Ok, not really, that one is still scheduled for October 4th-6th, but the college football season in the south is getting warmer than a moonshine possum stew. Here with some thoughts is Chris Rue’s-black-half-brother-from-another-mother:

Amen. Inspirational. SEC, SEC, SEC!

(having a bunch of dental surgery done so things are going to stay quiet around here for a bit)

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.

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.

After over two years in production, design and testing… The “When it’s done” just became “Done.“

v2 has been in use at Own Web Now for a while and the underlying framework is being used to power all our upcoming projects. So naturally the amount of work that went into making sure this was rock solid was quite large.

The wait is.. over. If you’re on the list, you’ll get a welcome email today. You will be on it by the end of the weekend. No more wait lists, no more queue, no more “coming soon” – we will have thousands of you in the queue online today.

Oh, did I mention that it’s free? Yeah, it’s free for our partners. Will remain free till 3.0. To find out more about that and the signup come back in a few days when we launch the new SM web site. The names on our new list of “friends” will surprise you.

Now back to the celebratory Mountain Dew!