Last night was our monthly meeting for Orlando ITPRO and it was the first one in quite some time. We had a few hours of just plain conversations about a local data center that recently had a network down status for over 12 hours and the importance of limited SLAs when things go wildly out of your own control.

For my part I was talking about our network management for unmanaged servers. Say that five times fast. There are many networks and customers that do business with us where we are not the managed services provider (company too large, privacy issues, IT policies prohibiting external access) so things like logmein and VNC are out of question. So what tools do we use to both assure staff has no access to the passwords and critical authentication data but also that we keep our level of integrity when it comes to accessing remote systems?

TechSmith Jeng - Screen video capture to save sessions and store both for compliance and legal purposes but also send to the client for training purposes.

code4ward Royal TS - Royal TS is a consolidated remote desktop tool, looks and feels a lot like Microsoft SCVMM for virtual machines, except for managing multiple remote desktop sessions.

Accountability and flexibility… for free.

If you are in the IT space, you need to be watching this. Even if you don’t work with or against Microsoft, Microsoft is a major force in this business and you need to know what they are up to.

OwnWebNow and a few of our partners are doing a bit to bring you the first impressions live from the event. I’m personally using the new Own Web Now Partner Call podcast to interview my partners about what they are learning at WPC and what they are thinking about doing to become more successful with the info they learn.

Listen to the first Own Web Now Partner Call with Mark Crall. Mark talks about the changes to the partner program, changes to the SBSC and community engagement from Microsoft, free exam vouchers and quite a bit more about business and economy in Charlotte.

I will have more calls from WPC today, tomorrow and after that when they get all their thoughts together and figure their strategy out. One of my other partners from Dallas, Pat Dolan of TCC Technologies is doing some video from WPC as well, check it out. Here he is talking to Dave Sobel.

Damn CPA’s getting pwn3d all over the place. For the billionth time, when working with someone in the Accounting industry remind them:

“password” is not a good password. It doesn’t matter that you have an antivirus installed.

Now back to the grave dancing thing I do so well Poor Susan, serves her right for shipping me a flaming piss yellow hard drive.

It’s so scary when I’m in a good mood. It’s Friday, had like 8 support requests all day, our container just landed in Australia and the one for UK goes online Tuesday. ’tis good to be the king.

Every now and then I get that tap on the shoulder, someone wants to chat with me in a dark corner and ask if I am about to offend people with what I say, think, believe and do.

You see, it is incomprehensible to some that a person will speak honestly and firmly about a sensitive subject that all traditional marketing and PR training has told you to avoid. In every organization there exists a list of items that are not for discussion, not for disclosure, that should never be admitted or commented on. Customer facing staffers are trained to avoid discussion of those items, to manage the conversation, to steer it in a way and whenever something potentially sensitive comes up to just nod and “thank you for your feedback, I will escalate it to the person in charge which just so happens to live in the castle with the Lochness monster.”

This is the norm of the services industry, professional as well as vocational. Your cell phone company will give you the same runaround that your office cleaning crew supervisor will.

Somewhere along the way people just chose to make “courteous” a synonym for patronizing and deceitful. For the dictionary experts out there - it’s not.

So why do folks in this business find it so important to base their approach on the exact same path of least resistance? Because all their gurus are doing it, and all their suppliers are doing it too.

“Oh, you just started your business and don’t have any customers and you’re at this conference instead of back at home working? Oh, right, because you wanted to get some fresh air and exchange ideas instead of trying to build business.

Well, that is fantastic. That’s a GREAT idea. You know what else is a great idea? This $20,000 management tool. Listen, as you grow you need a solid management foundation and this will save you money!”

Substitute any product, service, solution up there, it’s always the same. Four step process to closing business with IT professionals:

1. Listen to the war story at full attention.
2. Congratulate them on their opinion, even reinforce.
3. Ask about their problems.
4. Explain how your product will solve all their problems, close.

The faster you can get them into the debt up to their eyeballs you can’t really be held accountable for your solution sucking and not living up to the promise because they owe you money.

This, believe it or not is the standard operating procedure that is actually very well received and respected!

So suffice to say I get a little miffed when someone wants to discuss my approach of not lying straight into peoples faces and instead telling them what they don’t want to hear.

It’s not my fault that you’re an SPF, it’s your problem that you aren’t building a business.

I have absolutely no problem saying that. I base it on working with thousands of IT solution providers and hearing every sob story and every wild IT solution dream scheme ever imagined. I work with some damn successful people too, and I try to offer some of that wisdom on this blog. It may not be a pleasant reading material for 99 out of 100 people, but that 1 guy may still have a shot.

I’m all about that 1%. Let’s be honest, business is tough. Management is tough. Marketing is tough, even when you have a ton of money. Business is not easy. You have to surround yourself with the people that will keep you on your toes and keep on adjusting you as you go along.

And now we come to the actual jist of this blog post: when you can talk openly you will from time to time get smacked back in your mouth and people will have no fear to reach out and talk to you. You get to learn, you get to grow, you get to see things coming from a mile away instead of waking up from your dream one day in the middle of the sea of reality. Is being brutally honest bad for business because it will discourage people from working with the crazy man or woman? No. Because you may turn off some, but you will open up discussions with thousands more and actually stand out in a sea of drones that do the exact same thing you do. Call it leadership, call it insanity, but give it a shot. If you keep on going to networking events and never make a buck from anything or anyone you meet there it’s a good indication that the best practices drivel you read isn’t paying off for you.

Maybe I’m all wrong on all of this, but least you’ll be able to sleep at night.

I’m going to try something new. I am going to write an eloquent post, in much the same way that I run my business and project my values through it.

There is a lot of discussion again about Dell being the fire-breathing dragon setting the lives and careers of small business professionals on fire and burning down the “channel bridge” they so often talk about building.

For those of you not familiar with this business allow me to sum it up for you:

Dell is a computer manufacturer whose motto is to go direct and compete in a market with tight margins and plenty of substitutes. Small business IT consultants are by nature middlemen that profit from service and product markups along with the overall solution design and deployment.

Both crowds are competing for the direct relationship with the customer because in the entire equation that is the most profitable variable. It is all about the customer.

Dell wins when they are able to sell their entire solution stack to the customer. Small business IT consultants win when they can sell their preferred solution stack to the customer, either because it fits better or earns them bigger margins.

Both pretend to want to do business with each other but neither is willing to give up their ground of owning that direct financial relationship with the customer.

So they lie to one another. Dell lies to the partner community by telling everyone they are very focused on the channel, that the entire company history and culture of “going direct” is going to flip on its back for a handful of SMB IT consultants. SMB IT consultants in return go back to the villified vendor for their computer equipment because they are the cheaper and the easiest of the computer manufacturers to purchase from due to their direct nature and service delivery.

The two coexist when its convenient and fight when nobody is watching.

So why is it a surprise to some that Dell is not a channel friendly company, and why is it a surprise to Dell that its channel partners are not feeling the love from their partners as it offers one critical SMB IT Consultant service after another? Onsite delivery, onsite repairs, proactive managed services, cloud services, etc?

Why is everyone so surprised that people in business talk from both sides of their mouth?

Because in business the only thing that matters is money and where you can make more of it. Wise business people take Dell at its face value, understand the number of the beast, understand the conflict and find a profitable way to work around it. Others, for whatever self-deprecating reason, choose to think they can change the status quo that has been around for over a decade in a very profitable way.

SMB IT consultants like to talk about ethics, about the importance of staying small, about the importance of local commerce and doing business within your community but I can tell you that statistically speaking SMB IT Consultants would rather do business with anyone but one of their own. I had never set out to build OWN by contributing to the community, I did so because I wanted to help build on a movement that helped OWN break through and grow by learning from peers. All the while I was writing Vladville guides, video blogging, SBS Show, I got a lot of atta-boy but in equal measure I got a lot of recommendations not to do what I do for free. I was messing up the commercial life of selling advice to the SMB IT community. I didn’t stop. Want to know what finally made me quit?

“Several hundred people, by my best account, would call me having heard of our great products and services and instead of giving me the business they said: “I love what you do for the community, but business is business.” That’s life I suppose, and I just helped train and promote the very people that took their money and gave it to my competitors.”

SMB IT consultants chose to run their business without emotion or gratitude.

There are no hard feelings over that here, OWN has made a lot of friends, I have made a lot of personal friends and despite or maybe in spite of all that I chose that we were going to run a professional business no matter what.

Dell chose the same. They go direct.

Words are just words, marketing and empty promises don’t generate revenue or pay salaries or grow businesses. They just keep gullible going for a little while longer, always falling back to the culture of the company.

If we all could admit to ourselves what our strengths and competencies are and focused on them instead of portraying what we wish we could be, we’d all be a lot better off. If we could focus on improving ourselves instead of criticizing those that don’t appear to be what their marketing implies that would be even better.

Monday, time for the weekly pep talk.

There are really only two things that piss me off about this blog and I’m pretty sure that you won’t be able to guess them. If you scroll through the comments you’ll find plenty of examples.

“Dude, you work too hard..”

Oh really Jimmy Joe Bob, have you discovered the f’n missing link between the hard work and success? What do you think, someone just gave me all this one day for the good dental hygiene? If I was born with all this knowledge then I sure wasted a lot of damn time in college, in webcasts, in seminars and on the road taking in conferences, training folks, giving speeches.

If you are waiting for someone to just “give it to you” then go stand in the unemployment line.

“It would be great if I could get all of that without having to work for it..”

I get a lot of this on the phone too.

Oh, I would love to have you just teach me step by step what needs to be done in each situation.

Oh, I don’t like to read, can you make a podcast about it?

Oh, I wish I could do that but I just don’t have the time, could you sum it up for me?

Oh, I know you write about that stuff all the time with over 2,500 posts on vladville.com but could you post it again because I have an attention span of a shit fly.

In my years on the road and working with the partners I’ve had the joy of meeting a few idiots. Maybe a handful. I’d say less than 50 in total. Considering how many people I know, thats nothing. Most people I work with are very smart. All these people have plans, have process, have ideas, are executing. What are they executing? Not a whole heck of a lot, judging by the fact that they have the same problems year-over-year and don’t seem to have made an inch worth of progress since the day I met them.

Why? Cause it’s hard. I have to keep on learning. Things keep changing. I’m too stressed, I can work only 3 days a week and if someone is rude to me I need a mini vacation.. Are you kidding me? Does that even work for four year olds? Why in the world would it work when you’re fourty? Hint: See point #1.

Everyone keeps on looking for a shortcut. There must be some process that you’re not in on. All the people that are growing and prospering must have some trick that they haven’t let you in in. Maybe I should just peer up with others who have as little clue as I do or maybe I should keep on revising my plan every two months?

There is no secret. There is no shortcut. There is no peer solution for lazy. There is no magic blog post to cure cluelessness. There is no lifestyle buffer between business ownership and unemployment.

You just aren’t working hard enough. Really, that’s all there is to it. Read all about it in my upcoming book “SMB ENTERPRISE WHITEPAPER”, available as a preorder for $49.95. Condensed for the busy professional on the go, just one page, just one paragraph.

Stop making excuses. Stop at looking at the grass on the other side of the fence. Stop thinking you’re special. Stop looking for motivation. Just take a huge break from all the things you are doing on the side to distract yourself from working on what you’re actually supposed to be working on.

And if the prospect of that brings you down, if you can’t find energy in what you do, if you aren’t up at 2am trying to get better at what you do and aren’t willing to work hard and be happy with the blessing that is the ability to build your own company and serve people in your own way then why the f… even bother pretending? For a set of steak knives?

It’s Monday. Are you here to work or not?

Yesterday’s article is really bringing a lot of attention, glad you liked it. To be honest, I am still very involved in the technical side of Own Web Now, especially the new generation of products, but I have stopped blogging about them because they brought in far too much tech support via email form that said “don’t email me your tech support issues, take them to Microsoft newsgroups”; But since Exchange 2007 won’t be touched by SBSers for quite some time I can talk about it without fear.

A while back someone said they would pay to have me teach about how I work this stuff, particularly the troubleshooting, deployment and management. I played it off politely and modestly, very much unlike vladville.com, but the reason why you don’t see these kinds of presentations in SMB and the reason you will not see these kinds of technical presentations in the SMB space is that at their very core they are both too simplistic and too complex for the audience. Contradiction? Not really. Most of this stuff is very simple once you know the basics and know where to look for.

Let me take you through the thinking process step by step, yesterdays post for example:

First, I checked the site through the web browser. This told me that the web server works, that the domain did not expire, that the DNS is properly pointed at the server. This effort took all of five seconds, but it did not send me down a path of troubleshooting a problem that does not exist. For example, there is no need to restart IIS - if it gave you an error code that means its working so you need to check its logs or App/System log for errors.

Second, usual suspects. Check that stores are mounted, check that the app pools are started, general service checks.

Third, event log - what is causing the actual problem. This is time consuming exactly once. That first time you realize what the problem is, what the solution is and how it gets solved.

That is so simplistic that it would take two minutes to explain, but if you were an SBSer and didn’t know the basics and just pushed wizards over and over this would be a 6 day overview covering everything from how the Internet works all the way to registering ASP.NET correctly.

Anyhow, I just wanted to offer an explanation for why you’re not seeing in-depth technical training in SMB — the basics are far too complex for beginners and the solutions are, dare I say it, obvious to anyone that understands the basics.

Funny how that is all that separates people making teens per hour as opposed to six figures a year, eh?

Serial entrepreneurs fail when it comes to making money with a technology business.

This is one often overlooked or hidden fact among your garden variety of business topics covered at technology conferences, particularly in SMB where most people are being attracted to thanks to no criteria, no barrier to entry and an overwhelmingly large market (and supposedly remote chance of grabbing a small share of it.)

But does it make sense to go into a technology business to make money if you aren’t good at whatever technical aspect your company is built on? Statistically speaking, no. Most people fail, some with a heavy debt, and a tiny fraction sells out at a large premium. The middle is astonishingly void.

Why is that? Generally because the profile of a business entrepreneur involves high risk, high stakes, high liquidity and high growth and unlimited potential and scale. Unfortunately for them, the successful technology business has immense infrastructure expenses that are highly insolvent - you’ve never seen a yard sale for Microsoft Volume Licensing and banged up plyboard furniture. On top of that, operations of a technology company tend to be executed by someone with a very high skill set, translating into a big salary and thus a big expense, and none of the assets are immediately useful because they require a lot of training, education and specialization. These obstacles in the lack of solvency and inability to rapidly scale headcount with demand are evident before you have even sold anything.

This is why most technology companies fold, even if they achieve some marginal degree of success and profitability.

Which brings me to the actual point of this blog post - if the above are the largest, near insurmountable, obstacles for someone with a ton of money to break into the technology business, why oh why are so many technology companies just dying to outsource their technical roles to someone else and assume the role of a technology consulting business advisor?

Maybe because the message being sent by those with vested interest in taking away technology roles from technology companies is the most advertised and pitched message - on fear that a larger company will break in, a fear that skills will not keep up, a fear that the opportunity is now and it is passing you by with every moment that your name is not drying in ink on an outsourcing contract. And many people foolishly fall for such a pitch because they are uncertain of their direction, they are afraid of what is coming down the pipe  and they swallow the blue pill of business acceleration but trade in their key competence in for it.

Here is a question you should ask: If this business is dying and I should not focus on it, then why are you trying so hard to get me to sign on the dotted line and hand you over the very thing that earned me my salary in the first place? When they try to misdirect and tell you that you really got the clients on the business merits a blah blah cut them off and say: What do you see in the future of your business, and if it is truly dying then why are you in it?

Hint: Some people have thought about their exit strategy and were able to figure out that they can sell off their revenue generating assets with a high technical dependency under contract while business agreements and terms are generally always up for negotiation and are valued much, much less.

I think the future of this business is in scale, in ability to reach everyone and be dynamic enough to gather your resources and seize on the opportunities that present themselves in each segment as each goes through its hot stage.

The future of your business is in the ability to offer more services and make more money, not in trying to massacre it into small pieces and end up with a ton of expensive support contracts. The question is can you trust someone who isn’t trying to sell you either one or do you base your decisions on colorful flyers. Perhaps you should just be trying to copy the very people that are doing just that much slightly better than you to afford a colorful flyer. In commerce, there is interest behind every move, try to find out what it is.

Chris went to NOLA this weekend. Made a presentation. People liked it a lot, one of my guys even texted me about it being the best presentation of the weekend. Turns out you can make quite a business if you use mobility to fit the SMB business, not check off boxes on the Microsoft sales brochure.

Chris then went to O’Briens and had a Hurricane. And a Hand Granade. Another. And Another. Sooner or later it was bound to produce some brain damage, manifested in willingness to help complete strangers be more successful in a role they are grossly unqualified to be in: SMB technology sales.

If you would like to support Chris, who is still living large off his SBS Show royalties, in another fruitful community effort to postpine the inevitable, here is a survey:

Chris sells Windows Mobile

Please don’t let my apathy towards the iPhone Roadkill and Microsoft get in a way of you filling out this survey and helping Chris try to turn the leaking oil tanker that is Microsoft’s business software. He is trying to make things better for us (and Microsoft) but Microsoft  is a company of numbers and statistics so if you’ve got the time and will, please, help a brother out.

Getting a lot of mail (and guilt) about not being in New Orleans this weekend for the awesome Swing Migration NOLA conference. I spoke at the event last year and really enjoyed the parties, believe me, I wish I could have made it. Ditto for the SMB Summit with SMBTN. I wish I could have made it. Hanging out with peers and exchanging ideas is what drives all of our businesses forward. It is also one of the more enjoyable parts of the business.

However, it is not the only or even close to the top of the most important parts of running a business.

In the long long ago, all Little Vlad wanted to do was to run the cool little bells and whistles that power an ISP. But nobody with their right mind would let me do that. So I started building one on my own. I went to college. I got a CS degree. I got a business degree. I designed a network. I designed software. I hired people. I cut deals. I worked my tail off. I learned from the best. I went and met and worked with everyone I could, all over the world.

I built a successful, profitable company.

And I am loving it. Honestly, I can’t imagine doing anything but what I do all day long. I get to deal with some of the most expensive and most complex infrastructure available. When I get bored of that, I go back and work on the software. When I get bored of that, I talk to my partners, get ideas, turn those ideas and feedback into something that makes everyone more successful. We all grow more.

To me, business success is in enjoying and being excited about your business.

Why would I want to spend time away from it? The conference and road life is hard. I hate being away from my home, my wife, my dog.. and now the baby too. Moreover, conferences have a dense political motive behind them where you are always offending people that you turn down. I have been fortunate enough to be recognized as both a business and technology leader that if I so choose I could spend 364 days a year on the road. Not just that, but the obligations of being a vendor whore - I am always being invited to be a part of this focus group, and that council and this advisory group and that exam review board and this conference planning committee and…

… and while all those are a tremendous honor and a blessing, I just love my life and my company too much to separate myself from it that much. I have been fortunate to meet so many of you on the road, gain some wonderful friendships, get a great reputation in this segment…. and I just hope you understand that as a single human being I can only do so much and be in so many places at once. It’s not a personal thing, it’s not even a business thing.. I just hope nobody is offended at that, even though the emails indicate otherwise.

If you’re pissed, have a drink in my name. One thing I can promise is that we’ll always be represented by someone in the community that will pick up the tab.