Dire predictions from The Times:

“These jobs aren’t coming back,” said John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia in Charlotte, N.C. “A lot of production either isn’t going to happen at all, or it’s going to happen somewhere other than the United States. There are going to be fewer stores, fewer factories, fewer financial services operations. Firms are making strategic decisions that they don’t want to be in their businesses.”

Now, it’s easy to dismiss this because it comes from the mouth of someone that was involved in advising top levels of the most decimated industry in America. On the other hand, most of the greed that fueled it was lead by the typical Dilbert management and marketing characters.

I for one agree with him in the short term. As do the markets, as do politicians, as do the banks as do the foreign markets.

We’re now where we were at 10 years ago, financially, as a country. So were the years of Clinton and Bush (prior to bombing the wrong country) a lie? Not at all. Look at our little scope of IT. We built all these things at an enormous cost because there was no alternative. No broadband. Today we can do a lot for a lot less, remotely, which is why our business is growing.

But what if your primary business was making high end laptops? Not a good time.

This is a great lesson to learn. In order for your business to grow it needs to change.

Will soon come a day where Hosted Exchange and ExchangeDefender are not as hot? When we’ll be running at the fraction of employees? I don’t doubt it at all. Gotta keep on innovating if you want to stay around.

Not doom and gloom, just reality.

One of my greater joys in business over the past two years has been the development of our PSA. In the process of studying just how much we suck (and the extent) I’ve really gathered an alarming amount of data points that explain just where we suck but also the uniform way in which our client base is retarded. Naturally, it’s our fault.

Earlier today one of the kids from the Leesburg office drove down to frigid 60F Orlando and we took him out to lunch. We talked about some of the more advanced topics regarding ExchangeDefender. It’s so nice to see people interested in your work.

It’s also quite a pleasure to explain the actual meaning and implementation of the system and watch their dreams shatter in front of you. “Well, yes, that’s how we explain it. Here is what actually happens on the backend.” What can I say, my job is to deliver a message to destinations that are setup by a combo of a laid off IT helpdesk employee, part time lawyer and his wife, the disaccredited CPA. The miracles we perform to get mail to go from point A to point B deserve some sort of a sainthood.

So today we made some slight changes to the support system.

See if you can tell which one is for real.

This is the official business version:

Better Support Escalation

This dropdown allows you to select the service that you are requesting support for. This helps us route the request to the most qualified individual on the support team that can address your request quickly.

Note that when you select an item you will be presented with a checkbox to tell us if this is a service outage. If the outage affects the entire organization, and you check this box, we will escalate the request for free and bump you to the front of the queue.

Now, since I wrote the whole thing this afternoon, allow me to take you through the development process and the reality behind the sugarcoated marketing speak:

Business Problem Definition:

1. These jackasses aren’t reading the documentation.
2. Support team spends all day copying and pasting KB articles.
3. People shouldn’t pay for urgent support if there is a system down issue. We aren’t going to waive charges for urgent support. Meet me half way!

Business Problem Analysis:

1. Nobody reads our documentation.
2. Nobody bothers to file support requests with enough detail, only bare minimum.
3. Nobody reads anything we write or do.

Solution Matrix:

1. How about we hide a setting for our literate partners that lets them get free support?
2. What about embedding help right when they ask the question, maybe it temporarily distracts them and they forget what they wanted.
3. Maybe we can route these requests better around the clock, skip the middle man.

Voila.

Now, true: I wrote this to help my partners and make my staff a lot more efficient and provide more value along the way.

However: Things would cost so much less and perform so much better if we were not stuck in the baby sitting mode training people how to use the products they should have learned in less than 1 hour of video sessions.

This, IMHO, is what sucks about IT and what makes most people throw their hands up in frustration and they end up compromising for Google Gmail and the iPhone. Neither is a serious business solution, but serious business people are about money and efficiency – not about throwing money down the IT Strategic Initiative toilet, hoping to have something valuable at some upgrade cycle in the future.

Ballmer is under fire for some statements he made today. For what it’s worth, I defend the guy for being up front about the problem and what is going on. We can no longer afford little incremental fill-in-the-gap solutions. It’s all or nothing, black or white, people simply won’t put up with limitations in reliability. If they have to put up with limitations, they will go to the shiny crap or free crap – because let’s face it, if it’s all crap anyhow you may as well not pay for it and at least get some joy out of looking at it.

If Karl ever brings over a big enough truck full of money for me to write a book, this will be it’s title. Think of it as a business model that emerges out of the state of utter confusion, complexity and let’s be honest – bullshit – that is IT consulting.

I seem to spend more of my time talking to a very polarized audience – on one hand I have a ton of people that are skyrocketing in their business, on the other there are a few folks that just don’t seem to get what is holding them back.

The answer: their bull.

Really. There is no seeming characteristic that separates highly profitable folks from highly unprofitable. I have folks with severe speech impediments rolling in four and five figure contracts. I have one man shops signing up larger customers than my enterprise wing brings in. There are companies in the rust belt and financial services that are growing their business faster than the “hot” verticals of medicine and telephony.

Every day I talk to people who don’t seem to want to do anything to reach a new audience.

Every damn one of them is reading Vladville.com, listening to my podcasts, going through my videos and documentation.

All of this is just a huge friggin ploy to take all of your money. There is no real value here at all. For petes sake, start copying this grammatical abortion and focus on growing your business!@$!$!@$

If what worked yesterday isn’t working today, change it.

If what worked yesterday isn’t working as well today, change it.

If what you have is working, do more of it.

We had a killer February, biggest on record. March is already 30% ahead of February. Every day counts. Every effort counts. By firing employees, cutting products and trying to save money? Hell no. By adding more people, cutting deals and growing the portfolio.

Let me get straight to the point: You need more variety in your offerings. If the crappy crappy cardboard marketing RR crap you’ve been spraying your SIC codes is hardly cracking the 3% return rate, even if its thousands of dollars in return, should be returning more. If your customers aren’t responding to your message it isn’t because they just haven’t seen the light and don’t understand the value of your model – it’s because what you have on sale isn’t peaking their interest and you need to add more.

People are buying. If they aren’t buying your crap, you need to talk to me. As of late, I’ve adopted the phone greeting to:

Hi, my name is Vlad and I am here to make you money.

This goes on every level. I spoke to some high level folks at a company I talk about here often, they have a + in their name. Guess what I told them:

I am not sure if the partner is willing to pay or if the vendor is willing to pay. All I know is that there is a demand for it out there that people are willing to pay for and who am I not to take their money and make them more?

Always. Ladies and Gentleman. Always be pimping.

I’ve sort of made a career bashing Mac users. It backfired in Apple buying me a Mac Air! Thanks. So I figured I ought to push my luck and ask for a Lamborghini Murcielago.

And last week it made it here. Orange too!

Though it wasn’t quite the $300,000 car but a 1:16 diecast model, from my buddy Jon Coles at itlifesupport.com in UK. You’ll be happy it has gone on my shelf of dreams.

Gotta dream big I guess. It’s either going to motivate you or beat you down. It all depends on what you want from life.

Earlier tonight Katie and I were shopping for a house in Maui. I know, I know.

Here is the one we settled on:

We’re going to have to move a few more ExchangeDefender mailboxes… check it out, only 18 million. American dollars.

Thank you for all the nice emails regarding my health (or lack thereof) the new SPAM Show, etc. It’s always nice to hear that something I do or say materially makes people much better off.

Last week I was at Erick’s bootcamp.. Stu and I were talking about an insane number of people who didn’t do their “homework” they had assigned on the nightly basis. An overwhelming majority would be an understatement. All that time away from work, all that money, all that effort…. and people end up blowing their opportunity to move their businesses forward.

It’s such a sad thing to see. It’s one thing for Geek Squad Dave’s and Amazing Ben’s to run around on vapor for years, such incompetent fools couldn’t get a job or build a business even if they wanted to, but where is the excuse for the rest of folks for their businesses not amounting to shit and not even trying?

There is no excuse. I don’t care what you call your “model” or what your value system holds, no client deserves to have their infrastructure handled so unprofessionally.

Speaking of trying, I did get some questions about the lack of daily blog posts. Folks, I’ve been doing my job. That’s growing and managing the company that makes so many of you so much money. Even if you don’t do business with us, we do a ton of freebie community projects, podcasts and the money for all that doesn’t grow on trees. Someone has to make it in order to spend it. We are growing, we are adding products, we are improving our processes and Shockey Monkey, all those take a lot of time.

To anyone on that same page – life is good. On Saturday I went to Disneyland with friends. On Sunday, I flew to the other coast and went to Disney World with family. Today we had two new people start and we won a major contract. Life is good. So to all those of you working to make things better and improve your companies and your clients – thank you.

Sorry for the last minute notice, I tried to surprise my wife by coming back home a week early and she reads the blog.

I’m going to miss all’y'all a ton. I had every plan to be there and even Sir Richard Bronson didn’t give me my money back (although Alaskan gave me like 90% of the ticket back).

I’ve been on the road pimping and basically traveling like a forty year old junkie. I took to the road with antibiotics and cough syrup laced with narcotics. I like to call that the good old times. Then I got the stomach bug. Bright side: lost 5lb. Downside: when everything you eat makes you instantly religious and you can’t even stand up because you don’t know in which direction you’re about to fall… not really good times. And I don’t trust you fers not to wake up in a ditch

So I’m missing out on the Microsoft fun and really one of a kind of an event in the MVP Summit. Have a great time folks!