Having read every BS business book out there, I thought to make up one of my own. Enjoy:

Over the last few months I’ve been posting on Facebook/Twitter how much I can’t wait for Monday to come around, usually drawing disgusting comments from my friends.

I understand their skepticism, I spent my entire life waiting for the Thursday afternoon to finish so I knew I could relax a bit, just one more day till the weekend! TGIF! Yay!

Then as I grew up, as I started to understand my life a little bit better and as I started to draw up statistical models for why things are the way they are, dig up the problems that we created intentionally or unintentionally… I found the root cause for why Monday’s sucked so bad.

The Bad Monday

Monday is one of those days that everyone is grumpy on. You have people who really hate what they have to do to earn a living, mixed with overly driven assholes that have to cope with reality of getting nothing done because they depend on the lazy bastards who hate what they have to do to earn a living so they do it as slow as humanly possible to make everyone miserable.

This vicious cycle starts and rolls on because there is no organizational direction for getting shit done. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there are deadlines – the timestamp by which you are responsible to deliver a fraction of features you’ve originally agreed along with a high statistical probability that others will not notice all the stuff you skillfully buried under the features you’ve actually delivered.

As this goes on, people get trained to focus on working really hard the first part of the week while they coast through the later half.

The Good Monday

The reason most people hate Monday’s is not because Monday’s by any means suck any more than any other day of the week – it is because people naturally slack throughout the week and only focus on the “need to do” stuff on a Monday morning. Even if they don’t, others bring problems to them.

You know the saying – “Let’s do it next week” or “Due next week” – generally that means Monday and that usually means working some over the weekend, etc. Not a way to go through life.

So for OWN, Monday falls on Friday. All of our big projects, big marketing, big deliverables – come on Friday’s. We break our butt throughout the week and get to gloat about it on Monday.

Monday’s then become overly satisfying because that is when the really exciting stuff really happens. It gives us energy to push forward. If we have a day ruined by dropping the ball, it gets dropped when we are all around and doesn’t interfere by ruining our weekend or sending us out on a break completely broken.

It also makes work a lot more enjoyable and exciting, because people look forward to working on the stuff instead of being beaten down by stuff that doesn’t work.

…

It took us many years to bring our business to the level where we decided to make a flip.

The beauty is, you can make this happen in only one week of solid 5 days of work. This way, you can be excited about the Monday and when everyone calls you on Monday to bitch at you about things that they always have issues with, you can have a solution for them and make them feel better too. Worth a try… or you can just stay miserable on Monday’s and wait for the weekend. Life is a bit too short to give up 1/7th of it though.

One of the favorite staff catchlines around OWN offices is: “Call now, because we can’t do this all day” patented by that annoying guy from ShamWow! infomercials.

You can’t make this stuff up. In a story titled “ShamWow Pitchman Beats Hooker to the Punch” TMZ explains how the ShamWow! guy beat the hooker up because she was biting his tongue and would not let go:

“Shlomi began kissing the hooker when she allegedly “bit his tongue and would not let go.”

“According to cops, Shlomi then punched the prostitute several times until she released his tongue. Both the prostitute and Shlomi were arrested for felony aggravated battery.”

And of course, it happened in Miami.  Here is some more stuff data.

As one of the guys noted, upon review of the page above, the price seems steep. $1000 for that? Who comes up with hooker valuation models? In the event that the service delivery does not go as expected, what is the proper protocol for remediation of john-hooker disputes? Assuming that the pimp is the agent of the hooker he can’t be trusted to deliver a fair verdict, so is that disclosed during the sales process as one party waives it’s rights? So many questions. Another employee noted that hookers carry diseases so you need to make sure they don’t create any open wounds. I learn something new every day.

This is why I work in an executive office far, far away from you people

My buddy Schrag is noticing that the latest bit of self-inflicting gunshots to the head that Microsoft calls it’s marketing program is not terribly inflammatory towards him. So he says here: http://davidschrag.com/schlog/413/with-partners-like-this

“What’s that, Microsoft? You’re saying I can be replaced by college students!?!?!?!”

Personally, I think you could be replaced by a monkey, jar of peanut butter and some software but let’s not get into name calling.

Microsoft flourished in an environment where it had a ton of friends and at times only one or two enemies. Apple. IBM. Corel. Netscape. In the new world, which Microsoft has scorched by entering every market imaginable, the old rules don’t apply.

When will Microsoft realize that it is not Google, that it cannot behave with google because at the end of the day Microsoft software is too damn expensive, cumbersome and complex – and it requires a technology expertise to use because Microsoft made it as such!

And then they wonder why they are failing….

The other day I was bitching to someone about how I am seeing more and more Dilbert comics that resemble my life – except I’m now the Pointy Haired Boss, or at least I think like one:

True story, this morning one of the guys tells me that something can’t be done in PHP and he wrote it in Visual Studio instead. Once I explained to him how inclined I am to ever give Microsoft even a penny of our money, or develop software that would require us to pay Microsoft licensing revenue…. I got greeted by this Dilbert comic. fml.

Now, this cheered up my day. It’s nice to see when even our partners recognize that customers demands can at times be batsh** insane. They proposed the following solution when ExchangeDefender functionality became to burdensome:

I wonder that MSRP would be on CPaaS?

There are days when I feel things I learn about business totally devalue my college education. Filing this under “they didn’t teach me about this in school” is the  experience of adjusting to the circumstances and accepting that sometimes… well, things just don’t go your way but you can either let it get to you or really enjoy yourself.

The other day I was shipping some stuff, using a process that is not very familiar to me. I asked the lady if I needed to fill out additional paperwork or provide a payment or what the next step was going to be. Here is the conversation, for your amusement:

Vlad: So do I pay you or something?

Clerk: Oh no child! You put your credit card number here so they’ll do what they do and you’ll see it…

Vlad: So they do what they do and I’ll see it when I see it and I’ll know what it was, right?

Clerk: You got it!

Even mob conversations are more specific.

But hey, made me laugh!

Today was an exciting day – I finally took the wraps off what we’ve built and how we’re changing this game when it comes to professional services.

In my casually slimy way, I went around the room asking what attendees (and presumably our common customers) would consider to be a “good integration” project. What would make them more successful?

When you look at the vendor/PSA/rmm integration points you’re welcome with a sea of bullshit data points that are incomprehensible to even the most savvy full-of-crap marketer explaining where the customers money is going.

So after taking a few hints as to what our customers were expecting… I flashed my agenda for integration. As in, why would we bother entertaining an idea of integrating with a product?

Talk about not BSing people on the agenda, eh? I AM here to make you money. If you aren’t here to do the same for me, the door is that way, see ya.

Then I actually showcased our “integration” and I’m not talking about the voice control for Autotask we produced as an attention stunt.

I’m talking about entrepreneurs and business owners understanding their real cost centers and understanding the boundaries of their control and profitability that is realized when each party addresses it’s own turf in a way that benefits the customer the most. Let’s not forget who we’re doing all of this for (Customer. After they are happy and they pay the bill, the Vlad’s Ferrari Collection Fund.)

Attendees will get the integration documents tomorrow. If you’re savvy enough and actually look at our portal, you can actually get it going right now

What I want to know is – if you work with us, what is a good integration point? This is critical to the Shockey Monkey solution, it is critical to our partners on Autotask and Connectwise, and to everyone else in this ecosystem that is currently profiting on services.

I’m all ears – vlad@vladville.com

Aside…

Still very pleasantly surprised by the level of professionalism and handling by Autotask. They have been very kind to us, very helpful and today I got to meet a bunch of folks within the company which is always awesome.

Eventwise, again, perfect. Rented an entire restaurant, free bar and southern food, fried pickles and pulled pork sandwiches.

The night ends with Karl and Erick and a 4 hour dinner.