One of the reasons why ExchangeDefender is on a roll this year is because I’ve been able to stay at work for over 6 months straight and keep my top talent focused on what we’re doing. It’s not like we didn’t know what we had to do before nor were we lazy – it’s just that to move to the next step you need to have all the puzzle pieces fall into place (or push them together by force and all nighters).

In the past month I’ve taken six business trips and visited with a wide range of partners, vendors, competitors – everything from end users up to CEO’s of the companies you probably work with or rely on. Among vendors, the conversations are pretty much the same as they have been a year or two ago – threat vs. opportunity, consolidation vs. partnerships, etc. Among the partners, the conversations are the same as they have been for at least the past decade: Struggling to grow.

The only thing that disappoints me about people is laziness.

Some people are just stupid. There is no help for that. If you think you don’t need to know history because you can Google it and don’t need to understand physics because it’s not a part of your daily life and don’t care about geography or politics because it doesn’t matter to you – there is no hope for you. The problem with stupid people is that there is no way to explain to them why they should care because they wouldn’t understand it and it creates an infinite loop of stupidity that can never be broken out of.

The excuse for the rest – laziness. Laziness is not just a matter of not applying any effort (sitting on the couch watching TV and eating chips) but the unwillingness to break out of a circular pattern. If you’re working well past midnight and hate what you’re working on but are stubbornly unwilling to snap out of the comfortable pattern you’re stuck in – that’s just lazy. Problems do not get easier with time, they grow.

Most of my partner-centric conversations revolved around the move to the next level – but almost all of them were dismissive of all the innovation happening out there and unwillingness to consider a model or offering different from what is already being done all over the place.

Here is a little tip – if you do the same crap that everyone else is doing, and market it with the exact same crappy cardboard marketing stock you buy in a toolkit and pair it with the brilliant advice everyone else gets from a show that is only keeping you in place long enough to give away stripper bucks and pack the vendor hall – then you will get the exact same crappy results as 50% of the people there. And that’s assuming that the other 25% of the audience goes out of business and the rest accidentally walk out into the traffic during the break because that’s the level of ignorance that is required to keep on doing the same crap over and over and expect something different to happen. That’s the kind of business that will be certified by Microsoft as an SBSC (Small Business Stupid Consultant) and dispatched to unemployment after the last client is transferred to Office 365. 

The rest – get creative. Add to your model. Add to your mind. Add to your portfolio. Instead of doubling up the effort – screw it – take your favorite client out to lunch and ask them what they would do if they ran your business.

I do this EVERY time I go on the road. In return, some brilliant people have built my business – for free – and I’ve managed to pay them back by giving them tools and resources that felt and looked as if they built them themselves. Which is exactly what happened.

Don’t lose perspective of who you are working for. It’s your clients – not Microsoft. Not your largest vendor. Not the vendor you like to go out and party the most. It’s all about your f’n clients. And what happens to the employee that does the same thing over and over, day in and day out? Business growth, like promotions and raises, comes as a result of overachievement and changing of the routine stuff.

There are a lot of stupid people out there. Most of us are stupid about something – and there are plenty of legitimate reasons for it. Every now and then you will encounter a select subsection of people that are stupid about the very subject matter that is their professional occupation. These people are not just merely stupid due to under education or ignorance, they are outright idiots that are immune to knowledge and reasoning.

Over the next two posts I intend to teach you one of my other superpowers: How to spot an idiot. And how to get naked pictures of Alex Rogers.

Causation Loop

You may ask.. Vlad, what is the difference between someone that is just stupid and someone that is a complete friggin idiot? It’s quite simple.

Stupid people that do not realize they are stupid are idiots. Even when you prove it to them that they are stupid, complete with footnotes and references, they will still maintain that they are correct.

Hint #1: Idiots tend to be angered when you attempt to educate them.

Anger Fueled By Frustration

Now you might wonder.. But Vlad, how can I tell if someone is just frustrated due to miscommunication rather than their own inability to read, write and communicate effectively?

Byproduct of transition from stupidity to enlightenment is shame. When you find out that you were wrong about something you get this shameful, humbling feeling. Well, that was pretty stupid of me, I wish I had read that manual. Idiots are incapable of being ashamed or humble, instead they get angry in attempt to make you feel bad about pointing it out to them.

Hint #2: Idiots will be frustrated when you solve their problem and in the process make it apparent that they were wrong from the start.

Haphazard Misdirection

Now that you know the cause and the reaction, what if the frustration from the original issue results in another assault of anger, frustration and mental incapacity?

Idiots are the last ones to know it but incapable of admitting it. Think about it, when you’re out with your buddies and you say something stupid (“Whale is a fish. Dolphin is a mammal”) you will get corrected. You will then pull out your smartphone and a few seconds later Wikipedia will paint your face bright red. That is how normal people react to it. Idiots will argue that the Wikipedia is a flawed resource that has been proven wrong in the past. Idiots will claim that the research is inconclusive. Idiots will claim that you purposefully edited Wikipedia and will offer to bet an inordinate amount of money that they are right when all the facts point to the contrary.

Hint #3: Idiots will blame everything but themselves for the problem.

. . .

There is hope.

My superpower is based on a patent-pending 3-step process for identifying an idiot and getting out of their way.

Why? Ever notice how idiots never seem to be busy? Wanna know why? Because normal people are busy reading, studying, experimenting, testing, dealing with problems. Idiots don’t let that stuff preoccupy them, they use their ample time to argue with anyone that will listen.

If you are in a corporate environment and you get stuck dealing with an idiot through no fault of your own, the inability to properly filter out an idiot could negatively impact not just your company but your own career. All the time these folks save by not reading the manual, not watching the video, not attending training and not reading anything in general or dealing with people that are trying to help them… is instead funneled into endless Google and LinkedIn searches for your manager/supervisor. Whom they will go to blaming you first.

Your boss will not know the background. They will likely not even know the nature of the complaint. They will just be stunned by the complaint and the frustration that this poor client faced dealing with the company and would naturally assume that you’ve dropped the ball somewhere. My god Travis, do we suck so bad that we’re driving these people to threats of physical violence? WTF did you break?

Stop. Before you actually hit Send on that email or IM, take a moment to run through the Vlad Idiot Filter:

VIF:

1. Is this person irrationally angry about a routine process?

2. Is this person attempting to place overemphasized, irrational blame on someone or something?

3. Is this person unleashing their entire arsenal of abusive language on a multitude of targets?

Let’s face it, it’s likely that your company sucks at something.

It’s also likely that some key process wasn’t implemented correctly.

It’s possible that the client encountered a bug in the system.

It’s understandable that you may have failed to deliver the service at a level the client expected.

It’s possible.

It’s impossible that your company sucks, is ridden with bugs, rude people and performs constantly below the norm. It’s impossible because you’d be out of business. Hell, even Microsoft and AT&T are multibillion dollar industries that get awards for product design and customer service (respectively). The odds that you have managed to fail in such an epic and spectacular way may be remote.. the likelyhood that you’re dealing with an idiot though.. well, read on.

How To Manage Idiots

Personally, we have a no a-hole policy. You yell at my staff, or are in any way abusive, you can take your business elsewhere. We have the same policy internally, if you yell at a client you’re fired. But this may not be practical or easy to do in your business, particularly if you are dealing with a big client or important account (though you’ll find it that this is typically not the case, idiots tend not to be successful or at least not allowed to interact with anyone beyond the security gates of your local Walmart.

So here is how to manage idiots. You want to follow the DARP protocol.

Disarm – If you are confronted by an angry idiot, the last thing you want to do is justify their behavior or encourage it by a quick response. Let them cool off. Create a folder that says “Tomorrow” and drag the email there. If they are insistent on an immediate response tell them you’re researching it and look forward to helping them but want to make sure you provide the correct answer. Never, EVER, argue with an idiot.

Apologize – Offer an apology or sincere note of sympathy. Especially if it makes your eye twitch while typing it. Remember that idiots are reinforced by confirmation of their behavior because they act on impulses, hunches, gut feelings and anything that doesn’t even remotely resemble facts. Who knows, they could even be right! Apologies, sincere or otherwise, give people a sense that they have at least been acknowledged. Statistically speaking, most people do not thrive or seek out confrontation, if you truly failed someone they would just do business elsewhere, not trying to fight it out with you in the steel cage. Apologize and ..

Redirect – Remember how idiots are never to be blamed for their own stupidity? Just because you may be able to prove them wrong and tell them their behavior is not appropriate doesn’t mean they will respect it. Redirect the anger somewhere else, so when you bring back the bad news (after you confirm you’re not actually at fault) the frustration pushes them aside. For example.. “That does not sound right, I am sorry. I am going to get my team on it and figure out what may have happened.”

Point to resources – Idiots will not be happy with the answer unless you offer them a way to disengage the confrontation. Instead of simply solving the problem that in fact does not exist.. offer them a resource. For example, point to a blog or a knowledge base article and ask them if they had attempted to run through that. Point out that the resource has been useful in the past and ask them to give it a shot.

Other Helpful Tips

Keep in mind that idiots are not plentiful and often act as unicorn ninjas. You will not know that you’re dealing with an idiot until you’re way into an argument that you shouldn’t be having in the first place. So no matter what you do, always triple tap.

Triple tap is the process of checking off the boxes that point to a suspicious idiot. I reply to all the email that I get. But every now and then I get something that is so ridiculously unbelievable that I just have to check. If I don’t know you and I’ve made you so angry at me personally, something is wrong. If we suck so bad and you’re trying to give us your hard earned money, something is wrong. If you’ve tried to get us to help and we’ve been terrible.. well, I kind of know the people that work here.. something is wrong. Count to 3 then hit the Forward button and dispatch it to someone else.

Finally, send the drone. At ExchangeDefender we have this acronym PUTPAGAGAC.. It stands for “Pick up the phone and give a guy a call”. We all somehow manage to write emails that sound like we just lost a world war. You could be sending a funny happy birthday card to a friend and because he’s in a bad mood he reads it and thinks “What a dick.” It happens. For ages, men handled things like men. Really f’n dumb. If they left you a nasty voicemail, send them a polite email. If they sent you a nasty email, pick up the phone and give them a call. I can count the number of people on my hands that I’ve had to fire because I had an unpleasant phone conversation with them. Given the option, I probably would have punched them in the mouth or worse. But that’s the beauty of the modern communications – things are rarely as bad as they seem.

For example, if you’re reading this blog post and aren’t laughing your ass off or saying “Oh my god, I know the dude that is just like that!”, you’re missing the point (and of Vladville in general). Real people, real business disputes, real problems are rarely so serious, so critical and so bad. But you know what, every now and then you’ll find an idiot or a crazy person. And as you’ve heard by now: Never argue with an idiot. They’ll drag you to their level and beat you with experience.

I’d like to clear up an apparent logical conflict I have made on Vladville about blogging. In past I have told many of you that consider blogging for business honestly is a terrible idea. Meanwhile, I continue to write three different blogs on a weekly basis. That doesn’t add up! No, I’m not misleading you but to understand it you have to expand you concept of value.

Do Not Blog For Business

There are in fact two major reasons why you shouldn’t do it and liability isn’t even in the top ten.

Free advice has no goodwill value. It’s true, I’ve made a lot of money for ExchangeDefender through people that have found out about us through this blog. It generates a tremendous amount of leads and awareness for our products. However, it does not generate sales. I have gotten far more “I appreciate what you do for the community… but we’re gonna go with the other guys anyhow” than I have gotten sales. Not only will it not get you sales but people will actively punish you for it “I love the blog but I don’t like that the CEO is writing it, I’d rather see you on the road”

Everything is offensive. If you’re going to start editing yourself you will only put out trash nobody will want to read. They’ll all agree that it’s valuable, they’ll all sign up for your blog and tell you that they are reading it – but trust me, they aren’t. More people will read soap operas made up at MSP Mentor than useful information – so unless you’re going to cater to your audience why bother? Therein lies the trap because no matter what you write, you will offend someone. For example:

You: Why are all the servers black and beige? What happened to the days of SGI and Sun? I want a server with a blue or purple beazel.

Reader: Screw you, a blue car ran over my dog. I hate the color and I hate you.

So if you’re smart and have a low tolerance for pain and difficult people.. this is a good time to stop reading.

Why You Should Blog For Business

This is going to take a while to explain but stay with me please…

Considering the top two caveats (and also accounting for the issues of liability, putting yourself on public record, having your competitors aware of your weaknesses and opportunities, privacy and compliance issues) there is still a tremendous value in blogging and it goes beyond the “shameless drama for clicks” and “fanboy fodder” that dominates blogging.

It builds a fan base. Depending on the industry, this likely won’t do you much good on the romantic front. In all my time writing this blog I have only had one attractive girl my age tell me that she was a fan. I’ve lost the count of dudes that are in love with this blog and me. Merry Christmas Chris Rue. I was gonna write something about how nobody has tattoed themselves with my face yet but now that I’ve mentioned it I’m sure there will be a temp tattoo available at some future event.

Fans are good. Whether they like you or hate you. I’ve met a lot of folks that are genuine fans of Vladville. I’ve also met a lot of fake fans of Vladville. They literally look like they are throwing up as they say “I like your blog” – they choke back, look up to see if the lighting is about to hit them then down to the left to see if there is a good spot to projectile vomit. I imagine a normal person would be offended by such a thing, I however take pride that someone hates the blog so much that they are willing to lie to me to my face at great personal physical discomfort because they are afraid I’ll write something about them (hint: Relax. I don’t write about stupid people, only about stupid actions stupid people make; and if you’re stupid I should be the least of your concerns)

Good fans build connections. This is the ultimate payoff. Building connections with people through any medium gives the target audience a sense of familiarity. It opens them up. It warms them up. It makes them honest and it prompts them to communicate back.

This in turn creates an enormous community and an even bigger, compounded chain of feedback. Think of your Facebook friends. Now your Facebook’s friends friends. Ever see a picture from a third party or a comment? That’s what blogging gives you – deeper visibility through people that are genuine fans of what you do.

As a result, I get an email or a message whenever there is something going on out there that even remotely impacts me. And getting good and bad news ahead of everyone else is so materially precious that it’s in fact so illegal they locked up Martha Friggin Stewart for over a year for doing it!

This is not something you get by having a large company, or by sponsoring tons of shows, or by doing business with a lot of people. As much as folks like to gossip, they tend to do so behind your back. Thanks to Vladville, I get it right between the eyes.

Fans alleviate work issues. That one is kind of self explanatory, as much as blogging is a means of cheap therapy it also creates a sense that what you do is bigger than series of SPAM filters, Exchange arrays and dying hard drives. It illustrates personally how what we do makes it possible for others to do something that truly matters.

Finally, it fuels the Delorean. Feedback and commentary is what makes the Delorean go to 88mph and back to the future. Have you noticed how stuff you read here just so happens to eventually become reality? No, it’s not time travel (cause let’s be honest, I’d be playing lottery instead).. it’s the fact that I get real feedback from real people. Free feedback from real people is remarkably much more accurate than the polite feedback from people that are being fake to answer the survey correctly. This blog enables people to not give any consideration for my feelings, whatsoever.

There you have it… If you’re quick and you’re honest and you genuinely like people – good or bad – the activity won’t make you rich but the insight you will gain from it will give you an advantage others do not have. And if that doesn’t make you rich you’re better off picking a religion and playing the lottery for a living because you’re doomed.

So, should you write a blog?

If it’s about the money.. No. Don’t bother wasting your time.

If it’s for the sex.. aim your blog posts at attractive people with low moral standards. Write about pharmaceutical sales or a site about how to get acting roles or how to feel better about plastic surgery “When he say’s no..”

If it’s about personal fulfillment for having a shared a thought that will change the world.. First, put the joint down. Second, your very idea that you’re so brilliant to have figured out something nobody else has – and you’re about to post it for free on a blog site that will likely put up Google AdWords for fake Viagra next to it - is so moronic that the level of stupidity in your head and words explaining that stupidity on the monitor in front of you will collide creating a black hole that will completely consume you. Ok, not really but I bet I just made some stoner freak out.

If it’s for personal relief.. Because you downed 6 cans of Diet Mountain Dew after midnight and spent the last two hours hunting for a missing semicolon in a file with 3,000 lines because you started writing the damn thing when you were 20 and had 2 servers and the friggin thing just took off but you copied elseif{} blocks because you didn’t want to deal with the pain of switching to switches? For the love of god don’t do it, get back to work and hire someone else to go through the process of cleaning that nightmare up. You’re really gonna have to trust me on this one.

If it’s for any other reason, and your CPA and managers assured you it won’t get you fired (oh yes, you will), and your IT department won’t lock you away from the site once you offend them (oh yes, you will), and you’re not mortified by a thought of going to an IT conference where 3 of your biggest fans walk into the elevator with you and your mind starts doing the math on the weight safety range of the elevator… then go for it.

If for no other reason, it makes it seem like you’re working.

I was recently asked by my friends on Facebook (www.facebook.com/vladmmd) and Twitter (@vladmazek) about how to build a great technology business. As I was told, I spend a lot of time explaining how the doors to opportunity are being closed and not enough talking about what to actually do. Honestly, I spend a lot of time talking about our own businesses (Shockey Monkey, ExchangeDefender, CloudBlock, Looks Cloudy) and how those are being managed/promoted/built but those posts tend to get very skeptical commentary because even after years and years of documenting my every move on this blog people still somehow can’t trust me (why you’d value my opinion on this post then is beyond me but I aim to please).

So first a couple of disclaimers: I am not now nor have I ever been an MSP. The following is an opinion, not an advice. This opinion is only appropriate for a 30something looking for a business that has a medium range lifecycle (5-10 years).

Objective: To build a fast, scalable and inexpensive business that profits from the growing commoditization of network services and consumerization of IT.

Assumptions: Low startup costs, low barrier to entry, low level of skill or work ethic (otherwise you’d make more faster working for someone) and preferably a business activity that the attorney general would choose not to prosecute.

Business model: Look at the most successful technology businesses and find a way to wiggle in between them and the decision maker. Commoditize the most expensive component in the service delivery.

The Broken Model

The “technology business” model as exists right now is extremely expensive. It requires huge up front investments and huge operational expenses. All for extremely low returns met with extremely high risk.

For example, you’d be insane to start building Exchange clusters right now. I never built a voice product at ExchangeDefender and looking at the marketplace demand right now I wouldn’t even humor it. Everything “expensive” is on it’s way out – there are way too many substitutes for something big to work and work well enough.

Likewise, talent is extremely expensive, forget building a business that requires big salaries. Look at solutions like www.thirdtier.com and tell me why you’d ever create a single point of failure in your business given the price tag?

Finally, there are two huge challenges to the existing business model: consumerization and commoditization. Everything that is huge and expensive is being beaten by smaller and simpler solutions that don’t require an army of people to build and maintain.

The Opportunity of Viable Threats

The opportunity of connecting the technical dots out there is huge.

The only issue is that nobody has a huge interest in promoting them because if you’re already selling stuff you naturally want to sell the most expensive (highest margin) stuff you can get away with. Smaller and cheaper stuff, while it works just as well, is something as threatening to you as it is threatening your suppliers. But with your suppliers starting to compete with you… well, it’s time to make difficult decisions.

Make yourself the product and associate everything around you as a service or a tool that can be sold as a subscription.

Don’t do any actual work – resell services, service contracts, support, tools – set yourself up as an uncomissioned salesman that is collecting a margin but do so without liability or responsibility for what is being sold.

Outsource everything except management. You cannot run a modern business as an SPF, there is a long blood trail out in the industry as a proof. But forget about working 9-5.

Embrace working with people. The ones that make around $10/hour.

Redefine what you offer. Expertise, not grunt monkey work. The two need to be separate entities because if you try to balance both you’ll eventually be an expert grunt monkey making $10/hour for a job that others would charge $110/hour.

Be loud and annoying. Forget about a marketing budget.

What is it you do around here

Look at what’s expensive and commoditize it – training.

Look at what’s being consumerized and connect it – mobility.

Businesses are spending boatloads of money on consumer gadgets that they are barely managing or having any idea how much of their staff time is wasted on them instead of going towards “productivity” benefits they bought them for in the first place.

Do you go into business of managing mobile devices? Hell no. That costs a ton of money. You need skilled engineers, ridiculously expensive software and you can only be assured of one thing – it’s always gonna be a step slower than the stuff that’s coming out.

So what do you sell? If I had nothing better to do, I’d sell a low flat-rate training technology service. That is layered with a sales component on top of it. You could even sell managed services – just be sure you’re not the one stuck delivering them at 5 AM on Saturday.

This is something you don’t need a lot of resources for – you don’t even need an office. A virtual office with an impressive meeting space (leased by the hour) along with some admin assistant time for marketing, followups and scheduling.

The way to lead and ride the wave of consumerization of IT is to be a user, an expert – and leverage that to others that want to make it work. All that’s in it for you is 10-25% commission along the way.

Conclusion

There is no doubt cloud is huge. There is no doubt that big network infrastructure stuff is in pain. There is no doubt all of the techical stuff – from equipment to skill – is being commoditized. It’s also a fact that consumerization is taking the IT departments and technology companies out of the loop.

It’s also a fact that these companies have a ton of money and massive infrastructure in place to do what they do. Some of which they will spend on you if you can connect them to the base they are losing so rapidly.

Disclosure: This is a massive pitch. Please don’t misunderstand though, it is not meant to sell you or convince you – it’s a direction that I’m going in and if you’d like to hop onboard with me, you’re quite welcome. Enjoy.

…

We have just come out of a massive VAR extinction level event. Somewhere between automation, consumerization and overall technology just getting remarkably better and easier to use a large segment of the “IT business” population either got jobs or found a place in other industries. It used to be easy to make money, even if you didn’t like to market, sell, promote, manage people or even if you were not that great with technology and keeping up your skills. The easy money is gone.

With the easy money gone, companies that want to grow rapidly are finding it harder and harder to find qualified partners in a crowded field and reaching that next new partner is both expensive and logistically complex – they don’t attend shows and they aren’t just going to buy stuff for the sake of small incremental revenue: It has to fit the strategy and it has to impact the core business significantly to get promoted, sold, deployed and delivered over time. Without the ability to address a massive performance annoyance (spam, viruses, downtime) or critical business component (backups, failover, continuity) the solution sale and resistance (and effectively the cost) are more prolonged.

I knew this was coming. It’s why I wrote Shockey Monkey. It’s why I gave it away for free. It’s why we currently enjoy a rapid increase in the number of resellers and the level of activity across those resellers. Not just by showing the blueprint but by executing it ourselves. And you ought to listen to the folks that are actually making money and copy them. Wanna know why? Because the alternative sucks.

Just about everything else hasn’t worked. “You mean to tell me that the VARs that failed at the game are NOT the best people to tell me how to run my business? But they sold their business for nearly 3 times their monthly reoccurring revenue a month before barely making their payroll! I should ignore that?”

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

The traditional “from the trenches” expert panel of successful MSPs/VARs/Cloud managers is arguably less valuable to you in terms of advice because their model is being challenged by consumerization of the industry. Why should you sit around and listen to a conversation about desktop PC expertise when the tablets are taking over?

Really successful IT Solution Providers are at a junction point: Minimize spending and consider a sale or invest in expansion/transformation to a more consumer-oriented technology business. Considering the premiums that the market is dictating on the MSP businesses that have been acquired so far, most of your sub-$10,000,000 shops are going to transform.

Of course, my sales figures support that thesis What we are doing is not a coincidence or an experiment.

Where Shockey Monkey Fits In

When I launched Shockey Monkey I told everyone that it’s not a PSA. I still maintain that it’s an extension to a PSA model and it’s inherent design isn’t management of your business but the service delivery to your customer – portals, chat, remote access, invoicing and accounting, reporting – in the face of changing demand your customer service is more important to your business than the tech solutions.

Yes, you need a tool to manage the tech solutions. And I’ll give it to you for free.

You also need a system and partners – today we will be inviting many of them to the platform.

You see, the way software and hardware vendors currently market their solutions is by throwing messages out and hoping that they stick. When you walk by my booth at a trade show, I have a few seconds to get your attention. If you enter a drawing or a contest, it’s another opportunity. But it’s only an opportunity to pique your interest about what I can do for your business. I do not get to take you through the whole benefit of my solution. And quite frankly, for some solutions the business decision maker or sales guy or even the support manager may be the wrong person to talk to.

This is where Shockey Monkey, and advertising you will see in it, are fundamentally different. It’s not a game of impressions and hoping someone will click. It’s an annual campaign that can be updated daily. Shockey Monkey users will be working in the portal and seeing vendor messages – almost constantly – and have a clear idea of the value and benefits that are offered. This includes everyone from the lowest paid helpdesk admin to the highest-compensated partner who is only in there to see the quarterly sales figures.

This is a marketing approach that is both new and mutually beneficial for all of us. IT Solution Providers get a free portal experience that ties into virtually all the systems from the PSA (if you have one) to the accounting package to quoting package to the RMM and even your own web site. All brought to you by the vendors who want you to make them a part of your business. But do they get your business just because you clicked on their ad? In a way that we’ve implemented the marketing in Shockey Monkey, they win when you win – and it’s on them to show you how to grow and do so in an assisted, supported and illustrated way. We have a common goal here.

Over the next few blog posts I will go into details on how this will happen. Vendors, hardware and software, have very deep pockets but also very talented people and lots of insight into the industry. IT Solution Providers have the customer service, connections and willingness to do the implementation process.

It makes everyone more accountable. You can no longer overpromise, underdeliver and move on to the next sale – the dynamics of IT business have been flipped from large deals to smaller deals that are earned every month. In order for vendors to stay in partners toolbox they have to deliver every day of every month. In order for the IT Solution Providers not to be removed, they have to deliver far more value. Which means the cost of business is higher, margins are lower, and we’re racing to gain a larger market share.

Shockey Monkey is less of a tool and more of a platform to make this possible. Not only will we make those connections but we’ll turn them into a relationship that is connected at the service delivery.

The synergy of the two potentially turns every single one of us into IBM.

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.