Before you read this: This isn’t Vartruth or Channel Watchdog, I’m not trying to single anyone out or make it a personal hit. That said, you will certainly see the similarities between these descriptions and people/companies you have met. Your opinion (or consideration of mine) is not what is relevant – however, looking at these patterns and avoiding them when you encounter them in your own career/company is critical. If you don’t have the time to read the whole thing scroll down to the last paragraph.

Lack of attention span isn’t entrepreneurship

Every now and then you will meet folks who are in webinars / panels / conferences for seemingly no overwhelming success or reason – maybe they just sent in a positive survey on the day that the marketing manager organized a webinar and their sales engineer called out with flu. This is how the Mediocre VAR becomes an Industry Expert that is paraded around the circuit because there is nothing companies love more than uncompensated third party endorsement. Unfortunately in business you can’t fake your way into profitability so eventually these folks end up in significant vendor roles because they “understand our clients business” (dear vendor friends: if they did, they wouldn’t be asking you for a job). Except they don’t, and in real companies you have to show results or you end up back uninstalling spyware for a living.

So if you can’t play, coach. Or advise. Or provide input. Eventually they learn something in the death spiral process and they go back to being some sort of a solution provider.

Lesson here is that if you’re charismatic enough you can avoid real work but that can only get you so far. Real entrepreneurs are obsessed about their businesses and maximizing their profitability, they don’t sit around looking at the grass on the other side of the industry.

Leveraging attention deficit

Bad decision making and lack of work ethic isn’t limited to individuals, companies can fail in the same way. Fortunately for those of you with paychecks, it takes a real business model (or a venture capital fund) to keep people on payroll and put the whole house on Black or Red. But it happens.

VAR realizes it has something on it’s hands and it’s easier to grow the fastest possible way – find similar beasts and teach them how to make a killing. Inventor becomes the vendor and then one of the two things happens: most die when the business model flops or they win out by making acquisitions or being acquired.

Lesson here is that there are many business plans out there and only a few will win at them while the majority will lose.

What do they have in common?

I have spent a lot of time talking to a lot of entrepreneurs. Big and small.

One difference I’ve been able to pick out between the successful ones and the failures is in the way they treat their business: Are they focused on their business or something else?

If you meet a technology employee (regardless of rank) at a technology event (regardless of the event) and you’re both in the same field and you DON’T talk to them about technology – run.

Technology business isn’t a community college, you aren’t trying to find yourself and figure out what you want to be when you grow up – technology business is a business and it’s a business of making money now. And if you aren’t good at it then why are you talking to me?

It’s really that simple. Unless you’re extremely attractive, single and willing to do things so inappropriate I can’t even write them on this blog. Though if your decision making is so poor that you’ve found me attractive you’ve failed somewhere along the way.

Phoenix Firebird is just a myth

There is this myth that amazing things can come out of ashes. I’ve never seen a bird ignite itself and it’s nest just to immediately spring back to life more beautiful than ever.

Yet I see businesses, employees and entrepreneurs fail every single day.

There is no substitute for hard work. You’re no better and no smarter than the next guy. Want to see people that think they are smarter than the rest – go to a prison or a flea market and look behind the bars. There are no shortcuts.

Hard work doesn’t get glorified because it’s not attractive. In casual discussions more people are envious of successful folks and many would rather talk trash than be willing to join them with the same level of work ethic and dedication. Not everyone that becomes a success is a crook. Here is what it boils down to:

If you suck, you will fail. It doesn’t matter if you’re a VAR, Vendor or employee.

If you’re good and you work really, really hard… you still may fail.

Hopping from one sinking ship to another has only one certain trajectory: to the bottom. The difference between the success and failure in the long term is staying motivated and continuing to work on being the best. If you’re lucky enough, it pays off in the end. It’s still a heck of a lot better than drowning in the ocean of failure.

Persevere.. because winners don’t blame others for where they are at.

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.

Last Wednesday, our main data center in Dallas suffered a catastrophic power failure. While the inbound ExchangeDefender service went on as expected without skipping a beat, the less redundant services didn’t fare so well – Exchange 2010 was out for about 4 hours, Exchange 2007 for about 6 and various other services between 3 – 12 hours.

At this point it’s Tuesday and I’ve been pulling double shifts since last Wednesday evening working with partners, our partners clients, our vendors and everyone in between because I’ve taken this issue quite personally.

I’ve spent nearly my entire adult life building a reliable email business. Call me crazy, but I expect it to be up 100% of the time. That’s what it was designed to do, that’s what it’s built for and that’s how we manage and scale it. This isn’t some sort of a thing where a startup cuts costs here and there and hopes nobody notices – this is a major product in it’s 7th revision and some of the newer stuff (LiveArchive, outbound routing, apps – web sharing, encryption, etc) didn’t respond the way I had expected. So I’m fixing it.

We deal with crap every day. Power outages happen a lot more often than you think – not big catastrophic ones but isolated ones – blown power supplies, malfunctioning UPS and battery packs. Hard drives die far more often now than they did 10 years ago while the RAID cards and the amount of data they manage are exponentially higher. It’s not an easy business but it’s a fulfilling business. I would rather have this job than anything else in the world.

Here are a few takeaways.

Positive

The data center staff did an amazing job, in as short of a time span as they did.

I have by far the best partners on earth. Honestly, the feedback from you guys during this episode is what’s been keeping us awake.

Redbull & Monster Energy. Personally, Pirelli tires, Ducati and Aprilia.

The few issues that became apparent during this experience are going to be fixed within the 30 days and then we get back to the domination with the features.

Personally, learned a lot from our partners and just how well our service is received out there – it’s far more positive than even I thought but then again, people always bring me problems so I definitely had a wrong impression. Definitely makes me want to work harder.

Negative

Assholes. We all have asshole clients but you’d think people would be smarter than to try to kick someone while they are down and while they are trying to help them.

Irony. This was caused by a power failure in a piece of equipment that is supposed to switch the power from the utility to power generators.

Two Big Lessons: Shedding and Perspective

Shedding is good. This is particularly true for me as well as for many of you that have been in touch with me – in the grand scheme of things, a few hours is not a catastrophe – not to marginalize it at all but let’s face it, typical hardware outages last far longer. Compared to other big cloud services that are riddled with privacy concerns, questionable financing/management, days worth of outages and eventual data loss, for the most part all this did was reinforce just how important redundancy and failover and proper training are. Yet, it seems that the hardest hit folks are micro clients with a few seats here and there whose businesses apparently barely made it through the few hours without email. Here are some comments:

“Frankly I don’t want a client that is ready to jump ship on one outage, just had to share.“

“Ray of sunshine: Lost a 3 seat client that has been on my to-fire list for months.”

Perspective is good. Every single day I have conversations with partners who are scared of the Microsoft/Amazon/Google Apps business model. They don’t take it too kindly when I tell them to position the comparable products against it and if you lose to Microsoft or Amazon you probably don’t want that type of a client.

I’ll let you imagine the fireball response I get to that one.

But here is the perspective. If you Google for the kinds of outages and downtimes and other horror stories you get with Microsoft/Amazon/Google, you’d be insane to accept that kind of a compromise. But there are people that will – and you really don’t want them as your clients, trust me.

The initial reaction to any outage is – what happened? can we switch to something more reliable? I won’t lie, I thought the same thing last Wednesday until I realized that the reason we based our core operations in Dallas is because this is by far the best data center in the world. And while the initial reaction to downtime is always going to be tough, since Wednesday the feedback has been good and with the changes we are making our partners will be more successful.

Some will leave. That’s inevitable. And I’ve even been forwarded some folks celebrating the event on the newsgroups. I understand, enjoy it.

But what really matters at the end of the day, the big picture, the perspective – is that a whole lot of stuff rides on email and that this is a great business to be in. While the demand for the cheaper more compromised cut down product will be there and will be appealing to those that don’t know the risks, more often than not, people will choose a premium solution – which is good for us and good for our partners. You have our ongoing commitment to make the most scalable and most reliable offering out there and I look forward to bringing it to you.

…

P.S. Since last Wednesday I have been working with partners, partners clients and I’m pretty sure that I’m getting an ear blister from being on the phone all day and night. To all those of you who have spoken to me and those that have sent encouraging emails, I can’t tell you how much it means to me. Everyone from our biggest partners to the smallest partners to even the competitors that have gone through this – I appreciate the kind words and keep on forwarding them to my team. Absolutely everyone here cares about this stuff and what we work on every day. My message inside my company is that the bits and pieces of what we do are inconsequential to you – it’s the service that matters and whenever we make our partners win, we win. There really are times when I wish I didn’t care – wish I could shut down my laptop and let my management just deal with the problems. But my management, their staff and everyone involved has for better or worse sold themselves to you as your data center backoffice and we don’t quit.

To everyone that faced any bit of inconvenience as a result of all this – I am truly sorry. As you can tell from this blog post, I know how it feels. Stay strong, stay focused and remember that this is the difference. Most people in tough situations quit, switch, look at the greener grass on the other side and.. well, eventually you come to that sad realization that the only consistent thing in all your failures is you. The alternative is to just work harder – turn those negatives into positives, learn from the mistakes and show that work ethic trumps any inconveniences and “shit happens” moments that are just a part of life.

Here is the comment from one of my partners that literally had me smiling for hours this weekend. His client complained about the outage and the ABP muscle flexed:

Client: “Dude, WTF, it’s been two hours!”

Partner: “Yeah, and remember that $6 thing you wanted me to try and beat because you thought our stuff was too expensive? Well, if you think you’re crippled now what do you think will happen when your production system collapses without a managed backup or you finally get that audit?”

The pimp turned around an outage complaint into a $16,000 reoccurring monthly managed services deal. My response: “Sounds like you just earned your Ferrari payment!”

ABP.

As a firm believer in the ABP methodology it pains me to even ask if you should always be pimping or whether there is perhaps a time that it’s not appropriate. So consider this as a part of public service.

First of all, I understand. Economy is tough. Lot’s of people are unemployed or facing unemployment on the horizon. Market is oversaturated with talent which drives wages down and IT Solution Providers are more careful about how they spend their money. So you’ve got to earn it.

Professionally speaking, big trade show off hours are a virtual job fair for many. It’s the best place to go if you are looking for the next step if your career.

With one huge exception: Trade show hours when we interact with our clients. This is not the time to be selling me stuff. I know it’s easy, I know it’s fast and I know that you can pin someone in a corner – but it’s disrespectful. We spend a lot of money to present our solutions and if you come to a booth trying to sell something I always say the following:

“That sounds interesting and I would love to consider it. Right now I need to focus on dealing with our clients so if you don’t mind let’s schedule something – give me your card and I’ll follow up with you.”

Then I proceed to tear up the card.

Sell to me in an elevator. Sell to me at lunch. Sell to me while we’re walking to a meeting. Sell to me at a party. Sell to me in the hallway. Even interrupt me while I’m having a meeting in a lobby. But if you attempt to sell to me while you know well enough that I’m actually working – in my booth during show hours nonetheless – I’m sorry, I have to pass.

It’s all about the first impression. If I don’t know you and my first impression is that you’re disrespectful or worse (unaware) then even if your offering is somewhat intriguing I will not associate a positive feeling to what you are selling.

So yes, always be pimping. Except while someone else is pimping already.

Today two big, obvious, truths were revealed to those who held their sword aloft and said “By the power of Greyskull…”:

1. I am a shameless, selfpromotional opportunisitic guy.
2. I am neither Vartruth nor The Channel Watchdog.

Here is the truth. I spend a truckload of money to attend, sponsor, wine & dine, iPad-coat and act as an overall Santa to the channel. And all you people want to talk about is some tween shenanigans of stuff we all know but don’t sit around and talk about because there is something grander at hand: success.

So now you know what will happen to the next sucker who asks me about the sensationalism in the channel. First, I will tell you I know exactly who it is. Then, I will proceed to pin you in a corner and pitch stuff so hard that cash will bleed out of your ears and eyes. 

What Started This

My ex-wife sent me a txt late at night saying that she was defending my honor whenever my name came up as the obvious identity. Her comment:

“Don’t make me look stupid.”

My response:

“One way you can tell it’s not me is that everything I do is for the goal of promoting myself.”

Obviously you all think it’s me.

And since everyone thinks it’s me – and nobody has claimed Vartruth or The Channel Watchdog – who am I not to exploit it for attention? It registered more people than the last corporate webcast I ran.

You’ve seen this blog for years go after Microsoft, Apple and other folks that I tried to work with. It was self-serving and opportunistic at every step – and I put my name/reputation behind it. Now I was stupid and in my 20’s and the way I justified it at the time was because I could not afford to buy the kind of publicity that things like SBS Show, SPAM Show and Vladville generated when I voiced the displeasure of the community.

But at some point I grew up (I’ll admit I’m still stupid) and found a better way to get things done. Then again, it’s easy to look back from my skybox and point a finger at a 20-something Vlad that was working 20+ hours a day.

Faceless destruction for the sake of damage makes no sense to me. Even The Channel Watchdog asked:

“I have a load of stuff on Chartec, Labtec, and SMB Nation that I am putting together for release. Attacking Harry worries me a little though because everybody thinks he is a saint and my politics are shakey right now”

My response:

I’m not sure what your motivation for doing what you’re doing is but whenever I start to second guess myself I ask “How is this going to make me money?” — if I figure out a way, I go with it. Otherwise, why bother?

You see, we all have a reason for doing what we’re doing.

What I learned from this

Just like almost everything else in the channel, most people are not paying attention. Which in this case is a good thing.

Surprisingly, most people found the stuff generated by Vartruth and Channel Watchdog Unprofessional / Offensive. It’s surprising to me because if I don’t find something amusing or interesting, I ignore it.

I also found out that my deep disappointment in my friends low opinion of me as a shameless selfpromotional pimping machine can be cured by 30 minutes of shameless sales pitching.

What you need to know

Vartruth has disappeared. The Channel Watchdog is still around. But if you’re offended, why do you talk about it, ask who it is, secretly snicker about it all the time.

Would knowing who it was make any bit of difference to you? Would you stop doing business with them, today? If so, it was Scott Barlow. For both. Oh and whoever runs Office 365 and Google Apps. In fact, they collaborated on the whole deal! But if you believe that, you’re an idiot.

As I mentioned in the webcast today, if you continue to pay attention to baseless rumors and support the sites that sensationalize stuff that is not immediately relevant to your business, this will continue. What’s even worse is that if you’re a vendor, it’s only a matter of time until a slow news day makes you the next target.

It’s a cycle. When you legitimatize rumor mongering vendors flock to it because they want eyeballs. They spend big money for even the smallest of banners and ads and then a magical thing happens – there are only so many ways you can touch the same press release you get from your vendors blog, twitter and Facebook. So you know what happens? You stop paying attention. Yes, the traffic dries up. There are only so many times people will care about whether they are the top 10, 100, 200 or 500 people in the industry – and then you read baseless stuff like “Hear folks are making career changes” or “Which service provider is going under next, stay tuned” – which happens ALL the time but you still click, still move stuff around and then act surprised when the very form you legitimized is somehow offensive to you because it publishes stuff that is slightly more controversial.

The marital infidelity of certain popular channel vendors is every bit as interesting as who just got fired from a major distributor as is the brand of bike or car I’m buying this week. The only trouble is when you pay attention to some of it you no longer get to choose where the line between appropriate and offensive happens to be. And by virally spreading it, you don’t get to pick who the cannon is pointed at.

So to the shocking number of people that filled out the survey and attended the webinar – I hope you enjoyed the prank. Remember what I said: At this very time dozens of great seminars and training opportunities are taking place and you chose to hang out with me. I hope I made it worth your while. It’s not that we as grownups don’t like a juicy rumor, it’s that we as grownups have a responsibility to focus on business first and foremost.

Who the folks behind the avatars happen to be doesn’t matter to you one bit. What matters is whether you choose to be sucked into it or choose to run a business.

The fever surrounding the daily channel soap opera has come to new heights as VARs apparently find their day-to-day jobs boring. You’ve probably heard or seen Vartruth video series on youtube as it spanked one vendor after another (or the even more hilarious public spanking of Harry Brelsford by Robin Robbins as a result of it) or the more recent outing of MSP vendor dirty laundry by the Channel Watchdog.

Tomorrow, at 2PM EST, Channel Watchdog and Vartruth will unveil their identity:

Click here to register!

Please join us for this one-time-only webcast during which we will not only introduce you to the folks behind the controversy.. but also back it with the live interview, email logs and more.

But what if you can’t attend? Well, you can still play and win an ExchangeDefender tshirt. Just complete this survey and email vlad@vladville.com when you’ve done it – and you’re in!

Who is behind Vartruth and Channel Watchdog? Think you know?

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/?C7QFFG6

Join in the fun!

Since early 2003, this blog (and it’s blogger.com predecessor) chronicled the Fast Times at SMB high, the rise and fall of several business models and the lessons learned along the way to building wealth and solutions for the SMB technology marketplace. From the network engineer to SPF to IT Consultant to VAR to MSP to Master MSP era’s, it’s been a fun ride and it’s also been 10 years since I’ve had a real vacation (instead of 2-3 days here and there).. so.. as both I and my company move on to the next chapter in our lives, I figured it would be fitting to sum up the last 10 years of SMB IT and explain how and why things are changing.

The Cloud Prior to 2002

From roughly 1997-2003, the SMB world was preoccupied with simply establishing a presence. From the massive buildout of LANs across small businesses to building web pages, this was the era during which people figured there was a world beyond @aol.com or @compuserve.com. Microsoft was taking over the network dominance from Novell and for the most part the IT businesses of this time were high on skill and highly compensated for it.

My first job in 1996 involved me talking to SMBs and helping them write connection scripts for Trumpet Winsock. With the release of Windows 95 the obstacle of connecting to the Internet was nearly eliminated and it created the largest surge of small business users trying to get to it. Along with it came the IT Consultant who no longer had to have a tremendous amount of networking skill – just listen to the customer and know who to call for help.

This was also the moment at which technology became affordable and available. Purchasing computers immediately prior to this era required setting aside thousands of dollars to place the order, waiting weeks if not months for your 486 or that shiny new Pentium, upgrading your modem or USR Courier firmware every fall – naturally, you wanted to consult more than the sales guy when parting with so much money or reading books (yes, books – thick ones with no pictures) to get up and running. Prior to this it wasn’t simply enough to want something and have money to buy it – you had all sorts of considerations and limitations in place. People had to find out if they were on copper or SLIC lines, they learned their distance from the central office or DMARC. 

This era ended with the ability to walk into Best Buy and walk out with everything you needed 20 minutes later.

With this mass availability of technology the biggest business for SMB consultants was connecting all these computers, printers and “the Internet.”

Primary business: LAN buildouts. Most of us made money on the side designing web sites, setting up an online presence, upgrading networks to Windows 95, NT4 and dreaming about XP.

SMB, The Cloud and 2003

This was the year that everything changed. Windows XP had taken off, Microsoft announced Office 2003 and SBS 2003.

For the first time, ever, it was the user that was put in charge. SBS 2003 was in fact designed to allow the business owner to manage things, not the IT department.

There was a catch here. Because things got so easy for people that were computer savvy, suddenly if you were in business but not on the Internet you were at a huge disadvantage.

Computers got cheap. Internet access got even cheaper. The demand for all things IT skyrocketed. We got mobile.

It also marked a gold rush of SMB IT jobs. Prior to this, most SMBs didn’t have an IT department, the closest they got to one was having one of the employees kids come after school to fix computer problems. But troubleshooting network connectivity wasn’t as easy as changing the screen resolution or creating desktop shortcuts. Enter the “IT Consultant”

This was also an era in which being an SMB IT Consultant went from a highly profitable hobby to an actual professional that had to talk about more than just technology. Because the job of connecting everyone and everything became more time consuming, it also became extremely expensive: justifying costs, explaining the tradeoffs, presenting alternatives and being a part of planning stages was the new norm.

It also shifted many of the existing companies from being technology enthusiasts to focusing on the business. The rise of VAR came from the rapidly declining costs of hardware, software and directly from the decrease in complexity. Because the costs started shifting from the cost of purchase to the cost of deployment and support, established SMB IT companies started reselling a lot more than just their time or their one vendor they were certified/authorized for.

Primary business: Network infrastructure. Beyond computers and monitors, IT in small business became less of a tool and more a part of the process. Margins on hardware declined but margins on support and billable hours exploded.

2004-2005 The Dawn of Cloud

Now even laptops were affordable. Internet was everywhere and it was free. It started showing up at Starbucks and McDonalds. Email became free and Google’s Gmail launched with 1GB of storage.

SMB IT started to mature and the support personnel that came with it was under more fire to respond quickly to problems and outages. Businesses started relying on technology more and demanded it on mobile devices. At home. On the road.

Assuring the uptime and eliminating ugly encounters with large service bills gave rise to managed services model. VARs could now get a more predictable level of revenue and eliminate the surprises that came with ad-hoc support.

The key here was that network control became decentralized: you no longer had to be in the office to work and the IT provider no longer had to stop by to fix the problems or perform maintenance tasks.

Primary business: VAR. The more dependent companies became on technology, the more stuff they bought and wanted it connected and sync’d to their existing infrastructure.

2005 – 2008 The Fall of Steel

As the small IT solution providers were building their management cloud, they were simultaneously discounting the relevance and eventual success of large software companies who no longer wanted middlemen at the gate. The entire SMB IT food chain turned from steel and towards services.

IT providers faced their second major growth challenge in a decade: maintaining technical expertise while supporting/migrating/project planning of legacy systems.

For the first time we no longer were preoccupied with the faster, newer processor or the next big OS – we were spending more time trying to keep the old stuff up.

It was also the beginning of the end. With software/hardware companies at odds with the clients and partners that dealt with the client issues, someone had to fix the problem.

Primary business: Support.

2008 The Fall of Bear Sterns & Global Depression. The rise of IT consumerism.

To this day, the most popular Vladville post is the one covering the fall of Bear Sterns that plunged us into a depression/recession. Almost immediately following March 16, 2008 folks stopped looking forward with technology as an investment and focused on it’s cost.

This was bad news for pretty much everyone. Large companies gutted their IT departments. Small companies froze projects, purchases and more.

This was the era of “Do we really need ___?”

This was the tipping point for the cloud in SMB. Up to this point, the sales were largely based on the solution fit and the new features that solved problems. The discussion went from buying something new and towards using something less expensive.

At the same time, technology became more personal and the division between work PC and home PC blurred with the new wave of smartphones, web sites and online services. The more cool stuff people used, the more of it ended up in the business.

Suddenly workers were not willing to wait for the IT department to get things online or to allow something that restricted their control – they just signed up for an online service and eliminated the middleman. In SMB, we were the middleman.

Primary business: Support.

2008 – 2011: Cloud, Cloud, Cloud

The title sums it up. IT providers, to both large and small companies, were dealing less with steel and cables and more with consumer devices, online services, hosted services and gadgets.

The era of buying something that would break and then cost you to fix it was replaced with the subscription service that (once it broke) could be substituted with another. When it was no longer needed it got handed down (iPod, iPad, iPhone) or repurposed.

Primary business: Pimpin’ – anything that could be marked up, measured or required IT assistance got a plan attached to it.

The Future

The future, or the end of the past I’ve outlined so far, is surprisingly similar.

The frustration of IT Solution Providers over not being able to move ahead quickly is met with the rapidly declining demand for their services. The consumers (not clients anymore) are willing to pay for certain services but that doesn’t make IT Solution Providers profitable or produce a reliable revenue stream. User friendly gadgets and user friendly online services seamlessly integrate with one another and with social networking and Google, solving problems is easier than ever.

The error margin is widening and tolerance for failure is higher as we have alternatives. If the computer is dead, you pick up your tablet. If it’s dead, you go to your smartphone. If you don’t have reception, you’re never too far from free wifi. Service companies get by without even posting a phone number on their web sites and support is peer based through social networking sites and forums. The value of the human interaction, while desirable, is not compensated enough for it to exist.

This is a far cry from a highly competent, highly skilled and full service IT solution provider. They are deemed too expensive. Meanwhile, a large cloud service provider loses tens of thousands of accounts and escapes without a scratch.

Let me make this clear: This is the end of IT Service Provider business as we’ve known it.

Without being able to pick the low hanging fruit (remote managed services) IT Solution Providers will find a harder time trying to pay off the huge investment in the tools and training they bought to build the business up in the first place. It’s not like all the servers and IT demands are suddenly going to disappear and be replaced by the iPad or the next Android tablet, but with the consumers ability to find quick and cheap alternatives the profitability and business viability of your typical IT Solution Provider is questionable.

That is a difficult thought to swallow but as you can read in this post, it is not the first time our industry and our profession has faced a challenge. What is new is that at some point the paths of software/hardware manufacturers and those that support their solutions diverged. The software/hardware manufacturers won – they are selling more stuff than ever but the support jobs that existed to get that technology in the hands of consumers aren’t needed. They made devices cheaper, software more reliable, user experience more friendly and the consultant unnecessary.

Everything has become a subscription service. There will still be edge cases, a slim minority that will either never be able to accept that or use it. But business is seldom about edge cases and IT services aren’t luxury goods.

It is time to take a good hard look at what makes money and what doesn’t, what sells and what doesn’t, and what the marketplace is actually demanding. In my career I’ve been blessed enough to build and sell computers with a $1,000 margin, collect thousands of dollars for a migration that took half a day, get thousands of dollars just for offering my opinion on a conference call and get paid for seeing the progress bar move from left to right.

Those days are gone. So is Vladville’s coverage and fascination with it. I have a month-long vacation coming up to reflect on the past decade of the fun in this business and look forward to coming back and talking about what’s next. In the meantime, I encourage you to sign up for our Own Web Now blog and Looks Cloudy site.

Continued as a part of the New Year review blog posts. Out with the old, in with the new? Well, a year is a loooong time and there is a lot of old stuff that needs to be cleared off the schedule. If you run a small business, odds are you have people take on roles as the organization grows and not all the roles and all activities are in the best interest of the company. Even worse, some could be taking on too many roles while others are just hiding from the corporate axe. Finally, some could be doing a ton of mundane tasks with no value and can feel unappreciated for all their hard work while not understanding that it doesn’t matter.

I’m watching the Tim Tebow special on ESPN. Tim Tebow was a Florida quarterback, Heisman Trophy winner, 2x national champion, etc. The special follows him through the months leading up to the NFL draft and he is talking about his training session: Did I work the hardest? Did I stay the longest? A successful day is a day in which I become better than I was yesterday.

Businesses operate the same way. We’re only as good as we are this day / quarter / year. So this week we are running a special exercise that I hope brings more discipline into what we’re doing and how.

This week I asked all of my staff to send me a list of things they do. Office Space style: What it is you would say you do around here?

There are several reasons for this: I want to know what you’re wasting you’re the time on. I want to know what you’re doing. What is your primary responsibility? What is your secondary responsibility? What are some areas that you’re working on that I could develop into a full time role? What are some of the areas that I should remove from your schedule? Are you really spending that much time doing that?

Whose decision is it anyway?

What is everyone working on? If you’ve paid attention to e-myth, you wouldn’t need this exercise. Unfortunately, striking a balance between being an overbearing micromanager and inspiring leader that doesn’t make any decisions is very difficult.

If you have a good team around you, chances are that they have picked up some of the slack that you were not aware of. Or developed processes and means for dealing with the problems they encounter working with clients day-to-day.

In government that’s known as Form 114-A. In small business that’s called “I like working with Bob, can you transfer me to him?”

So here is where it gets ugly: Some employees will, from the most positive angle possible, waste a ton of your time and money. They don’t know that they are doing anything wrong – from their standpoint they are helping you. You don’t know any better either – from your standpoint they are robbing you blind. Reconciling the fact that someone is wasting their salary on mundane tasks goes across as well as “Ma’am, your baby is ugly.”

I’m particularly terrible about this. As a matter of fact, around the Orlando office I’m known as The Dreamcrusher. From the standpoint of my own ignorance, I always offered a honest opinion when I saw something heading for a sure failure. Most people tend to assume that the work just materialized out of nowhere and that the company with all it’s problems and solutions just appeared out of nowhere. No, motherfucker – I’m the big bang. I know where I’ve cut the corners, I know where I just got things to work and I’ve tried to fix certain things over and over again to the point that I’ve been where most people are when they propose solutions to problems that have existed for a while. Not all of our problems are caused by negligence you know ; )

So what are we doing different this year? Well, personal comment first:

I’m big on roles. Everyone has a primary role – whatever it is they are hired to do. Then there is their secondary support role – something that they are capable of doing to help the person that’s an expert / in charge of doing.

The greatest thing you can do in your primary role is automate it and move yourself on to the next problem. Some employees cannot grasp this concept. They feel like fixing problems will remove the reason for their employment. At McDonalds, yes. An automated drink dispenser has sent many back to the vocational school. In a professional organization – no. We value problem solvers. If you’ve figured out how to remove personnel (ie: human incompetence factor) from an equation you’re both worth more and likely capable of solving bigger problems.

Here is what I asked for:

1. List of things you’re responsible for
2. List of things you work on
3. Your daily schedule

Let’s break it down:

1. List of things you’re responsible for – the only opinion that matters is mine. I want to know what my employees feel is their primary cause for employment. This is critical because if they are focusing on areas that I do not value they are not moving towards the goals that I have set for them. They could be the best damn fish slicer in the world but if their job is tweaking SpamAssassin rulesets, we both need to refocus.

2. List of things you work on – the only opinion that matters is mine. I want to know what you’re doing with the 8 hours you spend at work. Browse the web? Update Facebook? Build beta environments? Reboot servers? What? What? This is critical – most people in professional services firms do not know everything their employees do. Trick is, your employees know what you need to be doing better than you do – from an operational sense at least. What they do not know is how this fits into the solution you are trying to build. These two need to be on the same page – and it’s the sole purpose of this exercise.

3. Your daily schedule. This one is split down the middle: Your sales people shouldn’t be making assigned client calls in the morning – nobody is going to pick up the phone on the west coast at 9:30 AM EST. If they do, you’re in trouble! the name of the game here is optimization: are the tasks that fill up your 8 hour day used in the best possible way?

Optimization

Find out where your employees are wasting time – help them understand what they are doing wrong and fix it.

Find out where your employees have uncovered potential in operations – and invest in it.

Find out if your employees are making the best of their workday – and rearrange it until it’s perfect.

Find out if your employees are doing multiple jobs – document it and make them a manager.

Find out if your employees are halfassing multiple jobs – cut their responsibilities and refocus them.

Find out if your employees are slacking on their sole job – and fire them.

Realize you’re working with human beings. Most people really do try their best. But their best needs to be aligned with your best interests and their expertise. Some people are organized. Some people are driven. Some people are just full of crap. There is a role for everyone. But if you don’t ask, and don’t make it a point to guide them to what you want them to be doing, then it’s your fault you’re underutilizing or beating down your team.

Most people want to be good at their jobs. Most people want to do what’s best for the client. Unfortunately, what is the best for the client may not be what’s in the best interest of the organization. What wins? Well, depends on whether you like receiving your paycheck or not. That’s not to say that you’re fired if you don’t do it my way – but if I’m unable to convince you that you need to follow my plan (that a lot of other people are already aboard on) then you might not be a fit going forward. There is a middle ground between completely heartless and completely compassionate. But it has to be driven by reason and the agenda.

Your job as the boss is to make sure your team is the best they can be. If they aren’t, that’s your fault. Employees job is to get things done in a way that moves the organization forward. If they don’t, they aren’t employees anymore.

But if everyone is not on the same page, you’ve got a catastrophe on your hands. People feel overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, unloved and lose their sense of being a critical part of the team. Listen, if you weren’t valuable, you wouldn’t be employed. If you are employed, you need to kick ass in the direction that the guy with the corner office points to.

Business is a team effort. Get to know it.