The answer to this question is relative to where you live and what your socially acceptable norms are. For example, the French look at Americans as people who are so fast paced and frenzied that never get to enjoy the finer things in life or have a 3 hour dinner – in fact most of Europe gets better benefits and far longer vacations than we do. And as fast paced and career oriented as we are, most people in Japan that are working over 300 days a year would think we are just lazy. And the factory workers in China don’t think shit because they have to put together an iPad every few seconds during their 18 hour shift.

Here is an interesting article that I hope you take a moment to read:

How U.S. lost out on iPhone Work

Now it depends which bias you read the article with. If you’re an extreme Republican, you’re probably thinking that Corning lost the glass cutting deal because of too many government regulations and insufficient labor force that is getting too many entitlements. If you’re an extreme Democrat, you’re probably going to point out that the reason China won was because government subsidized the plant, the housing and more. What our leaders (who let’s face it, are pretty much the same behind closed doors while pandering to different extremes in the public) would point out is that we’re not flexible enough and need more education to modernize our workforce, more (insert empty government promise) to entice private sector to compete more and create more jobs. So much for the fantasy.

The reality of the situation is that China won because of access to the slave labor force. They are not more flexible because of less government employment and regulations, they are more flexible because of a totalitarian government that calls all the shots. They are not smarter or more educated than us when it comes to manufacturing, but they are willing to work 18 hour shifts and live at work.

The whole article could have been summed in four words:

As long as I’ve been following the American politics, it’s always been someone elses fault that there are fewer jobs. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, illegal immigration was taking away good American jobs like janitorial duties at Walmart, landscaping and unskilled construction. These days it’s the fault of corporations that are outsourcing the jobs overseas.

It’s always someone elses fault. And damnit, someone else needs to fix it.

The reality, however, is that we have it so good here and we’re unable to sacrifice or roll backwards in the “quality of life” department. When we are buying products and services we want the cheapest possible one – we’re ultimate capitalists. Yet when it comes to work, we’re the ultimate socialists – hours and benefits even if we don’t deserve them.

The way these conflicting stances are resolved is through shifting the labor and production to the area where costs are minimized and profits are maximized. Those that take the risk stand a chance of higher than average returns. Everyone tries to participate. For example, #OccupyWallStreet largely objected to the salaries and bonuses of the financial industry that bankrupted the US economy and was perfectly permitted to do so under the policies of President Clinton & Bush. Yet nobody points to the lack of responsibility of the general public that bought properties it could not afford, signed off on forged and misleading financial statements and only did so in order to flip the house and get money for nothing. Politicians blame state financial woes on overpaid high school teachers while the college graduates blame corporations that won’t hire an English or Architectural History majors with no experience to high paying jobs.

Nobody wants to do the hard work.

Internships and long hours are beneath us.

Steve Jobs is the devil for outsourcing and not bringing the jobs to America but the slave factories can’t crank out enough iPad’s to meet the demand. 

Self Selective Slavery

I blogged a while ago about the lifecycle of employee disenchantment. When an employee accepts a job they are excited – they are getting paid! But after the first few paychecks are spent, they are underpaid. God forbid they are a few minutes late to work and someone points it out – now they are both underpaid, unappreciated and harassed!

Most people immediately go to living beyond their means which ultimately always assures lack of happiness with their social status.

This is where it’s again someone elses fault – likely their bosses. Employees both know more about their job than their bosses (“I’m the one actually doing this after all, you don’t know everything I have to put up with!”) but also deserve better pay. To the degree that it may be accurate, it’s also true that the employees have no idea what their bosses, management or company owners have to put up with.

So they look for a new, better job. It’s always about looking up and ahead because everything else is instantaneously beneath us.

That is why those jobs will never come back to USA.

It’s not because of Obama. It’s not because of the corporations. It’s not because of the Wall Street. It’s not because of the regulations – and remember that those regulations are in place because of the abuses corporations got away with for decades that made us a great and overly entitled nation.

For example, general pro-business opinion is that regulations are bad. They limit corporations. True, but everyone wonders where the regulators are when the financial system implodes due to fraud, when the planes are slammed into highrises and when the oil rigs explode and destroy the environment. It’s of course always someone elses fault that the rules are not followed – but it’s the rules fault that we can’t compete.

No. It’s because of you. It’s because you want an iPad but don’t want to work an 18 hour shift at the minimum wage. It’s because you want government services but don’t want to pay the taxes that fund them. It’s because you want an acre of land but don’t want to pay $20 to have it mowed or do it yourself. After all, you’re better than that.

As long as we’re expecting to get out more than we put in the world of leverage will rule.

The Middle of ExchangeDefender

Own Web Now (ie, Shockey Monkey, ExchangeDefender, CloudBlock, etc) is a small technology company. We actually make stuff (we’re not just repackaging other peoples stuff) and some of our products have very long development cycles.

Truth is, there are very few high paying jobs here and they are almost exclusively reserved for people that are working on eliminating the low-end disposable jobs. Just because you’re necessary doesn’t mean that you’re important – so it’s on to you to become more important.

This is something that majority of people understand and accept as a norm. Majority of job applicants do not – which I think only serves as a qualifier for either their unemployment or looking for a job. Prospects with no employment history or entry level skills expect mid-level compensation and the responsibilities of an advanced engineer role. They are not willing to earn it off the clock and expect on-job training. They want clearly defined hours and no responsibility but they want the salary. They don’t want the pressure of timelines, SLA or due dates but they want the “flex schedule” and executive benefits.

As the CEO (entrepreneur) I look at every dollar spent as an investment and every dollar earned as a return. Over time, I look to maximize my returns – so I’m only willing to overpay for the personnel that does more work than they are paid to do. Over the long employment cycle we all benefit.

But what about the people at the bottom who choose not to invest, not to evolve and not to compromise?

That is why the middle class is dying.

Now to make this self serving.

At Shockey Monkey we look at the death of the middle class as a model for the eventual death of the middleware.

The solutions that were once too expensive, too cumbersome and too specialized were priced accordingly because nobody had a way to mass produce them, create alternate revenue streams or benefit from a consumer that was flexible on the training and high end customization.

Shockey Monkey is often unfairly pinned up against similar solutions because that’s the easiest point of reference. But those solutions were written for a single industry and over time became so specialized that it’s made them lack the flexibility to serve others.

When I look at Shockey Monkey I don’t see a budget ConnectWise, I see a process oriented system that can be used by lawyers, service shops, retail, architects, etc. My potential client base is not the dying technology middleman trying to optimize the response time between LPI noticing the problem and monkey being dispatched to fix it. My potential client base is everyone that corresponds with their clients via email, uses web site for marketing, needs a computerized way of tracking interoffice communication and hours worked, that needs to track clients and bill them for goods and services.

The era of unbalanced compensation due to location is over – and it’s nobodys fault other than our own. We reward competition and winners.. so long as that is the case, nobody will be willing to bail us out unless we are willing to do it ourselves.

…

P.S. Some people feel that the service sector is immune to this. I remember walking through Mirage in Las Vegas a few years ago and seeing folks gambling with a virtual blackjack machine that was basically a 42” screen displaying little more than a massive cleavage shot. Less than 10 feet away from a real life blackjack dealer. Most of the human interaction jobs (ie, service) will be replaced by the self service attendants – you already see it in the self-checkout lines. What if you wanted to go to the bank and interacted with a virtual banker working in China for $1/hour? Would you do it? Judging by the outrage that Bank of America faced when they tried to charge folks a few bucks for the privilege of a check card, you can’t fault them for cutting costs in other ways. 

As I’m sure many of you have already seen, we’re really beefing up the ExchangeDefender Essentials lineup before we announce the final move in the 1-2-3 punch that will carry our partners up in 2012. This time, we’re adding an ExchangeDefender LiveArchive-like feature to ExchangeDefender Essentials, our budget-friendly solution.

Now on the corporate blog I have to be friendly and make it seem like sometimes you need to make tough decisions with tight budgets and make calculated compromises.

On here I don’t.

Now that little fact in itself makes some of my friends, employees and partners cringe because they try to imagine what’s it like to be on the receiving end of this. Those folks, fundamentally, do not understand how social media works. The main goal of this blog is not to beat down MSPs. It’s also not to pump up products and webinars. When you do that stuff too much people tune out in the most worthwhile way – they stop talking back. Feedback is the primary reason I write this blog – it gives me the opinion, insight, marketing research and everything else I could ever need to get the perspective needed to run my business. That’s also how we stay ahead of our competitors and why our products find so much success, as if they were built to order. Because on a really fundamental level, they are. Even when they conflict with one another.

So with that in mind, let me explain the Essentials, Emergency, all of ExchangeDefender and how it fits and where it fits and why even bother doing it.

The Basics

Typical abusive opinion should be written this way:

If you’re an MSP running a clients server without a failover like ExchangeDefender LiveArchive, you’re a fucking moron. Do you really think saving pennies and dimes is going to come even close to the losses you’re about to incur when the Exchange server goes down – and it will go down – and the client blames you – and they will blame you – and ruin both your reputation at worst and your ability to sell them additional products and services at best? Seriously? The business that is sitting there deciding whet her or not they need to be put out of business temporarily or permanently over a few bucks a month is a business that is gambling with it’s existence, do you comprehend the level of risk you are undertaking by trying to play into their nickel and diming games?

Now there are grains of truth in the above paragraph (I’ll get back to them in a moment) and to an aspiring IT industry sociopath writing a blog post like that would be incomprehensible. Oh my god, who would do business with someone that speaks in such a way? Turns out a lot of people – because the fact is that we don’t necessarily do business with people because we like them but because the product fits. When it comes to business all that personal stuff goes out the window.

I wish someone had told me that years ago, it would have saved me a lot of time and grief.

Eventually I figured it out on my own by accident and it’s what’s brought you our cloud services, expanded ExchangeDefender, LiveArchive, Shockey Monkey, Looks Cloudy, etc. In order to be successful you either have to be the best (the odds are against you on this one) or you have to work the hardest (this is really just a matter of choice). 

The Essentials

Technically, I held back on approving the buildout of Essentials product for years mostly because the profit margins in the high end product were great and I didn’t have the resources to support more than one product per category. There were also a shitload of problems and scaling issues that took years to resolve, but those are minor details.

Emotionally, I also grew so tired of people who had to sit and think about whether or not a $2 hit to their MSP bottom line would be worth it. I also grew tired of explaining how my $2 product did what my competitors charged double digits for.

Insecurely, I felt that introducing multiple products per category would lead to cannibalization. Surely most people will just switch to the cheaper solution from the more expensive one if they are not using it completely. Right? Right? Wrong. I was wrong about this.

Finally, the essentials product came about because it was a fundamentally different product (even though it is built on the same base with same features at the core) because it appealed to different kinds of partners/clients and it had an entirely different marketplace.

Initially I felt quite dirty about the Essentials product because I felt like partners were selling a product that would ultimately serve as a death trap. I spend millions of dollars building redundancy around redundant systems and really am consumed around making sure things never go down. Yet there were tons of people knocking down my door saying outages were not an issue.

Well, which is it?

Turns out, it’s both. There are just different requirements. And over time the products pick up critical mass and create a profit margin that allows us to include additional features without an overwhelmingly large cost structure associated with it. For example, the Essentials Emergency will cost us less than what it would cost us to sponsor a conference circuit aimed at low end and startup clients. In fact, it will cost less than a half.

Now quick question – what do you think will sell more products: word of mouth and referrals or me in a white suit in a hotel in Baltimore?

The way I see it, ExchangeDefender will continue to appeal to high end partners and MSPs worldwide. The Essentials product will appeal to those who only need the very basics. But with both, our entire team will be able to sleep at night knowing that we’re doing everything in our power to deliver the feature set that backs people up even when they make a decision that doesn’t make sense – because you know what, every software developer feels their features are the most important.

So I’ll introduce you to ExchangeDefender Essentials punch #3 shortly and I guarantee you’re going to like it. My opinion (and that of OWN) is that the MSPs will continue to grow in the cloud – and that the old infrastructure business support services (filtering, security, backups, management) are up for grabs and prone to more consumerisation and consolidation.

For years, I only chose to do my business on the high end. And for years, Postini kicked my ass simply by offering a barebones product for a $1.  But if the clients chose a competitive product based on cost, how loyal would they be to it once they could switch to a product to boost their margins? And at what point is a switch no longer worth the effort?

Ah, the fun of running a business. Here is to an awesome 2012!

It’s been over a week since I said anything on the subject and nearly two weeks since we officially launched Shockey Monkey Reloaded.

Watch the Shockey Monkey Reloaded Launch Webinar

Since that time we’ve signed up nearly 1,000 new portals and you keep on coming in strong as is the interest for sponsorships, etc.

Most of all, I want to thank to the many of you that have taken the time to talk to my staff and work with our support and developers on the bugs you’ve found. We’ve been squashing them daily and all the development resources have been assigned to making it flawless which it pretty much is. Hank got a much deserved vacation (I sent him to Las Vegas) and he’ll be back in the saddle next week with the priority being new integrations and some of the incredibly useful features some of you have brought to me.

Again, I can’t say thanks enough… well, short of giving you a free portal to run your business and serve you customers. That’s a good deal right?

Next Up..

We will be holding a webinar next week to discuss some of the questions that we get often. We also want to talk about the “Getting started in 10 minutes” which we feel is kind of critical for everyone signing up right now. We’ve hired two new people in the past week to help deal with this. And we’ll hire more if it keeps on going this fast, so please tune in and hear what we’ve been up to over the past two weeks.

Tuesday, December 20th, Noon EST

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/236053112

Many of you are good to go and are set to use Shockey Monkey full on in 2012, if you aren’t yet the great news is that it only takes 10 minutes so what are you waiting for?

Before I forget..

The Shockey Monkey training video has been updated for Reloaded. It used to be 67 minutes. Now it’s 17 minutes. That is hopefully the evidence of the commitment we have to making this software simple enough for anyone to use – you, your clients, your clients clients and everyone that doesn’t have an IT experience. Why? Well, the reason why portal and CRM deployments fail (SharePoint) is because nobody uses them, even when forced to use an industry specialized PSA solution folks use less than half the features and that’s among the best of the best! The goal for me with Reloaded was to make you more efficient without having to do more to gain that efficiency. In street terms: money for nothing and monkey for free. (que Dire Straits)

Finally..

Listen, I know I get a bad rep out there due to the many (many, many) blog posts I’ve written about the shortcomings we as an industry get. I don’t tolerate rude people, under any circumstances.. but it’s the stupid ones that bother me more. Everyone reads this blog with their own opinion of me, OWN, Shockey Monkey, ExchangeDefender and so on and I don’t spend much time putting lipstick on pigs.

Yeah, we’ve fucked up a lot over the years and we keep on chugging along, services get better, people get better, products get better. Everyone works on stuff.

What I’d really like to say is that we’ve got your back and we’re putting enormous resources behind this stuff because it’s important. I know a lot of you would rather see me spend it on Exchange or support or customer service or direct sales people so you don’t have to deal with any of the cloud stuff… and I understand. But it’s my money on the line in this company and I’m not running this company for the next month, quarter or year. I am looking to establish a portfolio that will make OWN relevant for another decade and that unfortunately (as some of you have put it) requires me to take an eye off the ball… in order to setup the next few plays.

P.S. As for the title.. I’m just going to keep on adding –ed to the subject as I go along with Reloaded. Kind of how people name their kids Erinn when it’s exactly the same as Erin. Why not Erinnn? While I’m on that subject, congratulations to my buddy Erinn Davis who got engaged this week!

Over the past week I have given you my assessment on the state of IT in SMB and beyond, a look to the past and to the future. I appreciate all the emails and only wish I could follow up with them all.. but I don’t just make up stuff you read on Vladville, all of it is influenced by many of you that talk, email and chat with me every day.

The theory of small business IT consumerization and how modern service providers can ride the wave to the more efficient and profitable future.

1. No future without the past
2. unRMM – What’s managed?
3. unPSA – Whose business is it anyway?
4. Derrivatives – Who does the IT work?
5. Ultimately, who pays the bill?

I’m also not putting this out for your enjoyment like some disgruntled English major that couldn’t get a real press job. I have a lot of money riding on me being right about things and the reason I’m right more often than not is because I have thousands of you offering me insight and different points of view that help me improve what I do.

But tomorrow, at noon, even more is on the line. It’s the biggest webinar I’ve ever done:

Shockey Monkey Reloaded

Thursday, December 1st, Noon EST (max 1000 seats; will be recorded)

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/812869640

It’s also a big bet on the future of IT. It’s a huge bet on the future of my company.

Right now, we (as in solution providers and their vendors) don’t have an upper hand in the marketplace. We sure as hell don’t have the marketing budgets and sales staff headcount that the big boys do. We also lack resources, economies of scale, farms and farms of slave labor in third world countries, tools and plenty of other excuses.

What we do have is flexibility and the size. There are way more of us than them and we can move faster when there is an opportunity.

Join me tomorrow, regardless of what PSA or CRM or stack of papers you use.

I promise you one thing, after you hear me out… I will be your best friend. The single greatest thing about Shockey Monkey is just one word… and I hope you like it when you hear it, I know I do!

Over the past week I’ve outlined what I believe to be the future of technology management in small to medium businesses. I’ve discussed how we got here, what we need to focus on managing, how we need to involve the decision makers in the management of business aspects of technology and who will do the work in the future… which is already here.

If you would like to consider the full thesis, here are the details and factors as I see them:

1. No future without the past
2. unRMM – What’s managed?
3. unPSA – Whose business is it anyway?
4. Derrivatives – Who does the IT work?
5. Ultimately, who pays the bill?

Before we figure out who pays the bill..

Before you can send out the invoice you need to put something on it. Exactly what are you billing?

In the distant past the invoice consisted mostly of infrastructure components (networking gear, computers, printers, monitors) and majority of the profit came simply from facilitating the transaction. The hardware business is tough and the margins are almost non-existent these days even if you’re as sophisticated as Dell and HP – and almost all of their profit comes from large Fortune 500 and government contracts. In small business, hardware game has passed. Regardless of how slick and charming the hardware guy may seem, people aren’t stupid and they won’t pay $3000 for a workstation just because of your smile.

In the more recent past, majority of the revenue was service based and highly profitable as managed services providers realized high scalability – one engineer managing hundreds of endpoints remotely. But businesses are downsizing the infrastructure and the complex junk. When you remember that most of the MSP value proposition was built back in the days when spyware was a huge problem and people couldn’t keep up with their system patches and unreliable backups that were criticial to onsite infrastructure – those problems have largely been addressed by Microsoft and others over the years.

Managed services value proposition was built on the problems we had in early 2000’s – missing patches, spyware, malware, failed backup jobs, hardware instability, etc. As these issues are not prevalent today more small businesses are rightfully asking why they are paying so much to have their technology managed when most of their technology is either reliable or in the cloud where the service is managed by the provider.

Just as we learned how to build profitable and scalable businesses without the huge hardware margins, we will find a way to build profitable businesses as the MSP model starts to sunset and faces huge competition from larger (cheaper) providers.

Where is the money, Vlad?

It’s actually much simpler than it seems. However, it requires a change in the model and restructuring of how the business plan is executed.

Let’s rewind: You used to sell a ton of infrastructure and make a large margin on configuring it all to play together. You no longer do that but now you make a huge margin managing all those systems remotely as your clients become less and less dependent on them. As your clients invest more in portable devices and mobility becomes a norm dictated by their LOB apps (no, there is no software vendor on the planet, including Microsoft, that wants to support the customer with their on-premise server deployments)… well, pretty soon you won’t have much to manage on site.

This is usually where the philosophical fights start… but please keep on reading. It is normal to be scared and to resist change because it means lack of visibility and predictability. Reality is you can’t maintain the status quo because all your vendors and suppliers are teaming up against you and sooner than later they will make it impossible for you to execute your business model profitably.  If you can agree to at least consider the following point I think it will make the world of difference to you:

Just as we transitioned from selling hardware to selling management services remotely for a fraction of an in-house IT persons salary, we can transition to what is next. What is next is the reality of most of these services being delivered remotely through the cloud – from voice to email to faxes to meetings – everything is becoming virtual, mobile, on demand and portable.

The bad news is you no longer get to profit from managing that technology.

The great news is that you no longer have to sink time into managing that technology.

Back in the early SBS days it took weeks to build a client network and onboard them. Then we got into Swing Migration and suddenly it was under a week. Then it went to the cloud and we no longer had to deal with Exchange at all. I can tell you first hand that many of your competitors and peers have even forgotten how much Exchange sucks, I know because I hear the outrage every time there is even a minor issue with Exchange that we host.

So no, you will no longer have to maintain an expertise in eseutil or schedule blocks of hours away from your family to defrag mail databases.

However, that time can now be reinvested and – just as it was when we moved from hardware to MSP – scaled to a more profitable venture.

You can’t profit from hoping that your clients are stupid

Read that a few more times.

Posting Facebook updates, tweets, updating iTunes and upgrading the firmware on your iPhone or your printer is no longer a geek job. Anyone can do it.

In the long long ago you had to create a system floppy disk. Copy the new ROM to the floppy along with the flashing tool. Reboot and boot off the floppy. Run the flash. Try to save the existing rom. Realizing that the backup would not fit on your current rom. Removing all the extra junk Microsoft put on the boot disks. Going at it again. Something going wrong. RTFM. Crossing fingers, etc. That era is gone.

Now everyone can patch.

Most of the time they don’t even know it’s happening. They just restart with the new version of Firefox or IE.

And that’s the scenario for the on premise gear. When it comes to online services… forget about it, you don’t even know when it’s done unless the provider bothers to email you.

You cannot continue to hope that things will remain complex because folks building all these gadgets and software solutions need to sell more of them. They can’t sell them as efficiently or as quickly if there is a shadow fee of an IT person that’s going to move in with you to deploy it. Small businesses are not buying IBM clusters to play chess or Jeopardy with. They are buying iPads and Android phones that a single-digit-per-hour retail store employee is all to happy to configure for them!

Profit from the fact that your clients are smart and get busy with more success

Now read that a few more times.

You can’t profit from ignorance and people that are bad at math. It takes a lot of money to build a casino. Lottery is cornered as well. You can’t hope that there will be an unlimited amount of inept people out there because if they are inept how will they earn the revenue to pay your services.

When businesses are in the startup mode, they like to do things on their own to save money and cut corners. When they mature and grow the cost of their time exceeds the cost of your service.

Focus on creating services that are affordable enough to be delegated to you.

Deliver a solution that makes it easy for the business owners to delegate complex tasks to you.

(fact: It’s taken me over 20,000 words to get to the bottom line which is highlighted above)

There are thousands of different things that you can do better, faster and more effectively for your clients when it comes to technology.. for a fee. All that’s missing is an impulse for them to call John when they are looking at a problem they shouldn’t be dealing with.

Maybe your customer will not buy a printer from you. Maybe they won’t even ask you to set it up for group printing. They won’t even bother asking you how to connect their iPad to it. The secretary can change paper and ink cartridge on his/her own. But eventually that secretary will spend two hours troubleshooting the printer and the manager will step in to “help” – if they are smart, they will get in touch with you within the hour. That’s where you can offer to have it worked on right now for a higher fee or later tonight for a lower fee. You can come on site, have someone pick it up, listen to them tell you all the other challenges they are facing and find a way to help.

No, you won’t be able to get them to sign a management agreement for 50 times what the printer costs. Those days are coming to an end.

You will however be able to collect a multiple of their salary because it’s impacting their business.

You will have far more clients because the fact above will make most of your peers and competitors close down their shop.

The easy IT money era is over. The smart IT era is beginning.

If you’d like to see what it looks like, please join me this Thursday at noon EST:

Shockey Monkey Reloaded

Thursday, December 1st, Noon EST (max 1000 seats; will be recorded)

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/812869640

You can be the IBM they can afford and trust. And yes, people will trust you far more when you’re not screwing them with fuzzy math and stuff they don’t need.

In the last few posts I have been laying out the multi-year strategy for Shockey Monkey and the changes IT Solution Providers need to come to terms with and adapt in order to survive and thrive. The core underlying concept of consumerisation of IT – technology decisions and use dictated by the users not engineers – impacts IT solution providers as the consumer electronics blend with business technology and make intermediaries unnecessary for basic tasks.

Who does the IT work?

The argument isn’t whether or not IT will continue to be a viable profession. The question is where do current IT solution providers provide value, so that value can be properly marketed today to assure for a great tomorrow. There is some background you need to consider first:

1. No future without the past
2. unRMM – What’s managed?
3. unPSA – Whose business is it anyway?
4. Derrivatives – Who does the IT work?
5. Ultimately, who pays the bill?

Some people tend to believe that they can run the same business for years without major changes. The problem is, underlying technology is changing too rapidly for any rational human being to believe that masses would remain ignorant. The only way you can charge premiums for same type of work with the same skill set is if your lack of morals combined with the ability to present bad ideas in a convincing manner meets people that are bad at math or grossly uninformed. However, even with all those conditions met, scale is difficult to accomplish as is the ability to get some sleep at night.

This is an enormous challenge. For business owners and managers of IT solution providers as well as for the engineers and technicians they employ. If your skill set is not absolutely the best you will soon only have a marginal advantage over the end user of the technology you deploy because you will not manage the majority of the technology from the ground up. If you’re antisocial, don’t like people, don’t like explaining technology and generally think you’re a genius and everyone else is an idiot – those idiots will find a way around the difficulty even if they have to sacrifice temporarily. If you exist for the sole purpose of prolonging the problem, people will get fed up. If you thrive on complexity you will find it exceedingly frustrating that everyone is trying to reduce it.

IT Magic – When people can use technology without feeling stupid about it they fall in love with it.

Back in the 90’s, Novell had a much better networking products than Microsoft. Last decade, Microsoft had much better media offerings than Apple. RIM had much better smartphones for business than Android or Apple.

What dictates users willingness to use a product is their ability to use a product.

Lot’s of stuff gets “sold” but if it’s not used, it’s worthless. See Microsoft SharePoint.

Large scale enterprise deployments of very sophisticated, very expensive, very specialized software are getting displaced by Web 2.0 sites ran by companies that haven’t even dreamed of turning a profit.

There is no arguing over the direction IT is going. There is the question of value.

What is valuable?

In order for something to be valuable, it has to be visible. Not just quantifiable in a virtual or hypothetical sense, but presentable and identifiable in day-to-day operations.

If you spend as much time as I do working with managed services providers you’d hear about sales pitches focused on things that business decision makers understand: time it takes to manage their technology. Business owners do not see blue screens, virus infections or paper jams – they deal with them – but they only see and feel the hit to the pocket book. Every minute of downtime or time a user spends dealing with an IT problem the business owner is multiplying their salary out and getting more upset.

MSPs sell on the value of saved time. But they haaaaaate it. Because time is a finite source that is not scalable. They would rather spend all day long selling hardware with huge margins but truth is that companies are not investing in infrastructure, they are trying to reduce it. MSPs would love to sell things like offsite backups, security services, patch management – stuff that they can automate, outsource, delegate and scale for huge profits.

Problem? Well, if you can’t see it you can’t put a price on it so you can try to live without it.

Part of the consolidation we’ve seen in the MSP space (and part of outright business closings) is directly related to the admission that the time (human factor) cannot be scaled so the profit becomes fixed to the headcount.

So what is valuable?

Customer service
Product recommendations
Alternative evaluations
Intelligent outsourcing
Migration services
Data interpretation
Billing consolidation
…

I can go on for days. The key is to focus on stuff they’d rather not do and stuff they can’t do.

You can build an extremely successful, extremely profitable, extremely lean business providing a lot of these services.

In order to get there you have to admit to yourself you are running less of a technology business and more of a marketing business.

Once you successfully market yourself and return to providing value you will have a greater client base and will again find more extremely lucrative project work you want in the first place.

It’s really that simple. You just don’t have the tools to do it…. yet.

Getting from gifted to employed

So the small and medium businesses are getting their technology served to them as ordinary consumers without regard for it’s use at home or a multimillion dollar business.

Is twitter a more reputable news distribution mechanism than a corporate web site? Are professional press releases better at getting serious attention than a Facebook fan page linked to a Constant Contact account?

The key to success in IT in the future isn’t in trying to establish yourself as the expert in everything the users may need. It’s in being available to deliver the service when they don’t want to do it themselves.

Your future client may purchase computers without you, smartphones without you, setup their cloud mail without you and manage all aspects of their communications without you.

But then their domain name will expire and the vice president of a mortgage brokerage will have to get to the bottom of why their business just came to a grinding halt.

Think fast: What rate do you think they’ll be willing to pay to have that problem resolved when it comes up? Would it be higher or lower than the one they are willing to pay to repair a largely disposable workstation when the employee already has an iPad, smartphone and a laptop?

I want to make something absolutely clear here: Do not underestimate the clients ability to work in unperfect environments. Much of Vladville’s success is built on stories of IT consultants, who through nearly criminal neglect, dismantled businesses faith in technology as a core business tool. Try not to think of problems small businesses would be incapable of tollerating (No such thing, remember Windows 95, 98, ME, every Exchange service pack ever built, businesses running on @yahoo.com or @aol.com addresses). Try to think about problems small businesses don’t want to deal with.

Strategy: Ignore problems that you think need to be addressed. Focus on problems small and medium business owners face and don’t want to address on their own.

For example, nobody needs an IT consultant to buy an email solution. Perfectly literate business owners that are control freaks (ie: all of us) won’t even need your help to set it all up. The ticking time bomb is in the contacts and calendars – what do you mean I can’t invite people into this meeting from my phone? Where did all of my contacts go?

Business owners love to be in control. But only on their terms, their schedule and their mood. They would all love to be the only ones who have access to all of their email. Unless that email were to go down while they are negotiating a new contract and this becomes an annoyance.

Focus on highly visible, highly annoying, highly valuable tasks and make it seem cheaper than their time. Ever wonder why there are probably hundreds of dry cleaners in a 10 mile radius yet an iron and an ironing board cost less than $50?

Be there when they want to buy, not when they want to shop

Once you’ve identified what you do, it’s time to get in between the user and the problem.

How do you do that?

Give them a tool that you can easily plug into.

Personal injury attorneys are spending millions and millions of dollars on radio commercials and billboards, that you’d only hear or see while you’re driving, to tell you to put their phone number into your cell phone so that you can call them when you have an accident… probably 20 seconds into trying to type the number in as a new contact while you should be looking at the road. Please don’t sue me for pointing that out.

You need to be there. As a fridge magnet. As a mousepad.

Or perhaps there is an easier way. Give them a free RMM that does nothing but keep them in the loop of all the IT problems they are experiencing. Give them a free CRM tool that will allow them to run their own business more efficiently while you are just a click away from being summoned. It’s better than a fridge magnet, it’s a genies lamp. You got 3 wishes and I got 3 lines on my invoice – Name, Credit card # and expiration date.

Only problem is, there is no such thing as a free RMM that a business would want to install in their company or that you can afford to deliver. It’s even worse in the CRM land, these big products cost a lot of money and nobody has an incentive to give them away so they won’t.

It’s hard to give away a product when your revenue stream depends on it’s commercial viability.

But what if.. a bunch of companies that sell more sophisticated RMM or PSA solutions.. banded together to sponsor a solution that would deliver all that to you, for free?

Would that earn your business? Would it earn your trust? If deployed, would it earn you more business?

In a time and a marketplace where most of your vendor partners are trying to figure a more effective way to get around you.. some of us are hard at work trying to get you more business. Welcome to Partnership 2.0 folks, the future looks bright even as IT looks cloudy..

Yesterday I wrote the first in the Reloaded Shockey Monkey articles covering the grand scheme of consumerization of IT and how the business models need to evolve as we transition from the world of IT to the world of the cloud to what’s coming next. The argument I’m making is not that IT will become irrelevant, that the cloud will obsolete things or that you need to abruptly change your business model today:

All I am pointing out is that technology purchase cycles in business are long and there is an immense advantage to being first. To read about the rest consider these articles:

1. No future without the past
2. unRMM – What’s managed?
3. unPSA – Whose business is it anyway?
4. Derrivatives – Who does the IT work?
5. Ultimately, who pays the bill?

What is an RMM?

RMM is quite simply a tool that has made unskilled IT staff obsolete. Prior to IT task automation, a human being of questionable hygiene and even more questionable IT certificate trail would walk to a computer / server and perform maintenance, repair, helpdesk functionality and so on. As businesses started using more technology the IT departments grew in size and influence within organizations because things were far from perfect.

RMM software – the likes of nAble, Level Platforms, Kaseya, Scriptlogic, Labtech and so on allowed IT departments and MSPs to centralize and “remote” a lot of the functionality. One person could now roll out software to thousands of workstations across multiple companies. They could keep an eye on all the software and act on problems before significant damage occurred – are backups running, are we using the latest antivirus definitions, are we running out of storage and do we have the latest security updates applied? If the answer to any of those is no, we could address it remotely.

This in fact is how ExchangeDefender manages to run a global network without ever setting foot on some of the continents that we have infrastructure on. This technology has been behind the outsourcing of IT management and massive reduction of IT force needed to manage this immense growth in IT infrastructure.

What’s next?

RMMs are here to stay. No argument there.

However, if you believe that the consumerization of IT is real and that end users and business owners are capable of managing their own phones, tablets and gadgets then you seriously need to look at the opportunity you have here. The current and future workforce isn’t out of Mad Men, it’s not your grandma with the flashing 12:00 on the VCR or an old guy who can’t see his smartphone much less use a keyboard. People showing up in workplaces today have been on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter for years and they may even know some HTML. Yet none of them will be impressed by SNMP traps or VPN advantages over SSL.. because the low level geek stuff we’ve built our companies on is largely too geeky to be relevant.

Last week we caused a minor controversy when an NDA survey made it’s way into the public with the title “Is Vlad building an RMM?” – for those of you that haven’t seen it yet, here is what we asked:

Love the writein comment.. Click on the image for magnification.

If we can all agree that virtualization, cloud and mobility are the future..

If we can all agree that the IT decision power and management is going from the IT department to business leaders and managers..

If we can all agree that devices like smartphones, tablets and netbooks are replacing traditional workstations and offices..

.. Is it really that much of a stretch to say that the monitoring of those resources changes radically as does the importance of the data being monitored?

In the long, long ago when I started Own Web Now, everyone had a PC. The select few important people got laptops. When those computers went down, people stopped working. It was not the end of the world because most business was still conducted over the phone, fax and mail.

Over time people got cell phones, laptops, netbooks, tables. We’re living in the Star Trek world talking to our computers about where we’d like to eat and asking them to remind us to do something tomorrow. With the exception of asking Siri to make you a coffee we’re only short of a replicator.

Once upon a time it really mattered if a hard drive was filling up and the client couldn’t send mail. Now if their computer literally explodes they have several devices that can do the same thing.

So let’s think about where we are, not where we were..

Reality of Today

If you talk to a business owner today his IT concerns are significantly different than those of an IT department. It costs me $300 per month to have an employee park in the highrise office that ExchangeDefender is in. That is the cost of renting the spot, not buying it by the way. The overhead of the office space is even higher as is virtually everything else associated with a real business.

Your “real businesses” of the future will have better ways to spend money than overpriced office space and parking spots. Most of the work will be done remotely. You may not have 100% say which device that work gets done on – if the VoIP server is down they will pick up the cell phone, if their computer is down and they need to send a quick email they might have to wrestle an iPad from their kid. Your future workers come with built in Internet redundancy and several business disaster continuity sites (Starbucks, McDonalds, Moes).

With a workforce so mobile what is the key monitoring objective? Making sure their infrastructure is working or that their employees are working?

Business owner in charge of an unRMM

As a business owner that manages people working from home, out of the country, or at 2AM there are different metrics I care about that transcend infrastructure. Your laptop got a Gatorade bath because your kid celebrated while watching a football game on it? It happens. $350 later, you’ll get a new one by tomorrow. It happens.

What I really want to monitor as a business owner and manager is performance. I want to know that 480 minutes of the workday I pay you for go towards something that makes my business move forward. I know, I know big brother, all employees already put in way too much overtime and work to the bone every minute of the day. But when you look at the data you see they catch up with their friends and family at work, have discussions with folks on the forums and endless chats about stuff over IM. In between banking sites, youtube or my favorite Office Space moment: “Sometimes I like to just sit here for 15 minutes and zone out.” 

As a business owner, you have no insight into what your employees are doing with the technology and as much as they feel you’re not paying them enough you know they aren’t spending all of their time working. So you do this little dance of trying to pin down one another – you make them produce endless timesheets and reports, ask for status updates and try to document every inappropriate non-business site they go to. What all this amounts to is more useless meetings, more time wasted on analytics and the staff is now even more pissed off that you don’t trust them that it adds even more work to the scarce time they have between managing their sports fantasy league, uploading and commenting on Facebook pictures and staying on top of tmz.com

Sounds pretty bitchy, right? What if you could just trust each other?

OK, joke aside, here is what I want. I want something that would help me both trust everyone, keep them more accountable and let them experience at least some workplace liberty that the technology we have guarantees us: I don’t mind if you work from home but keep in mind that I have a tool that will tell me when you started working, when you went to lunch and how long you spend inside Outlook as opposed to Facebook. If you run into a problem, I have a remote desktop tool that will let someone assist you. I don’t have to ask you what you’re working on, I can just see your desktop no matter where you’re at. If I just walked into the office I don’t have to wonder what you’ve been up to or waste both of our times with a status report, I can glance over your browsing history and searches today in a few seconds. I can see screenshots of everything you’ve done today and play 4 hours worth of work in under 2 minutes. Our IT guy will get an alert whenever something weird happens to your PC or laptop or smartphone and handle it so you don’t have to waste your time.

When I talk about an RMM, I want to think about a remote employee monitor and it doesn’t matter to me if remote is Australia or if I can see you from my office.

The key metric of the modern mobile workforce is productivity. Not the technology that once upon a time was far from perfect and needed a 24/7 janitor.

The Opportunity

Admittedly, while this is something all Shockey Monkey users will have in a matter of months, the commercial opportunity isn’t in trying to sell yet another tool. There are plenty of tools that do employee monitoring, activity monitoring, remote desktop help, etc.

The problem is that they are written for geeks or HR staff and they cost way too much money!!

Imagine an environment where this tool is something the businesses you manage get for free. Yes Mr Business Owner, I’ll give you all of this for free if you let me manage your IT infrastructure you’ve invested so much in. All these servers, workstations, desktops, printers, smartphones and tablets need to be taken care of and it’s cheaper and more effective for us to do it than for your VP to be on hold with some third world helpdesk script reader.

While they are leveraging their business remote monitoring tool, you can leverage your remote monitoring tool to generate revenues at a higher rate than others.

Business owners and decision makers know they have to have competent IT professionals, they just don’t appreciate all we do all the time. But arm them with the right tools so they can understand how much of their money goes to waste and they might consider their IT as a far more strategic asset instead of a disposable piece of the electronics it really is.

In a world where users will manage more of their IT, the cost of managing the IT they can’t figure out will rise while the amount of it goes down. I believe Shockey Monkey unRMM will enable our partners to get into those opportunities in a way traditional marketing and networking will simply not be able to.

That’s my story and that’s what I’m investing in.

It has taken us more than a year to get Shockey Monkey right. At this point, I would like to encourage you to read the following five posts about Shockey Monkey regardless of what you think of it, me or what you may be using to run your business.

Mostly because if I’m right.. it will fundamentally change your business.

Several years ago I wrote a series of articles called Lucy’s Sail. Go ahead and Google it, at the time it was not a popular topic but everyone could see bits and pieces of it made sense. I’ve made many of you millions of dollars in the cloud while many that argued against it now work for someone else and perennial powers of HP and Dell are scratching their head about what is next. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like they don’t know what’s next – they just have a hard time trying to figure out how to sell what they have into the future where people don’t want old technology.

We’ve undergone a massive consumerization of technology over the past few years, a movement that has taken decision making power away from IT departments/people and placed it in the hands of business people and end users.

Over the next few posts I would like to outline the goals behind the Shockey Monkey and why I’ve turned down millions of dollars to lose money pursue investing in it myself.

Please tune in each day for the following Shockey Monkey breakdowns:

1. No future without the past
2. unRMM – What’s managed?
3. unPSA – Whose business is it anyway?
4. Derrivatives – Who does the IT work?
5. Ultimately, who pays the bill?

The Past

Once upon a time I wrote Shockey Monkey as a combination of helpdesk, CRM and shopping cart for small business IT shops.

Step 1: In order for the cloud solutions to be profitable, they first had to be sold – so the IT Solution Provider needed to have a mechanism to efficiently take the credit card, accept an agreement and collect revenues each month (you’d be shocked to know that this is still not a baseline offering in any of the professional CRM / automation suites).

Step 2: Once you have the subscription and revenues rolling in each month, everything beyond the cost of service should be your profit. The only way that happens is if the end user is in control of their cloud services. If the IT Solution Provider has to pick up the phone, log the ticket, login to the control panel, find the user, etc just in order to reset the password or freeze a mailbox or add another user to the distribution group several horrible events are converging. First, you’re wasting time performing an automated task that the user should be empowered to do themselves – and time is money. Second, while you’re wasting your time talking to the end user about the weather as you try to find the passwords, etc – you aren’t doing anything that contributes to the growth of your business or the techie isn’t working on a more profitable project. Third, it’s not just your money that is going down the drain here, how can we say that the cloud saves people money if the users that leverage that cloud are spending time away from their jobs to deal with the outsourcing company for mundane tasks – how can we call it outsourcing if we’re still doing the job? Fourth, the one nobody wants to talk about: security; interjecting social inefficiencies of account management to override actual access credentials, logging and so on is a recipe for disaster – what would be your response to a subpoena for information that you helped someone destroy inadvertently because your tech got beaten up on the phone? The system needs to deliver efficiencies, security and ease of use in order to be used as a benefit instead of a deterrent.

Step 3: Once everything is covered in steps 1 and 2 the real business can begin. The days of living as a gatekeeper or an IT troll of necessity are over – you’re not a lawyer, you don’t get a paycheck just because we want to protect ourselves from the dangers that lurk around in the dark. These solutions need to be seamless and they need to reach into the everyday technology usage. They need to integrate together to deliver a real benefit. When they don’t you have billions of dollars burned in an effort to make people use a company whiteboard SharePoint that nobody can remember the location of.

Over the past few years we’ve helped thousands of Shockey Monkey users establish a process driven IT business and leverage cloud offerings to establish predictable revenue models.

When we launched Shockey Monkey we called it the unPSA. We don’t compete with the likes of Autotask or ConnectWise and have maintained a great working relationship with them because we have the same goals (taking IT staff and organizations from notepad and Excel into a process driven system). Any smart person that can look beyond the obvious similarities can tell that these are in fact great complementing solutions.

If you stick with Autotask and ConnectWise, you have a shot at becoming a great IT company. My goal with Shockey Monkey is to make sure the loyalty of your client base is sticky because it connects your company to the solutions you’ve sold them. You need a great tool to manage your business. You also need a tool to connect your clients business and technology back to yours. That is where your value is multiplied.

Here is something I want you to think about: Imagine if your tools (PSA, RMM, Backups) were not built for you but were designed for your customers… what would they look like?

If we are indeed in this massive consumerization of IT that everyone believes in and the IT becomes something that users do instead of IT staff, what do those applications look like? Who pays for them? How do they meet the regulatory compliance requirements? Who does the cleanup work when automation fails, what is the business continuity scenario and what level of data portability do we have?

Now, I do want to be mindful here and play the devils advocate for a moment: If those concerns are truly real, as they certainly would be in any real business that has to deal with them, how can that possibly ever spell the end of the IT as we know it? Making slight adjustments in course as we go along and as these technologies mature will keep us in place and evolving right along with it. Right?

In my opinion, there isn’t much difference between obscurity and failure. It could be that I’m just an extremely aggressive and competitive jerk but if you give me an option to earn a million dollars and I’m OK with taking home only $40,000 that doesn’t make me feel like much of a winner. We had these arguments before the cloud and some people bought it, some didn’t. Many that didn’t are unemployed and working somewhere while the lucky ones are maintaining the same levels or maybe growing a little. On the other hand, I have plenty of 1-3 man shops with thousands of Exchange mailboxes, massive amount of storage and other cloud services that they only sold and did the hard work once. How do you explain the discrepancy? Ultimately, is it really a discrepancy or is it the reality of the small business IT – there will be far fewer of us but we’ll be doing a lot more for our customers because we won’t be a part of a perpetual IT problem? This is something that Microsoft, Google and Amazon recognized early on and built massive cloud operations without an IT channel or staff involved in any major way.

But let’s not dwell over the past or sink ourselves in the problems of the present.

Let’s figure out a way to be a part of it and a massively profitable at that.

Shockey Monkey Reloaded

Thursday, December 1st, Noon EST (max 1000 seats; will be recorded)

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/812869640

Look forward to showing it off then. In the meantime, I’ll explain on this blog.

Once upon a time, Arnie stood over me at the airport trying to figure out why I was telling partners not to expect the same levels of integration in ConnectWise as we do in Autotask. We were at a conference a year later and he said:

“You know how you can tell that Vlad is pissed at you? He blogs about it.”

Well, things change. Thankfully, sometimes things change for better.

Back in the long, long ago there was no API. There was an existing integration between CW and some other SPAM tool and then there was tcpdump. I remember quite vividly how our initial integration between ExchangeDefender and CW worked – mostly because I wrote it. Everything was hardcoded so we sniffed the URL it was hardcoded to fetch, we reverse engineered the data stream. If that wasn’t dirty enough, we also had to hack the hosts file to mask ExchangeDefender servers as something else and I also had to distribute a wget binary I compiled myself to ignore SSL certificate mismatch. All this to get you a number on an executive report nobody ever looked at.

To say that I was pissed off about getting constantly reamed out in public feedback about our integration would be putting it politely. I was in my 20’s and stupid ambitious so whenever I could get a breather from stuff like this I put towards building Shockey Monkey. It’s tough to focus on building something when you’ve got people beating you over the head. If my professional experience has taught me anything it’s this:

Don’t get in a way of ambitious a$$holes who have their money on the line.

That first integration was many years ago.

Not my favorite memory.

But as I’ve highlighted above, we all face problems from time to time. I talk to tons of partners all day every day and this stuff isn’t easy. There are people that skate by and only do what they need to in order to get to the next level. Then there are folks that care and get to every detail. If you’ve played Mario Brothers a million times you probably know exactly where to jump, where to duck and how to get to the end in the fastest way possible. Then there are those of us that know where the brick block is and how to hit it for some extra points and coins.

Last week we published v4 of our CW integration, built on top of the new Web APIs, supporting the type of stuff our partners have been demanding for years. The difference between the new API and my original experience is night and day. The new integration doesn’t rely on the email connector to trigger events – it uses callback functions. It doesn’t require complex status switching, template parsing and customization or other tricks – it just requires a URL. It doesn’t come with a 32 page setup guide either.

The new integration piping isn’t just good – it’s phenomenal.

Great companies have a long term plan and even though they may be dealing with a mess from time to time, they don’t forget what they are building and who they are building it for. As I looked at a sea of venture capital backed vendors funded by folks who are pissed they didn’t put it into Facebook and the army of IT shops who are constantly battling how to grow faster and find the right talent.. I hope you keep this in mind: There are no quick fixes.

Getting something great takes time and effort, one you’ve already got and the other you just need to commit to.

I talk to folks all the time that think they are just one tweak away from being in the clear. Listen, if it were that easy you already would have done it and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If you’re constantly complaining about having to replace your service manager because things are getting dropped it might not be as simple as just replacing one person. It may in fact start with you.

Draw up what you need to do to go from where you are now to where you need to be. Ask your clients, they are probably all too happy to tell you just how much you suck. Pitch potential solutions or ways of working around problems or minimizing them. Then – and most importantly – get to work. We’ve all got brilliant ideas and it’s all too easy to criticize others. It’s quite another to turn those ideas into solutions and problems.

One thing I can share that works for me – so long as you continue to work on your problems you’ll never be beat. It’s as true for APIs as it is for everything else.

One of the biggest challenges in running a software/service company is communications. We have technical users who need to implement our software to fit different business requirements and we also have business users just reselling cloud solutions. As these companies grow they end up looking pretty much the same. Guys at the top stop dealing with the nuts and bolts but still lead the organization in terms of selecting who they do business with. Their staff then has the task of figuring out the nuts and bolts. If you suck at either your company is going nowhere fast.

Marketing and sales collateral without technical articles may lead to a sale but the service deployment will flop. Best product on the market will never go beyond grassroots and word of mouth if it’s not backed by professional looking marketing.

You can’t run a one-dimensional business.

This is something that everyone struggles with.

One of the ways we have been able to excel through the years has been on my back. I was there to shake hands, answer phone calls, help with Exchange in the odd hours of the night. You can do really well with great personnel but it doesn’t scale.

As my business started growing I still maintained the role of the communications quarterback – someone else generated the content but I was the one delivering the message and also one getting the feedback. It’s not easy to grow when the process goes just one way.

Step 1: Share the expertise

Put people in your organization in charge of delivering the message.

If you take a look at http://www.exchangedefender.com/blog you will see almost daily updates from the VP in my company. Everything from support to marketing to network operations to development to strategy and consulting.

These aren’t quickie posts. The chances of them being read by the majority of our partner base is slim. But folks that will read it will be the ones that care and want to know more about the topic than just the highlights.

Truth is, you can’t write blog posts for skimmers. People that dive into the post need to get some substance out of it.

This is almost exactly opposite from what you see in commercial blogging endeavors. The idea there is to create as much noise with as few words as possible so people will keep on clicking through and running up the view counter on the advertisements.

Do not model your corporate blog after the trade blog junk. The goal is to get the people to read, not accidentally click on an ad.

The big problem is that people may not care of have the time to read your posts.

The biggest problem is that they will definitely not have the time to read it when you post it.

Solution: Write valuable posts that will be shared, saved and read later.

Step 2: Promote

Remember what I said about who chooses to do business with you and who actually has the task of doing the real work? It’s typically not the same person. Same goes for blogs and documentation and any kind of content you make available. It could be that the person that follows your blog is in sales or marketing but if they are reading a blog post about the technology it won’t go anywhere.

You need to make sure everyone reads your blog. Good luck with that.

First, make sure you do the initial promotion – post it on Facebook, on Twitter, include it in your newsletters and mailers, make it a part of your signature and every piece of email your company sends out. That’s the easy part.

Second, make sure the content is available on demand – when someone asks you about a topic, make sure you link them to the content instead of answering the question. Now some will argue that this is horrible customer service but the truth of the matter is that there are no quick questions and quick answers, you have to consider some background in order to make the right decision.

“So the answer kind of depends on what you are doing but let me point you to a post on our site that gives you all the details instead of me guiding you in the wrong direction.”

The goal of written communications is for it to be complete.

Step 3: Consolidate

Finally, get to the point.

Once you have awesome documentation and a ton of content your most attentive listeners may not be your intended audience. Or vice versa.

The problem with the white collar economy is that you no longer get to choose to decide what is your job and what isn’t. If you can’t stay on top of everything you’re soon to be out a job. We all need to do more.

The problem with doing more is that folks that do more get promoted and have less time to stay on top of things. So you have to make it easy for them to delegate the communication to someone else.

At ExchangeDefender we have started producing ExchangeDefender Executive Podcasts.

10 minutes, ~10 megs, covering everything you need to know about what we’re doing. We talk about support issues, network maintenance, development progress, marketing and everything else.

You can listen to it in your car and when you hear something that you need to know more about you can just ask your staff to look into it for you at http://www.exchangedefender.com/blog or go get it yourself.

As we and our partners grow it becomes more important to stay on top of stuff and work closely with one another.

When we don’t, the profitability of the solution falls apart. If you’re spending too much time to support the product or don’t take advantage of the stuff that would make you more successful we both stand to lose.

It’s in our best interest to create a better message. It’s in your best interest to do something with that message. But it can’t be one sided.

Step 4: Focus

Since I know I’ll be punched by those of you that have listened to it so far, let me say it up front: Yes, we ordered better recording gear. This was one of those ideas that looked good on paper so we decided to record it and see if anyone would listen. Lot’s of people did and we just didn’t have the time to get the gear in for recording #2.

Two weeks ago I wrote about our decision to dramatically cut down our conference schedule. That post kind of got a life of it’s own but my main message was that in order for us to become more valuable to our partners we need to put the focus back on our partners. The goal of going to conferences is to test ideas, touch base with existing partners and more  – but the primary goal is to get new partners. As big as we are, should we spend money to get new partners or just work better with the existing ones?

Truth is, we can become far more successful by working better with our partners.

Every day I am being asked to take over billing, take over support, take over implementation/migration/deployment and so on. You can’t take on new business if you’re not going to be good at it… and we can’t get good at it if we’re on the road.

So here we go. This is just a piece of the whole ExchangeDefender puzzle we’re putting together for 2012. The better we serve our partners the better you’ll serve your clients and more successful everyone will become. At least that’s what we’re working on