This week was supposed to be my first full week of work at the Atomic Tangerine studios.. Monday was a holiday, Tuesday was a sick day and week was more than half over by the time I finished hanging the whiteboard in the studio. And as I stood there, in front of my crooked whiteboard, doodling the week objectives that I could get done in two days, I started reminiscing about the very reason I moved downtown, to improve the interaction I have with my customers. In order for that to become reality I either need to clone myself or optimize the hell out of my daily tasks. I am not sure if I’m the only CEO that thinks about this and I’m sure I don’t have enough brilliant ideas to get this done, so I’m going to let you into my head and you let me know if you’re on the same page.

How do you improve interaction with your clients in a material way? I have two types of clients, technical and business driven. My technical customers include CIO’s, CTO’s, office IT administrators and network operators, they want documentation, howto’s, solution overviews. My business driven customers include IT Solution Providers, consultants and CEO’s who may have a problem in hand and want a blueprint of how to get it done the best way. When I start talking costs and productivity with the technical crowd the eyes start rolling, when I talk tech to the business crowd I see the bobblehead effect.

Point is, neither side wants to hear what the other side is concerned about.

But as this company grows beyond the infrastructure, development and services and now heading into hardware, the pressure I face to stay relevant to both crowds is rising.

It’s not an easy gig either. When these folks interact with me they expect professional delivery, courtesy, compassion… which in no small part makes Vladville an outlet for my alter ego and the reason its so god awful filthy and direct.

So.. over the past almost 5–6 months I’ve taken what I’ve learned on the road over the past two years from some of the very best people in the business and I’m slowly starting to implement it all. The “needs” analysis has been overwhelming to say the least but the challenge of remaining direct without adding in intermediaries (sales staff, partner managers, customer service reps and other relationship-inhibiting roles) is not an easy task.

I have two pieces of advice to offer based on my personal experience:

People want to hear from you. Not from your CTO, not from “The Genius Employee”, not from the bobblehead sales guy. They want to have some level of comfort in knowing that this company they trusted with a critical piece of their solution actually works on providing that solution.

Get a camera. I have a Microsoft face-tracking one that I record my blog posts (not Vladville) and PR pieces on and I do two exercises: ass-check and blabber-check. Ass-check is the feeling of sincerity I need from what I’m saying – if it looks canned or arrogant it gets chopped. The blabber-check is the scanning for answers to questions nobody asked – there is no need to ramble on about unrelated details when people just want an overview. Camera will unveil these personality (professional?) flaws immediately. You can flow face-to-face if you have any personality, you can’t judge body language, intimidation, concern or humor through the written word – you always come off like an ass, guaranteed.

The final bit of this puzzle is relevance. Who gives a s… what I think? If you asked ten of my clients if they cared, all 10 would say “none at all” because I am not addressing their complete and immediate concerns. This is one question that none of my peers could ever help with, so I looked at how one of the most irrelevant companies gets this done – Apple Computer. Apple has been irrelevant (market share) or on the verge of extinction for at least two decades yet they manage to get people to stop and pay attention to them whether they are launching a crippled iPhone or a more glossy laptop case. I’ve studied Apple very closely and seen just what makes Steve so powerful – They are about one thing and one thing only. All seemingly done by one guy. Seriously, Apple Computer is a one man show that at any time talks about only one product. Go to their web site – easy, they released an OS. Now, go to Microsoft’s – holy clustercfuck, mobile phones, office, Live Search, articles, screen savers, livecare, Silverlight? What is this page designed for, a cow inflicted by ADD? Now, guess which company is more successful..

Point is, Apple makes the audience care about what they are talking about, whereas I am about whatever you want me to be right now. While the hooker approach works in person, indirectly via the web (newsletter, video, podcast) you pick a story and beat the crap out of it. I chose to copy Apple. I feel it is the only way for people to stop and hear you out, because anyone will spend 10 seconds to get your take from your area of expertise – but they won’t spend 30 seconds to hear the top 10 list.

How do you stay relevant in your customers face? Food for thought…

Lots of inquiries about Erick’s book on MSP Sales. I said I’d have it up over the weekend, and since its already almost the next weekend it stands the reason that the book sucks, right? Must have changed my mind about it, didn’t want to beat up my friend for writing a crap book in public?

Far from it.

The book is 500+ friggin pages, and unlike his first book, this one isn’t double spaced. Not to mention that the text is thick and there are no pictures. It’s just taking me a little longer to read it and give it its proper review and tell you what you’re going to gain from it. Let’s face it, if I just skimmed it and told you to buy it by paraphrasing its back cover you’d never listen to me again. Credibility matters here.

I don’t write about politics on this blog but watching tasering video of an annoying little entitled prick really made me proud of my alma mata, University of Florida:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqAVvlyVbag

Why is it so hard for people to show some respect for the law, comon decency and decorum? You are a student at the University of Florida. You are in a classroom. You are attending a speach by a US Senator. Show some respect, this isn’t a football game and you aren’t yelling at the Chief Osceola after he spikes the war spear into the Gator logo at the 50 yard line, you’re in an academic setting and expected to behave like a student.

It is a damn shame that a taser is needed to teach people that…

As for my young, proud white civil rights brothers fighting the oppression.. How very Martin Luther King of you.. No, wait… I’m thinking about the wrong King. I meant Burger King – like the place you’ll be working 3 months from now after you drop out of college because instead of going to class you’re laying on a field with a sign strapped to your back. I hope the back of that cardboard is still blank, you’ll need it to write tearful slogans that will make people throw change at you from their cars.

What… a… waste.

Ever seen this one in the mirror:

Job description: IT entrepreneur

Required Skills and Experience:

– Strong interpersonal skills with a focus on teamwork and ability to foster / manage relationships across multiple departments.

– Self-motivated professional, self-starter, proactive and able to handle multiple projects simultaneously in a fast-paced environment.

Allow me to translate that for you:

Today is going to be a bitch and you can’t be an asshole about it. People are going to put unreasonable expectations of you, you will be disrespected, belittled and forced to answer stupid questions asked by stupid people who are seemingly in more successful roles than you are. Through it all you’re expected to act as a professional, work through the day and deal with the stress, plan for the unexpected, respond to the unplanned and explain the situation to people that don’t really care. [to be continued]

Winners tend to motivate themselves. They tend to rise above the rest, meet the challenge and excel where others fail. They don’t need external parties to help them get to where they have already visualized themselves at.

Or at least thats what the bullshit motivational books say. If you’re one of the above, I envy you. Kudos.

I am one of the most driven people I know but even I have down days when things just get to me. Point is, I know my limitations. I also know that when it gets tough there is nobody that will pat me on the back, tell me it’s all going to be OK and that I should just put my panties back on and stop being such a little pussy. Tough chance of that improving now that people get the impression that I like to work naked. (google: humor)

So what to do…

I don’t have the desktop calendar of Tony Robbins and I firmly believe in the demotivator that states: If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.

I rely on my partners.

My partners know me, I genuinely enjoy talking to them, hanging out with them and working with them. So when I have a rough day, I can always count on a partner to pat me on the back when things are going bad, give me an ovation when things are going good and give me a friggin medal when things are going great.

I (and OWN) have been very fortunate to work with a lot of great partners. The other day I made a very tough final decision, hammer and nail in hand, to change the direction of my involvement when it comes to partners and I felt pretty rotten about what I said.

But today, I got to talk to a partner, and a friend, Tim Barrett, who took nearly an hour during his busy day to just talk to me about it. Few hours before that, Susan chatted with me for about 20 minutes. Right before I finished working for the day I got a call from one of my partners, Garrett Chipman who pretty much made my day. Dana Epp also did a lot of encouraging stuff for me today and…

… and its just nice to know that even on tough days, even in a professional setting and a professional environment you are lucky if you have friends that pick you up, kick you in the ass, and push you along the way. You’re not going to make it as entrepreneur if you can’t constantly motivate and challenge yourself, but having friends that can back you up and inspire you when you need it is more than I could have asked for.

In the end, this is why I write this blog and why we run Own Web Now the way we do. I try to do a lot of good and honest stuff (even if its not pleasant to hear) for my partners and while the AMEX is thanks enough, I am always blown away when they back me up the way they do. People ask me how I manage to do so much in a day – so now you know the secret – I have thousands of cheerleaders.

Today was a rough day. Even though the trouble lasted only about 40 minutes and affected just a handful of people its yet another smack in the face of the perfection that we strive for. Bah. I was out having lunch with Jen and bailed out early (thanks for picking up the check, you rock!) to realize I am not Google yet. Anyhow, I had this in the corner of my third screen all day long, it kept on looking at me while I was taking calls during the storm, updating the blog, checking on status reports, on the solution, looking what caused it, troubleshooted it with partners and so on. This was an IM I got at about 5 AM:

Morning V, before I got swamped again with work today I wanted to let you know that your last four posts rock - in particular the one about being mean and beloved and the one about Karl. I don’t care if you think you can’t write, you can, and you do it well. The best thing is that you write like you speak and so even though you are far away, I always have a little piece of Vlad on my desktop.

It’s good to have friends on days like today.. Now, off to Montana to breed sheep.

One thing that I have consistently struggled with in the past has been the attendance at the SBS UG meetings. Maybe it’s the word SBS that turns off so many folks, maybe it’s the location but for the most part its the feeling that if you hang out with a bunch of your competitors they will be able to drain your synapses and take away your business and competitive edge you’ve built in your Bait Shop brand. Truth is, people are successful because they are busy and they are busy because they are successful. Causality loop. Whatever the cause, the effect is that some of my best partners are not fully realizing their potential (or benefiting from the connectivity of the community) and it just turns out that there is another little software company out there that feels the same way.

So what will the three hours of ExchangeDefender and Open Value with Business Desktop Bundle pitching look like? (and the audience vanishes…) Well, first of all, these are not official company presentations so the stuff you’ll be watching will not be delivered by Own Web Now Corp or Microsoft Corp or individuals acting as their agents. We’re just going to pick some topics that are present at the moment and we’re going to discuss them, put them on video tape and let you wind down the evenings with a brief chat about our business and technology.

What specifically are we going to talk about? Well, I will start it off with a mumbled version of all of the above, combined with a nervous paper folding or PocketPC fumbling. Then I will gloss over the SMB technology stuff that you might want to know about (Acer bought Gateway today for example, presenting an interesting quagmire of how you can market two crappy computers with a Ferrari and a cow and where they thought their brand synergies would come from).

JJ will then take over and talk about SharePoint v3. JJ, though he hides this fact, has an MBA so again we’re talking about practical SMB implementation of a portal. You can get level 200, 300 and even 400 SharePoint webcasts from Microsoft on demand, hearing how to make it make sense to an SMB practice… thats JJ’s bag.

And saving the best for last, Jessica Emmons, PCM for Microsoft’s “The South Shall Rise Again” region will be flexing her own MBA muscle:

“I’m really looking forward to it, and planning to cover everyone’s favorite business topic: marketing… Will be lots of general business building in there, as well as some specific things for MSFT partners to watch for.”

Truth is, there is only one goal to this whole thing: to sell you crap you probably don’t need to make you realize that at the end of this whole mythical “community” all it really has is just a bunch of great people that are proud of what they do and they talk about it because they think it would help others. We thought this would help you, there is no tag or motive associated with it, take it for what its worth and I hope you learn something new. And if you’re so thrilled by it and like doing business with decent people it’s not difficult to find a place that needs OWN or Microsoft stuff and if you ever need something in Orlando there will be at least 30 people there that showcase what this community is about, hope you tune in.

If you’ve followed this blog for a while you know I’ve had my ups and downs with the Yahoo Groups system of “woe is me but I won’t do anything about it” discussions. For some that seemed to head nowhere (leads) I had the sense to remove myself. For others, I questioned publicly how long they were going to keep on taking the disrespectful tone and proceed into obscurity. I made a promise to a friend that I will remain and be a positive influence on the conversation – I nuked a few people that I had just about zero respect for and at the time I felt the fault was with the moderators of the group. Looking back, eight months later, not only was this not their fault to begin with but they have really stepped up their efforts to curb the discussions that headed nowhere. And at every turn they got questioned, disrespected, had personal items hurled at them..

Here is my fundamental problem with Yahoo Groups and IT discussions in the SMB IT consultant/reseller segment overall. It seems like there is always a crowd of people that comes to the table with one and only one objective: to bitch and moan. One of the idiots recently explained this in a very eloquent way: “The only way to get them to do anything is to create a huge public PR nightmare because the only way they will act is if there is a huge smear on their face”; If you’ve ever been to a TS2 event in Florida you know what I mean. Just because someone asks you for opinion or feedback does not mean you have put in a quarter for a few minutes with a punching bag. Some just do not seem to get that.

Sadly, folks, this isn’t therapy – this is a community for sharing technical and business knowledge; maybe at hard times a bit of comic relief. Unfortunately, this is a personal problem for me because Yahoo Groups have over time become a matter of personal addiction – and I just can’t seem to let it go when an idiot is given a megaphone directed at over 2,000 people. So I respond and I try to help folks understand the slightly bigger picture but eight months later it just seems to have gone to no avail. I guess I’ll focus more energy onto encouraging people to blog where they actually have to think before they start typing (though this blog is perhaps the worst example of that)

So… I’ve programmed in Parental Restrictions today not to allow me to look at my Gmail account (where all my community mail goes to) between 6 AM and midnight. If I am so compelled I guess I could look at them on my laptop but we’ll see. There are other OWN people in the groups now, maybe some of them bite the community bug but I kind of feel I have put in my time and failed and well.. time to move on.

Orlando ITPRO meeting is scheduled for this Thursday, August 2nd at 6:30 PM so come on over. It’s at the New Horizons (meeting not open to general public, must be a member of ITPRO due to confidentiality issues, lawyer speak, global warming, etc)

There are two quickie presentations up front just to get everyone started and the rest of the evening will be a roundtable discussion of everything thats going on. Thankfully it’s a slow summer with lots of folks on vacation – which makes this the best time of the year to start working hard on all the services you intend to be delivering year round. Now you can think about them, develop them, test them and all without being interrupted every 10 minutes. So… were putting our collective brain together to figure what more we can do to be successful in Orlando and Central Florida.

I know how alergic you are to clickthroughs so I’ve reprinted the whole article Vijay wrote because its perhaps the finest piece of social/business reflection on what it is most of us do. If you are moved to respond please do so here.

Microsoft has a fixation for case studies which are compete based i.e. you replaced a Linux solution with Microsoft. They’ll jump all over you for this! Tell them you have stories where you deployed SBS 2003 and it transformed the way a business operated and it’s yawn city for them! The point is this, that SBSC Partners do this day in and day out - keeping small businesses operating and giving them modern IT infrastructure. The change in some of these businesses can be amazing and on the surface may seem nothing, not even worth reporting but boy do they have an impact on the way people work. Microsoft continues to be completely underwhelmed by the work we do and the range of technologies we deploy - we perform minor miracles! The greatest stories are those of ordinary people doing ordinary things or maybe I should say ordinary people being empowered to do extraordinary things. Microsoft needs to come and see what we do and you can’t do that from the comfort of Microsoft HQ.

The SBSC Programme is like the Programme that dare not mention its name, in fact some who work within Small & Medium Business never mention it! If they were to meet a SBSC Partner you feel they would be like a rabbit caught in the headlights and try and make it to the safety of a Gold Certified Partner doing Business Solutions. I guess we can be a bolshy lot and that we don’t necessarily fit into nice neat Microsoft compartmentalised silos. We’re not going to cover many PAMs in glory - bless their little target driven cotton socks! Shock horror, we work with competitive technologies and have multiple vendor relationships and we speak our mind when things at Microsoft suck. We are unpredictable and ungrateful, probably in about equal measure.

One thing each and everyone of us has done has been to take real risks in life. We’ve bet our livelihoods, the growth of our businesses and the success of our customer’s businesses on Microsoft Technology so we deserve the maximum amount of support from Microsoft and for them to step into our shoes sometime.

To each and every SBSC Partner out there, I truly respect what you all do!

 

(I thought long and hard, which is rare, on whether I should post this on Vladville or not as its quite personal.)

I spoke to many successful and quite impressive people in both my business (Vladfire) and elsewhere about the way they define success.

Earlier tonight I had wrapped up a fairly long and exhausting week (DFWVF) and I went to the living room to find my wife soundly asleep on the couch at 8 PM. So I dragged her to bed and went back to doing what I was doing before. By 10:30 PM I was bored out of my mind and I went back to the bedroom.

Vlad: Hump.

Katie: What.

Vlad: You’re wearing a plain white tank top, the international sign for “Please hump me.”

Katie: What do you want?

Vlad: I’m bored out of my mind. Entertain me!

So she put her clothes on and took me out at 11 PM. We drove about two miles to Downtown Disney and went to Ghirardelli’s for a bannana split. Now I am not sure where exactly success in this is. In that it took me nearly 5 years since moving to Orlando to finally do what I moved here to do, that I can go somewhere at 11 PM and not have a care in the world about having to be anywhere tomorrow, that I can eat a banana split way past any normal persons bedtime and not have a heart attack…

But tonight, in however small way, I was very very happy.

And I get to enjoy it until Katie finds this blog post and kills me.