One of the readers emailed (vlad@vladville.com btw) to ask what it’s really like to be Vlad Mazek. Surely the post about working long hours can’t be real because nobody would believe that someone in my role would work that hard.

Believe it.

Look at any successful (and legal) company and you’ll find it is built on hard work in particular off the backs of the people on the very top of the org chart. I’m not talking about charlatans who sell fraudulent dietary supplements over the web and write books to inspire others to be worthless scammers in just 4 hours a week. I mean real companies, that have been around for years, with track record of building millionaires up and down the management chains.

Those folks work hard.

After giving my son a bath and rocking him to sleep around 9PM I hung out with my wife and watched Venture Bros for a little while. So after the whole day of out and about and working on the monkey, I took an hour or so to relax. Then at 11:15 PM I went to the airport to pick up Erick Simpson from Intelligent Enterprise, a highly respected MSP organization and a training firm and author and the list of credentials goes on. Four beers, two diet cokes and two bags of pretzels later, Erick and I compared notes on trends we see in the SMB space. Trends, business model changes, competitive landscape, opportunities, threats. We wrapped up at 3:18 AM.

In three hours I will be waking up to meet over breakfast with Stuart and Frank from SecureMyCompany, global leader in hosted Kaseya deployments.

After which I will go through the usual 9-5 day running the company that provides thousands of you with the services that make it possible to do your job.

Yup, that’s what a Sunday night to Monday morning, on three hours of sleep, looks like if you want to be successful.

Is this gratuitous self-promotion? You bet. But who do you think the customers pick and trust to run their IT? Companies that work hard, care and improve their offerings every day, or slackers that despite their lack of motivation and insurmountable demand for technical services managed to remain unemployed and employeeless but took a dozen vacations? 

Ask yourself what you are really spending your life doing and who you are serving. When you have some perspective then you can define your goals, your process and pave the way to the destination. Hint: It ain’t getting done in 4 hours a week.

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