I’ve finally almost caught up with my email. That seems to be the perpetual state of my existence lately, I guess I’m famous. But almost, yes, almost got all my mail and issues all taken care of. Training up the new MonkeyForce has been a bitch, if I were a loser I’d probably just quit right now and say we’re not going to grow anymore but far too many of you know where I live and if the monkeys stop hitting delete there will be a pitchfork army at my door by the evening.

Phew, what a relief. Dodged e-myth prophecy once again!

And now that I finally have a breather, time to get myself way in over my head again! But more about that later, here is what you’re likely missing out on:

My good friends Wayne and Robbie are doing a huge webcast to introduce those of you down under to SBS and EBS.  Registration required but a free event. They will also be taking to the road and such. Own Web Now Corp is also doing a huge show of support for SBS with a new community, check back tomorrow. No, we still won’t sell it.

I got an invitation from my partner Dana Epp introducing the AuthAnvil v2 next week. Make sure you sign up for it – now much like ExchangeDefender and all the other serious stuff there are minimums – but if you work with OWN there aren’t – you can buy it one token at a time, $20 a month. I am sure I could put another pimpnote in here.

Someone out there ran a study and found out that SPAM gets 1 response per 12,500,000 messages. It also found I have a body of a prepubescent Chinese gymnastics champion. Please. We get dozens of calls a day with people questioning why their UPS invoice got stuck in the SPAM queue. Do you have an account with UPS? No. Do you ship with UPS? No. And you want the UPS Invoice from heyyou@retardibetyoullopenthatexecutableattachment.com delivered to you ASAP? Every company has exactly 1 idiot that will keep ExchangeDefender around as long as there is email.

Finally, a huge apology to Garett Chipman from TVG Consulting for still waiting on a quote from me. Second one in line to Stuart Selbst from SecureMyCompany for not getting the branded panel in place for the launch of the 50 cent / gig offsite backup. Apologies to the ConnectWise and Autotask families for the lagging SM integration projects, everyone waiting on Shockey Monkey, Vanderbilt, MonkeyForce, people waiting for the newsletter, James Cash, the angry UK villagers that didn’t get their invoices AGAIN and everyone else that stuck with me while I worked like a migrant fruit picker to staff and train this company through another growing pain point. Oh and Susan Bradley for working as my administrative assistant and getting me everything I asked for over the past month! Flowers are on the way.

What a lovely profane, filthy road it has been writing this blog for the past year. I would like to thank my friends Chris and Susanne, for helping with the notion that no matter how something sounded there was always a way to bring it to a new low.

It is November 4th and honestly, I’m out of ideas. I have pretty much accomplished my mission of pissing off everyone I can to the point that I can actually enjoy my life, family and business without anyone bugging me or waiting for me or thinking I’m a horrible person for not doing them a favor.

So tomorrow, this blog goes back to what it was prior to the Vlad, the worst person ever series that started last November.

Bit of background for anyone that cares: I have this personality flaw of extreme persistence and competitiveness which just so happened to be channeled in the wrong direction. I did just about everything I could to promote this blog and share the values that are important to me. It lead to a very wide readership through the blog itself, SBS Show, Shockey Monkey, Vladfire, etc. It lead to a ton of conference speaking engagements, focus groups, awards, etc. It also lead to a lot of personal anguish because there isn’t a sweat shop behind Vladville and people like to write very needy things when they need something. When and if I said no I got dragged through the dirt and had some filthy things said about me (far filthier than you’ll ever read on Vladville). I’ve singlehandedly taken more blame for Microsoft Online than even those guys did. I’ve been called everything from asshole to down right just the bad human being for not attending certain conferences their friends threw. I was “informed” that if I didn’t show up at certain meetings the person would do everything in their power to talk down my business and promote my competitors. The crown jewel of this came last year when I said I would be taking some time off to spend with my wife and my new baby. I think the series of articles written here over the past year have successfully separated me from enough “community” enough reporters trying to build a story and enough Microsoft staff looking for free publicity. Most people that have met me know that I’m a smartass and actually a very nice guy - and I made a mistake of allowing people to take advantage of that. So hopefully I have now built a firewall thick enough to make sure what I do and what I stand for doesn’t get involved in that. Don’t get me wrong, I am not hating on anyone that is trying to shamelessly whore themselves through those things to build a business, I totally respect and recommend that, it’s just that I’m not interested and I need to learn how to say no politely.

Royal Oak, MI, October 3, 2008:  Amy Babinchak and Eriq Neale, MS MVP’s, Authors and Speakers,  have teamed up in a new business venture to provide remote support services to IT professionals. By formalizing and centralizing the remote support services of highly skilled professionals across a wide range of products ThirdTier.net will be the place where IT professionals turn to when they need assistance to resolve that tough problem for their client. Third Tier will also offer SMB focused vendors the solution to the difficult problem of supporting a wide variety of skill sets in the SMB market space, thus making it easier for them to offer their products to small business customers.

· Central location for IT Professionals to contract experts on a wide variety of technologies to remotely assist in problem resolution.

· Experts providing vendors the solution to product support in the SMB market space.

….

indianinthebucket.com for bottom-feeding NOC services, thirdtier.net for the expert services.

Let’s face it, times are hard. Depending on where you are geographically, times are really hard to depressing. We’re doing incredibly well (September on course to be the biggest month on record ever) but we saw this thing coming and redid our portfolio in order to keep on growing amid the market meltdown. Truth is, when people have less and less money coming in you have to help them spend less money. The pie-in-the-sky productivity savings and workforce optimizations do not work in this market, people do not invest in their information technology, they try to make it fill the gap and even find ways to immediately reduce costs.

Features? Forget about it. Upgrades? Dream on. Migration with the promise of a new OS that hasn’t been battle tested with all LOBs with documented support? Lights out.

Roll in the crumbling financial markets, continued housing slide, election throwdowns..

If your big play for 2008-2009 fiscal year was SBS or EBS upgrades and deployments, you’re.. well, you know. ___ed. Insert your favorite expletive there.

Thankfully, Microsoft is being very nice to the MVP bunch and has invited us up to Redmond for a week of SBS training. I’ve decided to take the trip as well since a lot of my partners are in the SBS land and I know you folks are struggling. We are doing what we can at OWN to help with the cause because we know that as bad as things are right now the crisis always shakes out the weakest fruit and makes the marketplace better and more profitable for the rest of us. So we are doing what we can to provide the training, ramp up our partner community and give it a shot in the arm it needs.

But what always comes up with projects like this is that there is a demand that it be free. So I figured I’d open up just what the cost of any “free” venture is. Let’s assume that my time is worth nothing, that I will collect salary no matter what. The price of the free training is still:

Plane ticket: $600

Hotel: $1,300

Cab, tips, etc: $120

So even eliminating the enormous cost of spending time away from business for a week, the cost of free training is over $2K. Folks like to complain about how little comes out of the conferences in terms of free videos, training, recordings and blog posts. Folks want to feel like they are there. Truth of the matter is, there is no such thing as free - someone always pays - and even when folks do something for free it buys them no goodwill - most people go about business as usual and reward companies on a selection criteria that is void of community contributions. Some solutions, as I’ve noted here, have even died in the SMB space due to the lack of support. Is it fair? Of course, absolutely, but that explains the suckiness of the sharing that is seen from the top down. I suppose I’m just a dumbass, so you’ll see something pretty special come around next weekend. Stay tuned.

I have not exactly been celebrated for holding a very low opinion of most “We install manage and support SBS networks” shops, especially in the one man shop category. But it seems that my reigns as the SBS Public Enemy #1 are being taken by someone new so in spirit of helping they guy out from the public religious drubbing and eventual crucifixion at the Garbage Truck Drive Convention this October, I’d like to offer a slight SBS-atheist (”No, god did not create the SBS CEICW Wizard on the 8th day”) reality check to some of my dear friends and respected colleagues who seem to be living in a delusional dream state.

First, you are not going to beat Susan Bradley in an argument by calling her out on technical facts. She corrects Microsoft’s web sites and KB articles for living. The way to get under Susan’s skin is to say that she is “just a CPA” and should go read an ISA book by a good friend of mine. What happens is reminescent of the fabulous 80’s cartoon:

Fabulous secret powers were revealed to me the day I held aloft my magic sword and said:

I have the poooooooweeeeerrr!

She then proceeds to point her sword at her Mini which becomes a mighty wrecking ball and probably says: “Here is your button. Now bend over!!!!”

Susan is a dear friend so in a moment I will demonstrate how you get her to stand in front of Skull Mountain.

The real reason SBSers aren’t installing _______________________

The real reason is because most SBSers aren’t technology savvy people to begin with, most of them were barely able to manage their own workstation as the counter went from 1999 to 2000. Most are your garden variety hacks in multiple IT gadgets, enthusiasts if you will. They knew how to uninstall spyware. Maybe they knew how to connect a printer, install a switch and figure out through documentation what the difference between the WAN and LAN ports was.

Then the divine intelligent creator came around one day, we’ll call him Mike Marshall, and thought:

What if we created a roadshow that did nothing but take end users and consumers through the Microsoft’s product stack and do a quick and easy demo on our latest technology and teach these people how to click on wizards, add SharePoint parts, etc. Let’s break through this myth of IT being something that required training, certifications, experience, degrees or really any knowledge beyond the brain dump.

Then Mike went to a tall mountain where he talked to the burning bush that gave him “Microsoft Business Solution Accelerators” that would guide the horde of SBSers through the waters of wizards that you couldn’t just click Next on and actually hat to put in a IP address or a hostname.

Eventually these shows became the breeding ground for the Microsoft solution stack and training of people who wanted downloadable virtual images, walkthroughs and workshops. Microsoft all too happily obliged.

What we ended up with is a large but diminishing population of people who have no ability to manage a server and never should. Just a bunch of CPA’s (see, thats how it’s done n3wb writer) stabbing in the dark for a solution to their infrastructure problems.

Surely it’s more complicated than that?

Nope. Not at all. The SBS community played a big part in getting DIYers to ignore the world outside of SBS and to discard it as irrelevant. When I started hanging out in the SMB IT community around 2002-2003 you would see endless threads of people saying “Why not just install SBS” or “Pull that Windows 2003 server and install this SBSized wizarded thing”

People like me, who wrote technical articles and organized SBS groups, are partially to blame for this.

Bottom line

It’s not that these incompetent people are choosing to ignore Linux or Windows 2008 or Exchange 2007 or cloud solutions or ______. It is that they lack technical competence to do anything out of their comfort zone because they are the glorified script readers and button pushers and they reject the notion of anything that might force them to read Google, open up a book.

Just read all the outrage lately over the SBS support going to the callback model only.

Why do you think that is?

Because folks that don’t know what they are doing can easilly say it’s Microsoft’s fault and spend the rest of the day on the phone all while telling their clients that Microsoft is on the case.

But what about Microsoft’s side in all this? Why do you think they only chose SBS to be a callback platform? Because it takes a lot longer to troubleshoot an issue if your caller can’t figure out where the registry editor is or how to stop and start services. If you’ve never been on the receiving end of some of these calls then you’re missing out. What happens when you ask someone if the service is running they will try to read the entire services right panel, with descriptions and all to boot. “So are these sorted alphabetically? Can I just do a search?” <faceplant>

That can’t be, that simply just can’t be…

Welp, it is. I would venture to guess that upwards of the 90% of the SBS-or-death consulting market is comprised of just CPA’s, lawyers, the most savy IT people in the shop and not of actual certified engineers, people with IT degrees. I’m just basing that on the tier-1 questions we get in our support portal.

The SBSer elite doesn’t want to admit this is the case because they just refuse to believe it and they have no circumstantial evidence to point to. That’s because Johnny the SPF doesn’t go on the Internet to post a question. He doesn’t take the time to come out to the SBS user group. He doesn’t stand up and profess his issues at the TS2 event or Microsoft roadshow because he knows he is a fraud.

That’s the truth kids. It’s not that people are making bad business decisions or are just uninformed of other solutions or that they cheat their customers — it’s the fear that their inability will show up one day and they would be exposed for what they are — power-user way out of his comfort zone.

But is all this a necessarily bad thing? For the customers stuck with the SPFs, yes. But for the greater majority of clients, Microsoft and the SMB IT ecosystem this is a huge win. I suppose the greatest compliment one can pay to the designers of SBS is that they’ve designed a product that is used and managed by people that never should be touching that server to begin with.

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.