One of the more unpleasant parts of running a business is that you get introduced to a ton of business drivel books that pick an outcome and find specific cases to work backwards to somehow prove a theory. People reading them feel good because the content reaffirms their common sense and attitude towards business. So much for Good to Great, if you haven’t read it, don’t bother.

But I thought it would be nice for someone to write the opposite.

Give me “Great to Meh” or “How I lost it all trading options” - I don’t want to read about how great and awesome people are, I want to find out how people failed tremendously so I can avoid being one of those suckers.

So here is my “Great to Meh” moment of the past month.

We’re building this incredible new product. We think it’s going to change this space significantly.

We are working with our usual suppliers, usual hardware, proven software.

But the empire starts to crumble on the most unforseen of tasks.

So the model of the motherboard changed and the vendor assured us it was the same thing. We verified the specs and agreed that it was the same beast.

Everything was the same. Except for the layout. The 4 pin ATX power feed was 4 inches to the left, making the case power 2″ too far away.

I’ll spare you the fact that we paid 4x as much for shipping for each extension cable as we intended to.

What we also did not account for was the new layout in the new 2U SuperMicro chasis that replaced the old one. So when we went to order the same old 180 degree SAS drive data cables because the 90 degree ones overlapped some ports on the old chasis… well, you can tell where this goes. The 180 degree cables protruded out of the 2U cases, back to the parts order page.

So what did we learn today…

First, never trust sales people when they tell you nothing has changed. Order one instead of a pallet.

Second, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give people an ETA. No matter how well planned, how well organized or sure you are about a certain outcome there are forces working against you. Unless thing is up and running and sucking down power and has been burned in for at least 3 days, it’s just a concept.

Third, pick a person of authority in your organization that has the final say on yay/nay. Everything heard, read, seen or implied elsewhere should take a huge distant second place to the person in charge, preferably you.

Fourth, count the amount of positive feedback from this. Write a crappy business book and sell it to Karl. Failure in technology business is the norm, not success, so you would be better served learning how to avoid the biggest mistakes failures of this business took. Learn from your mistakes - wouldn’t it be more fun to learn it without making those mistakes in the first place? Absolutely, but nobody would buy such a book, people read for personal fulfillment not to be put through gut wrenching nightmares about how it can all go wrong. I am not sure how to explain the audience this blog gets….. I attribute most of it to my masterful spellling and grammar skills.

Thanks to the elections in Unites States a fair amount of public discussion has taken place over just who should be the leader. The smartest? The most competent? The most experienced? The toughest? Or someone that reflects the average man - Joe Six Pack that you can have a beer with and debate whether Africa is a continent or a country?

Who cares, isn’t the election over?

It’s a little bit bigger than that. Election cycle gives you an incredible insight into what drives people, what motivates them, what they fear the most and what they believe to be the solution to their problem.

As IT solution providers our job is generally to identify the problems and propose solutions. Some of us are wildly successful at identifying the true problems clients face. Some of us just suck at getting that information from our clients. Just asking people what they don’t like about their technology is not enough. Feeding data into a junk “Solution Creator” is an OK sales tool but it doesn’t get to the bottom of the true issues our client base faces.

One of the biggest drivers behind the development of the new wave of products at OWN has been a little “Development” tab where we keep track of what our current customers demands are. This is great when it comes to finding the specific nuances in functionality from client to client, from industry to industry. But refining a solution to fit the client is easy… how do you market yourself to the kind of people that would fit your solution portfolio?

That is why most IT solution providers fail at marketing and making it big.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The reason your clients aren’t telling you exactly what they want from you is because they likely do not consider you to be their peers and would likely not understand them. So you talk to your clients in the best business language you can muster and they respond in the most technical lingo they have picked out of their trade journals.

One thing I realized last year is that as my business grew and I grew in my IT business and then grew in my business outside of the scope of running a “technology” business I lost that familiarity that has made me so successful working with small IT shops. It has been a few years since I had left a really small IT biz way of thinking and I realized that I was no longer the loudest proponent that understood the challenges of the really small IT solution providers.

Sometimes you just have to hire the right people that speak to the right kind of the market. So I set out to find a person that was most like the majority of IT startup guys. I’m not going to open up about all the secrets but suffice to say, people open themselves up to the people that they identify as their peers - technically, business-wise.

You have to play your strengths to be the right fit for your clients needs. Otherwise you are doomed to the professional life of taking orders, being second guessed, not in the budget, a decision to be made later.

Now that is a little doomy and gloomy, so let’s talk about something positive. Where I think most people fail at and get frustrated into remaining small is the failure of their first hire. Most people think to hire the exact same kind of a person they are. Techie. Competent. Someone that can help them scale themselves by offering the same kind of a service, same kind of a technical expertise and same kind of a go-getter personality type they have.

It puzzles me is that nobody ever asks themselves as entrepreneurs why they don’t work for someone else? Why would you hire someone completely unmanageable?

There are so many pieces of advice and books written on who you should hire, who you should hire first, how you should hire and on what terms. So I will offer you the single most important piece of advice and key to success:

Do not hire on the grounds of what would make you better off, what would make your life easier and who would fit you better. Think about your customers instead. Which of your hiring prospects would work the best with your client base - who are they most likely to respect and like as a point of interaction and representation of your corporate image and your corporate values?

Style points matter. You betcha.

Last week the hard drive on my Dell XPS M1530 got put on life support. Bad blocks, unreadable system files, etc. After an hour of trying to repair Vista and failing on one system file after another I gave up and did the diagnostics check. Yup, drive passed on.

So I contacted Dell Online Support hoping that I would get a quick and painless part replacement under warranty. You can kind of guess where this is heading but keep on reading, there is an important lesson here. After jumping through the Dell hoops and redoing all the steps the Dell technician made me do before he finally shipped the drive I was asked to hold on:

Please give me 2 more minutes my manager would like to have a word with you.

Manager was very polite but I doubt he liked my answer to his question. The issue with support is that we as technical people feel we are beyond process, we know what we are doing so please skip the level 101 stupid questions. The more basics you put me through, the more upset I get. So the more Dell tried to help, the more time I wasted on what was ultimately about $80.

I just wanted to check your experience on Chat with him.
12:35:55 PM        Agent      Sup_Aamer_52067    
Was he able to handle the problem to your satisfaction?
12:36:17 PM        Customer      Vladimir Mazek    
Honestly, I would not rank your support as satisfactory or recommend Dell based on this support call.
12:36:29 PM        Customer      Vladimir Mazek    
However, I do understand you have a process in place for very good reasons and I can respect that.

We went back and forth a little and he did explain the reason why the basics are done (few items I was not aware of, for example they track error codes that are produced by their diagnostics software so they can track defects)

But the point is that this conversation about improving their process really did nothing for me as a customer. I had a piece of electronics which is prone to failure, it failed, I spent my time and then spent it again to get the replacement, no amount of explanation was going to make me feel good about what had happened. They could have thrown a Dell Mini my way, a 42” plasma screen, I still would be shooting time down the sinkhole that is an issue I wish had not happened in the first place.

And if I had unreasonable expectation that everything should work 100% in 100% of the time I wouldn’t be in IT.

Here is where the conversation went to an eventful draw that 99.999% of the support calls end with – both parties are dissatisfied with the outcome. The support did all they could and the customer is still unhappy.

12:41:28 PM        Customer      Vladimir Mazek    
And I did comply with the script and the process.
12:41:38 PM        Agent      Sup_Aamer_52067    
We pass on the error code to the concerned department so that they work on it and try to minimize those errors.
12:41:50 PM        Agent      Sup_Aamer_52067    
Yes. And we really appreciate that.
12:41:52 PM        Customer      Vladimir Mazek    
But you did ask me if I was satisfied with your support and frankly the answer to that is no, I was not.
12:42:21 PM        Customer      Vladimir Mazek    
But I do appreciate the effort and the help and the new hard drive.

This sucks for everyone involved. Dell support gets a bad rep, I probably get dinged a few support points which assures I’m labeled as a jerk never to go above and beyond for because I am holding Dell to an unfair standard.

But this is where he won the ball game. We continued to chat about process, etc and after I summed up my main point of contention:

 12:44:31 PM        Agent      Sup_Aamer_52067    
I will take this feedback and make sure that my agents work on it.

Wow.

Lie to me Jerry, lie to me!

I have no idea if Aamer is going to take the feedback I gave him to his supervisors or if he just got another jerk off his support queue. But the above made me feel really good.

My feedback counted for something, more importantly, I was at least indirectly assured that I was right in my request and not insanely demanding.

There are two outcomes that can be taken with any complaint:

1. Customer is wrong, f em. They lose.
2. Customer is right, let’s fix it. They win.

Almost all support cases end up in one of the two buckets. Then there is that third area which makes both parties share a bit of the victory. I feel like I did my diagnostics and assured the first guy that the drive is dead. They feel like they did their job and got me a replacement. But neither of us is perfectly satisfied. Did Dell concede that it was their fault? No. Did I concede that their process makes perfect sense? No.

But I walk away from an incident that I wish I didn’t have to be involved in feeling like the next experience won’t be a negative one.

When you fail people that is pretty much all you can give them, faith that the next experience will be better. Behind the scenes, you work damn hard to make sure the conversation never repeats.

The joy of customer service.

Growing up, one of my favorite shows was Beyond 2000. I don’t think it played a small part in sending me down the engineering path and constantly trying to hack things into something better. The show was absolutely unbelievable, almost magic.

One episode that I remember to this day was of a small Australian town that had issues with traffic congestion. Back in the 80’s the town put up LED speed limit signs that calculated the speed the car should be moving at in order not to stop at the next stop light and glide through. This was not only supposed to reduce stop and go traffic but also improve fuel consumption.

And now way-beyond-2008, my podunk little village on the corner of a swamp is utilizing this very same technology. Hooray for Orlando. The speed limit on I4 highway will adjust depending on congestion to keep the traffic moving. As a proud owner of a stick-shift this means I will no longer look like a freak with a bulging left leg. The idea is that when the congestion is detected the speed limit will decrease to keep cars moving, hopefully reduce accidents and even emissions.

There is of course a negative angle to any government operation: the system should have been ready over two years ago but the computer software malfunctioned. I sincerely hope someone questions the city about how a software malfunction took two years to be corrected. We live in a state that cannot afford police departments, law enforcement, community services and it’s governor campaigns vigilantly to give everyone a huge tax cut. This is why we simply cannot allow more software development jobs to be given to Indian, regardless of economic benefits of globalization, because we cannot educate our population and our community resources are going to suffer more and more as a result of it.

Personally, I would severely tax any company using offshore development labor and using the proceeds in a form of technology scholarships. We aren’t Beyond 2000, we are beyond @$#%ed if keep on shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to innovation and technology. 

I don’t know if this is a uniquely American trait, but the sense of entitlement is just huge in the IT space. We want it all. We want it now. We want it free.

Does anyone for a moment consider that things actually cost money?

From production staff, to satellite uplinks, to broadcast staff, to bandwidth required to distribute content, to market it, to deliver and support it - oh, and a few hundred million to grease the wheels and obtain the “rights” to the certain content people want to see.

Most people don’t like to face reality that things simply cost money. Best example of this ignorance is all over this Digg discussion titled: NBC Olympics video site snubs Linux, older Macs. In a nutshell, Microsoft handed a boatload of $$$ to make sure the digital Olympiad 2008 broadcast over the Internet was powered by Silverlight. They made a business decision to invest money into the event and process that would expand the installation base of their software. It is that simple.

But it angered the entitled people. The no DRM people. The information needs to be free people. The liberty or death people. Bah. These guys wouldn’t even spend $100 on an operating system, but demand a digital broadcast from China free of charge. Here is the best argument I’ve seen so far on the topic:

itsthebrod said: Last I checked, no one is forcing you to use Linux or old Mac versions. Stop bitching for the choice YOU made. Jesus, this is one reason Linux fanboys are one of the most annoying groups of people on earth: they make a decision to be a tiny minority and use Linux as their OS and then bitch when the world around them doesn’t cater every piece of software to them…

The counter-argument follows:

magic6435: That has got to be the dumbest comment i have ever read on digg…. so mabe they wanted to save some cash and not blow another 2 grand on a new mac if their powerpc is still doing what they need it to. or maybe they wanted to use and support the open software moment. there is no reason for the content NOT to work on these systems. its a matter of companies artificially mucking things up for certain techs.

Welcome to the power of choice.

You chose poorly.

You see, the beauty of living in the free world and enjoying all the benefits of the free markets is that you have the power to choose. It’s your right. The beauty of free markets for corporate citizens is that we too have a power of choice - on how we make our investments. So in the same way that you selfishly choose one alternative over another, corporations choose one alternative over another. The right to broadcast Olympics isn’t free. The right to broadcast the college football game isn’t free. That right has to be bought, and every time there is a transaction to be made someone pays for it.

In this case, Microsoft paid for it. And they offer it under the terms they set. Take it or leave it. Nobody is forcing you. Nobody is snubbing you.

Microsoft chose the format to broadcast the Olympics with. You chose an operating system that does not have the capabilities to watch the Olympics. Thats all there is to it.

Now the delicate dance that the creators (such as the music industry) and distributors (iTunes, Best Buy) and consumers (us) do in order to determine just what the right amount of money, DRM and restriction is acceptable so that everyone walks away from the deal happy and content…. that’s a much longer blog post. But in the end it comes to the exact same conclusion - it is all about the choice.

Geek Squad Dave first gained notoriety in the newsgroups for his very public lack of ability to grasp the basic concepts of vendor and client management and dealing with cost structure changes. After being condemned in public by most of his peers Geek Squad Dave became only the second person OWN will not do business with, which has apparently motivated him to become an unofficial spokesperson for one of our customer-direct competitors where he hopes to lead the drones of retail consulting IT failures like him - and god do I wish he succeeds. He also appears to be preoccupied with me for some reason even though I don’t remember ever meeting the guy. Here is his latest bit of “brilliance”:

I’ve been in this industry since Vlad was in diapers and I can assure
you the WAN bandwidth is always going to be behind LAN bandwidth. And that as bandwidth increases, the apps and data will too.

This is a part of the Geek Squad Dave’s argument on why most applications will just never make it to the cloud. Now, for this to work I am going to need you to ignore a few things. The last time I was in diapers was about 28 years ago or so.. so please ignore for a moment that this genius comes from a man who has been virtually unemployed for that period of time and failed to even accidentally be successful enough to hire another person. Please also ignore the flawed logic of “this has failed before, so it will surely fail again.” Also ignore the billions of dollars being pumped into the transformation of IT infrastructure by every major vendor. Let’s also ignore the wisdom of people who work with network engineers, developers, major IT powerhouses all of which are indicating that this is the direction they are strongly focusing on. That’s just how much ignorance you’ll need to think that we are not on a cusp of the most significant change in computing during most of our lifetime. Pampers stage included.

You see, for the longest time we’ve had this shift of computing and processing power from mainframe to PC, from PC to server, from server to workstation and the trend always flowed to the device with the most computational power because that is what transformed data into something useful. But over the last few years we have seen the relevance of a local area network diminish. Change in paradigm? Change in trust? Change in cost and affordability? It doesn’t really matter why, it matters that the computing experience is no longer dependant on you being a part of some segmented network that needed to be managed, monitored, tuned and audited around the clock. Your phone accesses the same Internet. It sends around the same email. It provides similar services, often better and more reliable if at times even cheaper. Ever tried to print a picture across the Internet and pick it up at a local CVS? Or have a picture book shipped to your doorstep?

The large data set argument is the last one in the defense of the local area network and is by far the most flawed of them all. If the data set grows, the processing power needed to manipulate it grows. Major movie studios do not render their movies on expensive standalone SGI’s anymore - they render them on server render farms. Major database and transaction systems no longer sit on monolithic clusters fighting a storage medium bottleneck - you’ve guessed it, data farms. Large files, voice, video - all within the reach of your cell phone powered by a tiny battery.

Welcome to the future. (PDC ‘08 Sessions)

As the cloud computing becomes more prevalent medium for long term storage, processing, scalability and affordability, what unique feature will bring computing back to the confines of the LAN? That my friends is what is crushing guys like Geek Squad Dave right out of their almost-business, the inability to deal with change combined with lack of expertise to seize the opportunity. It is what separates IT solution providers from independent Geek Squad guys running out and “trust recommending” the solutions. One provides solutions, the other picks out laptop bags and offers input on which version of Quickbooks or Office you should buy. The successful IT solution providers of today and tomorrow are the ones who stay informed and can demonstrate the ability to help a business be successful in the modern times.

The opportunity is incredible. And the only requirement is shedding the ignorance.

This is the most exciting time to be in the IT space, bar none. And if you think you’ve seen this before… your mind is starting to go, a good indication that you’re closer to diapers than I am.

It means confused, just in case you’re wondering.

Why do companies that have been built on going direct suddenly decide to care about the reseller channel?

Why do companies that have been built on the reseller channel partnerships decide to go direct to the customer?

Mo money. The grass is always greener on the other side.

That is all there is to it. Or as my buddy Robbie would put it: It’s that simple.

Really? Really.

With every change of guard and seasons, the occupying management force will do a business assessment and identify key areas of improvement, the opportunity matrix, the differentiating factor… and the rest is basically what the Dilbert comic is based on.

These change strategies are all ultimately based on a flawed concept that while everything else stays the same and we change only this one thing, we will be able to make $X more money. People making this kind of a call probably never heard of causality.

You see, the problem is that when you change one little thing, even with the best of intentions, you end up pissing off a large contingent of the base that got you to your current stature. So it makes sense to do it when you are at the bottom and the feds just raided your office. But what happens when you are at the top and your change for an incremental % of market share results upsetting 100% of the constituency that got you to your current leader role in the market? There goes your sand castle.

Now sure you can draw parallels to Dell and Microsoft, but I do the same for my OWN company. As the reseller base erodes and folks flunk out of business there is mounting pressure for us to go direct.

Whenever there is a high demand of unquantifiable revenue opportunity I like to find out who is suddenly making this need apparent. How did the world change overnight that we could be making all this money and how did all these customers figure out to call us? Dig a little below the shiny cover sheet of the presentation and you find out that it’s Bob, the failed VAR, callling from the $25,000 job he got with his largest client and he needs us to go direct because he is tired of returning support phone calls during summer from his car during the lunch hour.

So let me get this straight. We’re going to throw our biggest partners under the bus in order to be friendly to the very customers that couldn’t even keep the ol’ Bob in business? We need to go direct for that? Answer on the first ring for that needy client base? Reeeeeeeally?

Let me think about that one… Bzzzt. No.

I wonder if Dell, Microsoft and others are looking past their presentation cover sheets or blindly salivating over the large dream numbers?

It wasn’t too long ago that I felt it was my obligation to get into the public brawls with my peers over what was right and wrong, all while my friends tried to pull me back and tell me it’s not worth it. Nowadays, I feel like I’m the one doing most of the pulling because it is hard to get passionate people to pull back from what they perceive as a direct attack or just pure moral and ethical blasphemy.

Truth is, most people in this business put their all into their effort to change the world and burn out half way through it. Or they burn at 500 degrees, cool off, virtually disappear and then come back in a volcanic explosion. Nobody likes handling a live grenade.

I’m glad it never got to that point with me and the great deal of that goes to my friends Dave Sobel, Susan Bradley and Karl Palachuk. At their suggestion I started charting my day, charting my reach, charting the net benefits/losses both materially to OWN and mentally to me. How much time did I spend developing? How much marketing? How much helping others? How much pro-bono? And then in the other column, I noted how much difference it made to me, my family, my company and my community.

I encourage everyone to do the same.

The problem with passionate people is that they feed off the energy and response of others. The trick to being successful, in either commercial or community initiative, is knowing where your passion benefits the most people. With only 24 hours in a day you can only make a difference for so many people in so many places.

So crunch some numbers. Even if you make no money out of it at all. Especially if you don’t make any money out of it at all. Find out what you do that makes the world a better place for others, find out where you have a chance to impact the most people and offer your message.

If you do that, and if you only do that, we’re all a lot better off because nobody burns out. It worked for me

Update: Woops, one correction before I get beheaded. Most of the credit goes to my wife and to my son for grounding me, giving me a time out, chance to focus and giving me a chance to look at what I’m doing from outside in. I used to spend all this time at conferences, in groups, meetings, feedback groups, etc and use Vladville to vent my frustrations. I don’t know if you’ve noticed the difference but I’ve started using Vladville as more of a personal reflection on what I’m involved in and how I’m dealing/struggling/winning/failing - and judging by the feedback and emails and audience growth, it seems to be the most inspirational and valuable thing I’ve ever done for the complete strangers. So thanks to everyone above, and thank you for reading Vladville.

One of the nicest things about the MVP Summit, and one of the reasons I pay so much and urge so many of you to go to the big industry events, is that you can surround yourself with people who are far (far, far) wiser and more experienced than you. In a surrounding where you are not being weighted down by the idiots you have to deal with for a paycheck you can’t help but elevate your game and start seeing things in a whole new light.

One of the things I have been thinking about over the past few days has been the balancing of the equation that contains trust, influence, reputation, authority and credibility. Number of techmeme headlines had been swirling around my head for weeks as bloggers start to realize that they are not the center of the world.

But this is not about bloggers, it is an important lesson for everyone that brings themselves online, whether willingly through social networks or unwillingly through the better search engine indexing of public records.

You can’t hide. But you can try to understand how the information is consumed online.

The fundamental lie to the Web 2.0 world is that it is not based on knowledge and credentials, it is based on the size of your personal network. It’s not what you know, it’s how many people it appears know you. It’s all about the size, baby. Those with the size and apparent large roster of buddies use it to talk about those connections and project the appearance of equality with their subjects. And the pile grows. They refer back to how so-and-so did-something-something because of them. It infers influence. Jump on the bandwagon as often as possible, love everything everyone else loves. It will grow your network of people interested in the seemingly everything you are interested in. Talk about yourself and how you’ve previously talked about it. To the casual observer, it seems like you have some authority over the subject. Traffic begets traffic, pretty pictures illustrate credibility, authority, makes you feel like you can trust them because the herd does too.

Then you meet them and realize… my god, this person is complete and total charlatan that is obviously out of place.

The bottom line is, knowledge and credentials still matter. Not in the makebelief world of Web 2.0, but in the real world where you make your money, feed your family, grow as a human being and hopefully cause change that improves you and things around you.

My whole point is that you should not get discouraged from what you do just because you’re an apparent peon and you don’t have a billion contacts on Facebook. You should not abandon hope just because your events are packed with hundreds of people lined up to take your picture. The big picture is far larger than that.

Trust is something earned, not something percieved.
Everyone fact-checks, nobody will take things on blind faith. (Web 2.0 religion opportunity?
You have no influence over anyone. Don’t lie to yourself.

What makes you reputable, notable, perhaps even influential is NOT an internal quality that you posses. It is an external, subjective opinion of people who choose to follow you, who believe that you make sense and can be honest and human.

Web 2.0 is not so unlike the Real World 1.0, though it is easier to lie in, reality is all that actually matters/counts. Don’t get lost in the clouds. (sorry, sorry, I know, bad pun)

This is called taking one for the team as far as the community is concerned. She either asks for the password to start Twittering or drives up to Seattle for the Summit for the sole purpose of killing me. Either way, everyone stands to benefit:

https://twitter.com/susanbradley

Name susanbradley

Location Fesno, CA

Bio Fake Susan Bradley’s take on SBS and adult entertainment industry

Oh, Chris is twittering too.. Or is it tweeting?