I’m blogging this at 30,000 ft aboard Airtran 737 – and by the time you read this on Sunday, I will be living the Pirates of the Carribean scene: “So you just layed around on the beach and drank rum?”

I have been called out for not blogging as much as of late – sorry guys, business is booming and I am staying on top of it all – so I figured I’d give you all a bit of inspiration.

Over the past two days OWN (myself and Nicole made it to Baltimore in person) got to help contribute to the success that MSP University bootcamps are becoming. They are by far the best conference and the best organization that we are partnering with at least when it comes to aligning organizational goals. If you aren’t attending these free events, I’m not sure there is anything I can say to encourage you to check them out, it’s simply your loss, but let’s move beyond that:

Make no mistake, we are a business and we are a sponsor for these events. That means we give them money to pull these events off. In return, we get to chat with attendees and try to sell our stuff. Thats the goal.

This can be remarkably valuable, or incredibly flawed. I’ve blogged about the Tent of SMB Failure festival, be it on east or west coast, so I’ll just share this tidbit:

Attendees were free to roam the sponsor area. But once the sessions started, Erick and Gary were out herding people back into the conference room. This is very much the opposite of the general conference, where attendees are driven towards the sponsors and away from mediocre content. So what is MSPU admitting to here?

Simply put, these events have the attendee and the industry in their best interest. Where most conferences benefit from the foot traffic and bodies, MSPU is a subscription based business. If it’s members don’t pay attention to the content, which they came to Baltimore to learn, they will not succeed in business. They will not make it and the subscription goes away. While on some level my initial reaction is “Damn man, let me finish my sales pitch” the big picture here is that if the guys miss out on the role playing, sales training, marketing implementation, process control and service delivery…. my pitch makes no difference at all, they won’t have the skills needed to position my solution. In effect, MSP University is training my sales and support channel!

I hate to make this sound like shameless plugging but this is as close to the strategic goals of OWN that I just cannot hold back my respect for seeing this executed properly. If the partners aren’t successful, their clients aren’t successful and the vendors who partner with those VARs won’t be successful either.

This is not something that is easy to verbally explain, or to quickly quantify on a spreadsheet because relationships and success are long term proposals. For folks with incredibly short attention span, this is a terrible concept! I even skipped completely on the sales aspect of my presentation and just talked about what I do in my day-to-day and what we’re seeing. As a result, we’ve made a lot of new friends and partners than we’ve done at any other conference this year, much larger ones too!

Point is, we are in this for the long term. It’s so nice to see so many organizations that are on the same page, that’s all.

Being a long weekend gives lots of folks an opportunity to consider their direction, process and goals – take the peace and quiet to determine exactly where you want to go and what you want to do. I hope OWN is a part of that because we are still growing and very much committed to this marketplace…..

… in the meantime, I will be on the beach in Puerto Rico, having a Mojito on y’all.

Thanks for reading Vladville.

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