Last week I launched the series of ExchangeDefender Lunch & Learn webcasts. Basically I get together with a marketing person and we launch a live presentation covering 30 minutes on how to setup / configure / sell / support ExchangeDefender and then follow it with another 30 minutes of Q&A with up to 5 partner organizations.

My primary goal in doing this, aside from being nice to the people that fund my car collection, is to figure out how we can better support our partners and offer great training.

One of the initiatives that came from last weeks lunch & learn was a need for a partner university. Here are overall requests:

1. Present information in an easy to understand, easy to follow, low attention span way (3 minutes at most) as a video.
2. Allow company owners to assign these videos to their staff and be informed when the video is viewed.
3. Offer a brief comprehension quiz at the end of the video to give business owner an idea if their staff actually learned something or if they were browsing eBay while they were being paid to learn.
4. Give partners the ability to post these training videos on their own web site so that end users an learn how to use the product.

So I have two questions here.

1. Is there anything else you’d like? We’re putting in some overtime tomorrow evening at 6 PM to design this and outline the videos we’d like to record.
2. Does anyone know of a way to determine when a video has been played from beginning to the end? Maybe embedding something into the control at the end of the video so that it requires a click that is not obvious to the user (without viewing the source?).

Let me know. I’m vlad@ownwebnow.com or 407-536-VLAD. If you can’t reach me you can also discuss this with Stephanie Hoffman, I believe at x737?

My company has grown remarkably over the past few years, at times unfortunately way ahead of its capacity, and I am always asked about how our ideas come to fruition. “Do you just pull it out your a$$ Vlad?”

Truth is, every concept we have is drawn out. Out of all the brilliant ideas we have, all are either born or killed on the 25 feet of whiteboard space in an awkwardly large conference room we didn’t know what to do with. The entire team is encouraged to doodle and we all have our own whiteboards in our offices (some more than one) on which we draw out our proposals and bring to one another for review / ideas / suggestions.

At times these drawings sit on the wall for days or weeks. We keep on adding to them. Everyone significantly contributes to them at times because it’s sometimes hard to visualize and beat down everything until you see it.

We approach business this way.

We draw out business concepts and ideas this way. Not just software. The screen above is of our onboarding process. The screen below is for our marketing workflows that we’re arming our clients with so they can demonstrate how the service functions:

Once we’ve agreed on what we’re doing, we let creative people have a crack at it. In marketing, this is done by Stephanie Hoffman. In web and design, this is done by Judy Scmidt. We go through the doodles and they make it beautiful and consumable. Here is an end result:

Own Web Now Onboarding Process

Check it out live at: http://go.ownwebnow.com

One thing that is very hard to convey to the young staff is how to deal with failure. Not all ideas are winners and sometimes even great things get killed by the most unlikely and unforeseen of circumstances.

The biggest challenge in business is picking yourself up when you’ve lost and moving on. The 25’ monster board is the test of resolve, consistency and ability to see beyond the problems. The goal is to constantly be drawing and focusing on the progression – dealing with what we’ve got now, what we’ll have 6 months from now and what won’t see the light of day in a year or longer. Nothing breeds creativity like giving yourself time to look at the same problem over and over.

As you’ve read here, and heard from me on the road, 2009 was hard for me personally. I had to deal with a product that wasn’t quite 100% because we spent so much time developing ExchangeDefender 5. All the while I got beaten, bruised, cursed out and called names but I didn’t sit home and let it crush me, I beat up the board hard and now we are where we are. Kicking a$$.

I am the most optimistic about our future than I’ve ever been. Even when I had big dreams, $0 money and no idea just how dumb I was

And now to 2010…

The board is blank. We finished clean and strong and now…..

Our goal in 2010 is triple digit growth. 100%.

My goal for you is the same – if you aren’t already a partner and haven’t spoken to me, I encourage you to do it today. Right… now. In 2010, we will push our partners like we have never even pushed ourselves and it’s a challenge I am looking forward to like a fat kid looks at desert in a buffet line. Game… ON!

Last week I recorded a SPAM Show podcast with my buddies Erick and Karl about the exciting stuff that 2010 will bring. This has become a tradition of sorts, and we’ve generally been right (hey, we’re still in business) about what’s coming down the pipe. If you aren’t following the SPAM Show, you should – it’s available in the OWN Partner Portal and from our Facebook fan page (you must be a fan in order to download it).

But on to 2010, right? For the first time ever, my prediction is not just something I’m making up and hoping I’m right: I’m actually betting a significant amount of money and 2009 efforts on it. I also believe that the big change we’ve started to see in 2009 is not a short term economic factor but just the start of the extinction event I’ve privately called “Vladville 2012” – hey even if you don’t like what I’m saying the Mayans predicted it centuries ago

2 0 1 0 – Beginning of The End

In 2009 we saw people sink expensive projects, shelf long term licensing agreements and outright refuse to commit to anything complex or drawn out.

Several factors played a role in this: recession, cash flow challenges, global competition, alternatives and substitutes, aggressive cost cutting, etc. Which factor was the biggest or most prevalent is a discussion of it’s own, the bottom line is that the client expectations have changed and you won’t get 2007 conditions back again.

What this means for the MSP industry is that we’re now at the beginning of the end of businesses that were built on delivering an SLA on top of the on-premise infrastructure alone because value is harder to justify in light of the availability of alternatives and lowered costs.

One question has been asked more than any other in 2009: Can we live without it?

For many, particularly large, companies the answer has been a resounding yes and the tangled web of licensing, infrastructure and legacy solutions got cut. This extended beyond just computer solutions and applied to everything corporate: including human resources.

As the fat get’s trimmed, the realization that fat is actually your margins (what keeps you profitable) was a painful sight for many businesses in 2009. Time will tell if this was a learning lesson or just a part of my hypothesis.

Meanwhile, in 2010..

We will see massive consolidation, from the bottom up. Typically, consolidation is from bigger fish eating smaller fish. In 2010, I see it going the other way.

In 2009, we saw the extinction of the shady businesses I’ve spotlighted for years. No need to speak about them anymore because they no longer exist. People that never were a solid business to begin with are now gone.

So now we’re looking at solid businesses. Speaking from experience here too. Trying to hit a million dollar revenue with a handful of employees is difficult. When at the end of the year you look at your low six or even five figure take, after all the hassle and sacrifices, the 9-5 life at $50,000 with benefits starts to look like a pretty good deal.

Don’t lie to yourself, we’ve all been there. And truth is, we feel that pain no matter how much higher revenue goals may be.

In 2010, I believe many of the larger MSPs will be taking up smaller MSPs for the benefit of having a seasoned veteran on their staff.

It is an inversion of the MSP pyramid (extremely business savvy personnel at the thin top with a wide base of lower cost technicians and helpdesk staff at the bottom) – changing to a wider assortment of business people on the top with very few or completely nonexistent technical staff (mostly outsourced) on the bottom.

As for my other predictions, all you’ve got to look at is our roadmap with ExchangeDefender and Own Web Now. The future is very bright but one thing remains: you have to fight for success, it won’t just happen.

I just deleted a rather long blog post.. here is the bottom line folks: we’re as open and happy to create integrations that will make you successful. We’ve spent a ton of money developing stuff on our own and will continue to do so – so when you see something available with one company but not another – take it up with the provider of that software, not me/OWN. Not getting anywhere? Switch! Seriously.

I don’t have the time for the drama anymore and I’m not getting in the middle or discussion either – I have my own product line to manage. My response from now on will be sending you a coupon to a competitive solution that has the features you’re looking for – but I will not break the law, contracts or agreements we have in place.

End.. of.. conversation.

2009 was an awesome year for Own Web Now and we spent like there was no tomorrow. We’ve attended more events, conferences, user groups and corporate trainings than ever in the history of the company.

With that in mind:

Did you miss us this year? If so, let me know where at vlad@vladville.com.

Our biggest marketing push of the year is underway but I’m already narrowing down our road schedule for 2010. We’re looking to spend more but spend less time on the road if you get my drift. This was our biggest year in marketing and we learned a few things:

1. Paid events are no longer worth sponsoring. IT industry is no stranger to liars but this year in particular people really relied on the “sponsored event” organizers for vacations. Events that pay or beg people to attend for free are off the road trip list.
2. Some folks clearly spend too much time traveling and too little working. We have a 3 figure deep list of people that have gone to 4 or more events this year.
3. We aren’t stupid – we actually track our ROI – you can coach your attendees to go be nice to blow smoke up sponsors ass but when no sales come up as a result of it the sponsorship money dries up too.

Our business is really firing on all cylinders and we want to keep it that way – so keep your eyes on your mailboxes (physical ones) through November and December. I’d really appreciate any help with the above. I hope some of you don’t misinterpret what this means to our partners – the less money we waste on the road front the more will come out the market development and business resource end. But not letting that one out the bag until you get our mail

I was looking at the financial breakdown of our company today, tracking some of the trends and trying to gain some confidence in the new business models, annual shift of responsibilities and the next huge growth curve we’re (hopefully) about to experience.

It’s hard. We’ve beaten all our estimates, revenues are at the highest they have ever been and profit almost hit a full percent over the last month which is sort of incredible when you consider that half of Europe pretty much shuts down from late June to late August.

So the good news is, we’re making a pile of money, we’re supporting our community, we are going to be at the major shows in August: CompTIA in Las Vegas, MSPU in Los Angeles, XChange in Washingon DC. So if you want to see us live, that’s where we’ll be.

We are also hiring a bunch of folks in both Dallas and the new Orlando office which fires up this Friday.

September is going to be huge for us too, 09/09/09 is a huuuuuuuuge day for Shockey Monkey but I’ve promised myself I will not talk about it until we freeze the code a month from now.

Life is good!!!

Yet, things continue to crack at the very bottom of the market. The S in SMB is slowly but surely eroding and I am a little concerned for my partners that make their living at that level. We have only one growing product in that segment (Exchange Hosting) which is getting a facelift in August.

We have been spending a lot of money on events and travel this year, and the new marketing plan we’ve kicked off is certainly giving us a leg up on the competition. But fighting the same enemy over the same set of customers, while the new fish die off, is not good for the future of the business.

So we change.

If you aren’t changing, if your business model is not significantly different today than it was 12 months ago… seriously, exactly WHAT are you doing?

Actual question, always welcome feedback at vlad@vladville.com

Once upon a time, in the long long ago, I was a broke college student. After series of tables that you would see broken in half during WWF fights, I actually sublet a furnished room in an apartment from a guy that took the summer off from school. This guy had a desk which would make most NOCs cry for – 8 feet wide, 10 feet tall with enough shelf room for at least 10 monitors. It was an incredible productivity tool.

I had a rather good summer (back then it meant I had a bank account with 4 digits in it) so I embarked on building a desk on my own. It was my first lesson as a business owner: stick to software. However, I managed to build it with a few friends and possibly spent more on polyurethane high gloss spray paint than I would if I just bought a table from the store.

That was about 10 years ago. And to this day, every little project at Own Web Now was in some shape, way or form designed or built on this desk. It is perhaps the biggest eyesore I own, and the only piece of furniture that I refuse to get rid of. Because no matter how ugly it may be to others, or how much better I could do, I’ve built nearly everything I have using this thing. To me, it’s the most valuable thing I own.

Now, I’ll give you a moment to wipe off that tear, call me a fag and send me an extra-large package of Midol to soothe my menstrual cramps.

Done? Great. Because there is more to this. It has to do with the attitude we take in life towards everything, personal and impersonal, tangible and invisible, relationships and contracts. Do you have any pride and sense of accomplishment in what you do?

Over the past two years I have failed in maintaining an executive office or doing business in Central Florida. Not only have I packed what was supposed to be just my place, but we also have an office a few towns over that I’m consolidating into the new OWN HQ for the purpose of executing the next stage in our business plan and a look beyond cloud services and the things we do today.

It’s not going to be easy. It’s also not going to be done in 8 hours a day. If we are to survive and thrive over the next 5 years we need to honestly look at ourselves and take some more pride in what we do. We need to do things that we haven’t done before.

So taking my desk as an example, there is pride in making something. This past week I took nearly everyone on my Orlando staff and we worked on the new office. Could we have hired half a dozen Mexicans and let them loose on it for a week? Absolutely. And we’d still have a ton of things that we were not happy with.

But you know what… everyone got to pick out their office color. Everything from Beige to Purple to Navel to yes, Jolly Green. When folks come in to work they aren’t sitting in a soul crushing cubicle, they are sitting in their office with a solid door so they can be comfortable and continue to build this great company.

And for what it’s worth, the doors were prepped, mounted and drilled by our own Hank Newman, guy that wrote among other things the ExchangeDefender Client Software Suite, Shockey Monkey Mobile and a few dozen things for the two products. On Tuesday I told him to go to hgtv.com and learn how to mount a door, on Wednesday the doors were up.

Next, we worked on the common area / conference room. I hope University of Florida College of Engineering doesn’t ask for our diplomas back.

So.. what had happened was…

The people that were in this suite before us were much like any other commercial space tenant. They did stuff on their own. Without regard for any engineering concepts whatsoever. There was apparently flood damage, and whatever surface they used to create a slanted wall had turned into a wet cardboard by the time we got there. Stripping paint and applying drywall compound on a slanted piece of dry cardboard is a recipe for disaster.

So at one point Carlos and I decided we needed to go for the whole new wall.

But what?

Ever seen Beautiful Mind? Ever taken a college calculus or physics course? Yep. We went to Home Depot and got ourselves 26’ of whiteboard space. We glued it to the carboard, nailed it in, fastened it with series of what is best described as creative construction.

And everyone was in on this.

Even the girls.

Even on the 3,285,239 “caulk” jokes that were shared during the sealing of crown moulding and associated boards.

And that’s what 26 feet of doodling dry-eraser surface space amounts to. And yes, the paint you see (blue) is the same shade as ownwebnow.com

Stupid? Probably. Financially unsound? You bet, we make far more than Handy Manny’s. Waste of money and time? Not at all.

I count on the people around me to build the best damn software and solutions out there. That’s how I get to keep my fat ass… fat. And I want them to take some pride in what we do and figure out what drive them and how they deal with problems and how much vision they have to build the invisible – which is our job.

As a result, I have a better idea how to better utilize my folks. Unfortunately, I also have an idea of who I need to let go of and who gets less capacity.

I firmly believe that people are who they are most of the time. You don’t have assholes that take weekends off to feed the hungry, nor do you have nice people passing out after fights in bars. You can’t run from yourself. How we work, what we expect from ourselves, personally and professionally, is our character and what we project to everyone we work with.

If you own a business, you can probably relate to people doing business with you on the account of a relationship. As that relationship transcends beyond just you, the HR decisions you make – good or bad – reflect your commitment to your promise and your corporate mission. Without it all, on all levels, it’s just a bunch of insincere web page fodder and people eventually catch on.

A few weeks ago a buddy of mine asked an open ended question: What makes you different? In a market where change is constant and companies range from deadbeats to broke to $30 billion a quarter, how are you positioning yourself and your company for success? Almost everyone has their one word or tagline if you will, as do I, but for a moment I’ll ignore the BS one I use for marketing and share the real one. I don’t happen to be immensely proud of it:

“Persistent ability to fail and try again.”

It doesn’t look good on a shirt. Or a company mission statement. Or as an introduction to a new client. However, looking back and looking forward, every step in the evolution of my company involved my brain crack slamming the wall at 200 mph, looking back at the carnage and finding a way to move it forward.

People are so afraid of failure that they absolutely, totally, positively have to be right. About everything. Ten years in the past, ten years in the future. And in their quest to be so sure and so positive and so firm in what they are doing, they are paralyzed. They never give themselves a chance to do anything and grow beyond where they are. Some are OK with being stuck in the rut and they treasure the life without change or challenge. Eventually, as with almost everything, they fail as well and move on. Look at the carnage in the IT industry over the past few years, look at the hundred year old financial firms that folded last year, look at governments, empires… everyone fails.

The key difference for me is that as the sky is falling down, I am learning all that I did wrong and how we got to the point that we’re at. Then I work to eliminate those mistakes and just try again.

Which brings me to the monkey wrangling circus. How do you train the people around you? Pass on all the great knowledge you’ve amassed and sit there in disappointment as they never live up to your expectations or their own potential? Or throw them in the fire and see if they burn or start coming up with ways not to be in that situation again?

So now that you know a little more about me, I need a favor. This is a room in our new office in downtown Orlando. What you are looking at is a shell of a few hundred square feet that we have absolutely no plans for. After Nicole and I hook up the Garage Band and reenact the scene from Risky Business we are a bit out of ideas. This office already has a room set aside for the video studio and there is even a podcast studio (foam padded broom closet that 2 obese geeks can fit in with a box of chocolate rolls, a 16 piece bucket and a mic).

So, what can we do with this room to help out our community and better serve the people we work with? I’d love your input. One thing is for sure though: the first few things we try we’ll fail at.

Ideas and comments welcome, or email vlad@vladville.com

Every now and then we come to the difficult decision, or a set of decisions, that might impact the way our partners work. This is my personal attempt, as the guy who is paying to make all this happen, to explain our situation and answer the questions before you’ve had a chance to form your opinion based on the first few keywords that upset you.

Later this month we (Own Web Now Corp) will be announcing our next generation integrations with Autotask, Connectwise and yes, even Shockey Monkey. This is a significant effort, a significant gesture – because it is in no way a part of our products functionality – to help you think about OWN a lot less and make a lot more money. I will go a step ahead and even say that what we are bringing to the integration picture (and beyond, in custom software for the platforms) is unlike anything available on the market… and if you’re an MSP you owe to give us a look.

On to the imaginary questions:

Q: How are we going to implement the integration? Can I have the white paper? Can you walk me through it?

There are two possible ways to get Own Web Now integrated with your PSA deployment:

Supported – Under this scenario we will offer you the whitepapers, create the integration workflows, queues, service boards, dialin numbers, offer best practices and support the integration when it breaks. This service will come at a reasonable one-time cost and will include training and ongoing best practices from others that use it.

Unsupported – Under this scenario we will send you the whitepapers and wish you the best of luck. This will be available free of charge and will include all the features of our integration suite. No support is available. If you choose this route you will not be able to upgrade to the supported product in the future. I know, I know, while it may make sense for you to try it on your own, fail, and then blame my staff into doing it for you for free while also training you to use your PSA, it is really not a fair scenario and not one I expect to see – you know exactly how much time goes into supporting, managing and billing the solution, so if there is even an ounce of question of whether our service is worth $500 then you have more serious questions to address.

The integration is available between us and Connectwise, Autotask and Shockey Monkey.

Q: We use ____ PSA? Will you integrate with that? When will you integrate with it?

No, we only integrate with Connectwise, Autotask and Shockey Monkey. We never (ever, ever) expect to integrate with anything else. If your product doesn’t contain Connectwise, Autotask or Shockey Monkey we will not integrate with it.

Q: Will the integration be different between different platforms?

While we have tried to bring the identical level of integration to all platforms, there are many factors prohibiting us from offering the same feature set across all platforms. Things contributing to differences between platforms can be attributed to the maturity of the API we are using to integrate with your platform, similarity of data types for services / contracts / products, vendors willingness to assist with problems, vendors restrictions of features across product lines.

Most importantly, our technical inability to create an integration point because of our unwillingness, incompetence and BSTDWOT (better “stuff” to do with our time). It’s not that we are bad people, it’s that your feature request will never generate enough money for us to justify writing the software in the first place.

Q: But..but..but… Vlad! If you can make this work with Autotask, why can’t I have it in Connectwise? Why does it work on the dedicated installation of Connectwise and not hosted? I have this feature in ConnectWise but I’m moving to Autotask Go to save money, I can just assume it will work the same right?

I don’t want to oversimplify this but here it goes: If you see a feature that you don’t have in Connectwise, it’s Arnie Bellini’s fault. If you see a feature you don’t have in Autotask, it’s Bob Godgart’s fault. If it’s a feature that you don’t have in Shockey Monkey then it’s coming in the next release.

Joke aside, see the above answer. The platforms are too different for us to offer the same feature set. If you see a feature in Connectwise that you need in Autotask or your business will implode, please switch to Connectwise. Or vice versa. Again, we are not bad people, we just need to explain that it’s not really apples to apples out there:

All OWN workflow and order management is designed on top of Shockey Monkey. That work is then ported to an extent to two different sync APIs. Some stuff will work with your PSA, some will not. That’s just the reality of software development.

Q: Is this just an elaborate ploy to sell more Shockey Monkey?

No. As a matter of fact, we will not take competitive orders for people looking to switch from Autotask or Connectwise. Truth is, we develop software for our platform and then extend it, within reason, to our partners platforms. We do not have any more advanced access to either platform than any other vendor, we are bound by the same legal and licensing as every other vendor and it’s a leveled playing field.

Q: When will you do ____?

Official answer will always be no. I cannot stress this enough, we are talking about software and features that save you money and make you more productive – I do not want to put more pressure on my staff or shift their focus from our tasks. We don’t write our software in India or China for $2/hr so the feature you are looking for will be available in the next release (maybe not the very next one)

This may sound harsh, and I wanted to give you an idea of the possible conflicts I see in this initiative so you can know where our line is drawn. We will do everything in the power to help out the people that see the value in this.

By all means we’re going to do everything in our power to give our partners an advantage with their PSA choice. All of the above will be made very pretty contract language with blog posts and screenshots to follow.

Another record month, amazing 2009 and the future has never looked better for OWN and ExchangeDefender. We’ve worked very hard to make this possible and huge credit goes to our partners who keep on helping us build the best damn offering out there. Over the years the part of community and involvement was mostly an individual effort, Vlad(tm), but as we started producing more documentation, the SPAM Show, more conference calls and developer feedback… well, we needed someone whose full time job would cover interaction with the community. Meet Jen.

Earlier this Spring we started producing the SPAM Show, many of which Jen has produced and edited. As we add a newsletter, magazine, syndication and few more things we needed someone to handle all the communications, scheduling, etc. You’ll be hearing and meeting Jen who will take over a bulk of my effort with goal of making our training and community outreach a constant. So many people have made SPAM Show (SBS Show prior to that) a core of their training and community participation that it really needed someone in charge of making it a consistent full time presence.

Jen will also be joining Nicole and Travis on the road more in the coming months. As Karl noted earlier, I am not qualified for the after-hours sessions that turn into competitions of who can drink the most and still make it back to their hotel room, so we made sure to hire only the best:

“I was so drunk that night I puked 6 times.”

I can’t wait for her to meet Chris Rue and Mark Crall.

So while I’m sure we’re violating some child labor laws with Travis and Jen, they should keep the spirit of Vladville on the road as I roll out of the scene on my walker into my thirties.