Thanks to the elections in Unites States a fair amount of public discussion has taken place over just who should be the leader. The smartest? The most competent? The most experienced? The toughest? Or someone that reflects the average man – Joe Six Pack that you can have a beer with and debate whether Africa is a continent or a country?

Who cares, isn’t the election over?

It’s a little bit bigger than that. Election cycle gives you an incredible insight into what drives people, what motivates them, what they fear the most and what they believe to be the solution to their problem.

As IT solution providers our job is generally to identify the problems and propose solutions. Some of us are wildly successful at identifying the true problems clients face. Some of us just suck at getting that information from our clients. Just asking people what they don’t like about their technology is not enough. Feeding data into a junk “Solution Creator” is an OK sales tool but it doesn’t get to the bottom of the true issues our client base faces.

One of the biggest drivers behind the development of the new wave of products at OWN has been a little “Development” tab where we keep track of what our current customers demands are. This is great when it comes to finding the specific nuances in functionality from client to client, from industry to industry. But refining a solution to fit the client is easy… how do you market yourself to the kind of people that would fit your solution portfolio?

That is why most IT solution providers fail at marketing and making it big.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The reason your clients aren’t telling you exactly what they want from you is because they likely do not consider you to be their peers and would likely not understand them. So you talk to your clients in the best business language you can muster and they respond in the most technical lingo they have picked out of their trade journals.

One thing I realized last year is that as my business grew and I grew in my IT business and then grew in my business outside of the scope of running a “technology” business I lost that familiarity that has made me so successful working with small IT shops. It has been a few years since I had left a really small IT biz way of thinking and I realized that I was no longer the loudest proponent that understood the challenges of the really small IT solution providers.

Sometimes you just have to hire the right people that speak to the right kind of the market. So I set out to find a person that was most like the majority of IT startup guys. I’m not going to open up about all the secrets but suffice to say, people open themselves up to the people that they identify as their peers – technically, business-wise.

You have to play your strengths to be the right fit for your clients needs. Otherwise you are doomed to the professional life of taking orders, being second guessed, not in the budget, a decision to be made later.

Now that is a little doomy and gloomy, so let’s talk about something positive. Where I think most people fail at and get frustrated into remaining small is the failure of their first hire. Most people think to hire the exact same kind of a person they are. Techie. Competent. Someone that can help them scale themselves by offering the same kind of a service, same kind of a technical expertise and same kind of a go-getter personality type they have.

It puzzles me is that nobody ever asks themselves as entrepreneurs why they don’t work for someone else? Why would you hire someone completely unmanageable?

There are so many pieces of advice and books written on who you should hire, who you should hire first, how you should hire and on what terms. So I will offer you the single most important piece of advice and key to success:

Do not hire on the grounds of what would make you better off, what would make your life easier and who would fit you better. Think about your customers instead. Which of your hiring prospects would work the best with your client base – who are they most likely to respect and like as a point of interaction and representation of your corporate image and your corporate values?

Style points matter. You betcha.

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