when they seem to be going way out of line…. all so that everyone can think you’re Microsoft’s bitch, that you’re making money off the group in some way and no matter how much you do it is never enough because a large majority of the people will view this as a service they can use and never give back.

But… if you’re stupid (and persistent) enough you really get something that is available nowhere else, in no other profession. You get true business owners and technology experts, talking things out with one another, finding solutions to common problems that benefit everyone and through the large enough crowd you get close access to the vendors you do business with and most importantly, form lasting relationships with people that can think out of the box and outside of their little comfort zone (and you know what, those are the folks that take risks and in the end persevere); so huge thanks to Alex and Richard for taking their time to organize Miami, to lead it, to get people out, to establish a sense of community that Miami is famous for.

Thanks for having me over folks, I’ll be back when the meetings move to South Beach

I’ll be in Miami tonight (8/8/2007) presenting at the Miami SBS UG.

Miami SBS UG
August 8, 2007
The Academy
3100 S. Dixie Highway, 2nd Floor
Miami, FL

Pretty easy to find, just take I-95 south until it ends in US1 and keep on going for a few more blocks.

The presentation is on Shockey Monkey but it’s not a product pitch, it’s more of a discussion of organization, management and providing customer service based on what has worked for us.

Note: If you have a technical/business UG that gets more than 20 people in attendance I’d like to come over and present Shockey Monkey after Thieving Weasel project wraps and launches towards the end of August. Pref. October – November timeline, not a fan of sitting in a snowed in airport.

If I find myself writing another one of these “basic business etiquette” posts I think I’m going to go write some teenage girl self help book because the attitudes some folks have in business seem more like preteen rages against the establishment than legitimate business behavior. Either way, disclaimers up first: Yes, I am talking about you, and this is how I single out people I don’t want to do business with. Is this your setup?

That’s an Asterisk-based wardialer machine.

Do you wardial? There are two variables to availability: I’m there and I can’t pick up the phone (on the phone already) or I am not there. Either way, a sequential redial is highly unwarranted - unless you are dying. There is only one acceptable solution: leave a voicemail. I know what you’re thinking… But Vlad, this is URGENT. No, dear Jessica, it is not any more urgent than what I am doing now. I do not put people on hold for anyone but my wife, I consider everyone I am talking to at the moment to be the most important person in the world. To me, asking to put someone on hold translates into “I am sorry, someone more important is trying to reach me, would you mind sitting in place quietly while I go hang out with them?”

Furthermore, I don’t return wardialed phone calls.

Why? Well, if it was so gosh darn urgent that you had to ring my phone 6 times in space of a minute, if there was a case so urgent that you had to be so persistantly rude, that you had lost all your common decensy for business communication.. you must have been on your deathbed waiting for the venom and were simply calling me to see if I had any around.

I’m sorry, no I didn’t, but I’ll say a prayer for your soul. And you’ll need it because wardialers end up in hell.

Long awaited (and anticipated) changes to the Microsoft Action Pack Subscription are coming. The Australian SBSC blog has some details on the changes in this published Q&A:

Update on the Action Pack Changes

I don’t know about you but I am loving these changes because they address my long time gripes with the Action Pack: lack of verification and unfair compensation. Lack of verification meaning anyone with an email and a credit card can get MAPS – well, not so easy anymore, you have to pass assesments. Unfair compensation meaning dumping high end enterprise software in the lap of people who at best sell Office and Windows – now they’ll have to prove their business needs development software by taking an exam and proving they actually support the solutions that they demand.

I realize that these items seem quite superficial, just who are they going to stop with tbjs? Well, they will stop your “Jimmy Joe Bob SPF the MAPS Media Collector Consultancy @ hotmail.com” who gives all of us a bad name by bsing themselves to the type of solution they aren’t even qualified to look at, much less administer. They will stop your “only $300 a year for all this and I just have to call the toll free number and tell them I’m an IT shop” business owner that just shot down a proposal due to sticker shock.

Will there still be MAPS fraud? Of course, crooks are crooks and they will always find a way around, but truth is that most crooks are simply lazy and as long as the process is even a little bit inconvenient a huge portion of the fraud we see today will be wiped out. Perhaps this never would have been a problem if we didn’t have eager partners helping businesses obtain MAPS through illegitimate means or accepting to manage it, or if at the very least Microsoft asked a few questions first. At least they are starting to ask them now.

One of the search features I would really appreciate would be to search for the results available in the database on a particular date. For example, what if you searched for “Bush nucular evidence” in 2001 vs. 2007, you’d get some wildly different result sets.

My particular problem, and the reason I am writing this blog post at 5 am, is that for the past few hours I have been trying to locate a mailing list response from the author of dovecot from the long, long ago. I cannot figure out how to do static maildir mappings without involving uid/gid in auth_userdb database.

Google does have a search that limits how old of a result you wish to see (show only pages that were first seen over the last 6 months) but nothing to say show only results available prior to date m/d/y. Oh well, there is always hope for live.com search, lol.

Last week I wrote about a few steps that I took to limit my exposure to daily time wasters. I have dropped the Yahoo newsgroups completely now and took a few more steps to free up more time during the day. I hope you find them helpful.

Immediately after I locked myself out of the Yahoo groups I realized just how much info I was getting out of the professional (read: not sbs) newsgroups so I asked a few on my staff to sign up for them and forward me anything of relevance that I may need to look at during the day. These are generally discussions on major products that we use internally along with the major breaking news that I might not be getting through the RSS feeds.

I also ended up blocking Google Reader along with Gmail because I just did not want to find myself going through the Engadget every time something new came up. I now review our internal “shared” feed lists and I proudly get my IT advice from a CPA ™ from Susan’s blog who sits in my sidebar. That easilly shaved quite a bit of time each day.

The hardest thing to dump has been the IM. I have completely ripped out (read: safe mode, delete, replace with dummy file, deny r/w/x to Administrator) Microsoft Live Messenger. This was hard. Not only is the IM my core distraction but its also a core communication tool. Not just business but personal too. But it just had to be done, with what I’m doing now I need to concentrate and that means not wondering wtf that icon she picked for her display means. I still have the internal IM going via Office Communications Server as well as full SIP access so I’m not out of reach by any means but its limiting the people that can contact me to the folks I really need to work with right now.

Last step, sadly, meant demanding a heck of a lot more from the software I use. I have stopped using Microsoft Outlook 2007. The best piece of software ever written, the most productive and most effective application I have on my desktop… just had to go. I have given it a few months and it just is not meeting the needs of performance and reliability I expect in 2007. I have completely replaced it with Micorosft Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access (which our OWN partners will soon be getting free of charge) and I am able to do pretty much everything I need to via the web without my desktop freezing, calendar freezing, Outlook crashing and taking 5–10 minutes to rebuild during the day. I just can’t afford that.

Finally, taking a page from Eileen Browns book: deleting old messages. I haven’t quite gone as far as to delete them but I have taken steps to move them from my inbox and improve the Exchange on-demand search which is just specacular.

Let’s see, what else.. I have continued the tradition of eliminating myself and others with small shell scripts. I have finished the full integration of Asterisk/Trixbox into Shockey Monkey, so now I not only know when I miss a call but it also creates an organized callback listing for me in the Shockey Monkey. I also have to thank Allen St. Clair for the recommendation of creating a customizable priority schedule that wanted brought in from Autotask – I look at the tickets assigned to me and I run a quick “priority” update on all the tickets in the view. I sit, consider, update and work through them throughout the day. That, along with the intraday 2 mile run, has really reduced the stress significantly. I don’t feel overloaded at all, I don’t feel stressed, I don’t feel burried in work – I just click on “Prioritize” button and a little container slides in the view for me to add priorities from 0–100. Then I drill down the list one by one. Shockey Monkey by itself lets me do the work of 5 people, I don’t know why it took me so long to sit down and do it but I should have done it a long time ago.

What’s left?

I am far from done but I have to admit – none of my fears have come to fruition. I am not out of touch, I am not uninformed, I am not stressed and I am not overworked. It has really allowed me to simplify how I approach my day and by the end of it get a lot more stuff done.

That is not to say that there aren’t a lot of areas that need improvement. Here are my top time wasters at the moment:

• Sales phone calls. Long gone are the days during which I flew to the phone every time it rang, excited about selling something. Everything is selling, almost faster than we can keep up with it. We’re even selling stuff we don’t have or know how to do now (“I just landed Windows Server 2008 rollout!”)
• Facebook. I don’t think I want to get rid of it. Friends (friendships, people) are what makes this life worth living and I just love the folks I get to spend my idle time with. Both of them.
• Dog. Today I fed my dog Total and yogurt because we ran out of dog food. Then I taped it and cut a movie for my wife. Sue me, I needed a break.
• Paperwork. I hate paper. Really, I do. Give me an eform any day over the dreaded signatures, initials, dots, lines and acknowledgements.

I think I am getting to the point where my days are becoming more optimized so I can afford the new projects. And more time goes into Shockey Monkey which further decreases the amount of time spent during the day on other items. It’s getting better!

I just got the news from Microsoft’s Jeff Smith that Response Point VoIP system for SMB will be making a visit to Vladville. This is why you go to places like WWPC, I mentioned when they released it and where I signed up while watching the presentation.

This appears to be a “gift” and as this is going to Own Web Now Corp, I’m not allowed to accept expensive gifts, so you will see it go through a rough test and then given raffled away in some way on this blog. It’s gonna be a toughie because OWN uses Asterisk, Exchange 2007 with Unified Messaging as well as Office Communications Server. 

So, if you didn’t win it from Microsoft…. You’ll win it from me

In the meantime, keep an eye on Response Point blog.

I wrote about this (and how it came up) on my personal blog but I felt it was perhaps also appropriate to share it with the business crowd on this blog. A long time ago Karl wrote a post, that I can’t find, about the importance of having a meaningful business name. It basically said that it should portray a confident, professional image.

You do have to be careful, there is such a thing as an “overly confident” professional. Usually referred to as “that stuck up jerk” by the competitors, partners and clients. This weeks winner of that award comes from my home town of Orlando, with the following byline:

“Perfection… at its best.”

Aside from being arrogant, what else is wrong with this tagline? Does it tell you what the company does? Does it offer anything to identify this perfection? (awards, certifications, memberships, presence, size) Does it identify the market? Does it do anything that would make me pick up the phone and call them for my handyman needs?

In fact, it does exactly the opposite. Look at the ad. What does it, along with its byline, tell you about this business?

To me it almost sounds like a satirical self-deprecating insult. “I am so perfect that I didn’t need to go to college and all I could become is a generalist without any particular skill, training or certification.”

Remember, brave taglines require evident backup. If its not visible/apparent immediately, you’re better off not using them at all.

I am so suing Scott Adams about this comic:

That’s the whole Shockey Monkey business model damnit! It shocks the monkeys so you don’t have to!

Gah. I guess now I can delete Erick Simpsons legendary Glengarry Glen Ross impersonation “Close that ticket down. Coffee is for closers only. You hear me, you #@%@ #$%^@#%???”

Last weeks Orlando ITPRO meeting has been one of the best ones I’ve ever attended; it was also bittersweet because I was handing over the reigns of the group to the new folks but we made a heck of a party out of it and I was so darn proud to see the people just show what they do. Erik talked about the Kayako helpdesk tool he uses and showed the LiveChat feature as well as how he implements it in his business (by far the funniest presentation we’ve ever had in Orlando) as well as a really nice overview of CactiEZ he uses for monitoring. Ryan from Asystech hopped up on the screen in the middle of the conversation and started showing off their Connectwise / Kaseya deployment. I know what you’re thinking, “Vlad let all of these people talk about how they use his competitors products? WTF?”

Perhaps the biggest mistake I have made in my two years of leading Orlando is building it up on top of my own braindumps. I don’t have regrets about that per se because the show must go on and I needed to sell the people on attending the events so they could see the value in being a part of the community and just what sort of payoff that kind of activity can have to everyone. Even if they are discussing your very competition, there is a lot of value but you either come and get it or you don’t. Unfortunately, it’s not so direct input/output equation, there is a lot of stuff that goes into the organization of it and the execution as well as marketing, growth of the group, vendor relationships, driving speakers around the town, etc. But two of the downsides that came out of the approach I had implemented were primarily that this was seen as the “service” that some folks outright expected to be there – but never saw fit to contribute back to it. So I did a little spring cleaning, based on Jeff Middleton’s advice, that the group ought to be all about the people that chose to show up month after month, not only when it suits them. So I kicked a few folks out, will probably have to have an egg on my face and some uncomfortable social impacts in the future but I believe it will benefit the group going forward. Second, and a far more problematic piece, is that the group became “Vlad’s Orlando ITPRO” or “Vlad’s group in Orlando” which I had never wanted it to be seen as. However, I am a leader and those of you that know me know the type of intensity I bring to all of my projects (coincidentally, also the reason why I drop so much stuff that I don’t see going anywhere… in it to win it, otherwise what is the point?) But, easilly solved.

So, taking over the helm of Orlando are:

Judd Spence – Central Florida Helpdesk

Rob Richardson – Micro Logix Information Systems

Ryan Ford – Asystech

All three work for some very serious Orlando service providers and I’m sure have the resources to push this organization forward.

I will be there to help and will be (as a part of the evil stuff I discussed here before) organizing quarterly international events in collaboration with a very large company you may have heard of before. So at least once a quarter Orlando will be the center of the world when it comes to the Small Business Specialist expertise, between those we will focus on improving one another so we can all win.

As for me, I will be taking what I have learned and succeeded with in Orlando and taking it worldwide. I will also be leading some projects at OwnWebNow to help the partners that brought us to this stage. The key to success at OWN have been partnerships and while it has been a win-win so far we’re taking this thing to a whole new level. Stay tuned, news should be out very, very soon.