This blog, for all intents and purposes, is community service. You’re by no means obligated to subscribe to it, or support it’s sponsors, yet many, many, many of you do. I’ve thanked many of you in person and on the blog, but the words thank you are these days just a matter of politeness, not necessarily something that expresses ones true gratitude. 

So allow me to do the latter: Today I drove an unreasonably expensive car to the airport where my son and I got on a plane and flew to Disneyland for a few days. He watched a few movies on the iPad, played a game on the iPhone, looked at pics of his mom and his dog. Right now he is standing in a window, watching Disney’s World of Color. As a father, this is perhaps the greatest gift I can ever give my son: that of utter amazement and happiness. When all the problems in the world melt away and you’re left with your mouth open gazing at something that just seems unbelievable.

Every day a ton of you choose to part with your money and build your business at Own Web Now. There are far more of you than I’ll ever get to meet or thank in person for enabling me what I am able to do for my family. Likewise, you will never meet the many people at Own Web Now, whose families are supported by your business. I do want you to know that we wake up each and every day and go to work to make Internet suck just that little less – be it by killing SPAM or making Exchange do the impossible.

I just want all of you who don’t actually know me (and only know of the Vlad’s Ferrari Fund) to know how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me personally by trusting us with your networks and giving us your money – and what I, as the CEO, do with it. For the most part, it’s making the little guy in the picture above happy.

I’d just like to take a moment to thank so many of you that have taken the time to send me some constructive feedback on what you’re contemplating, fearing and considering on your journey to the cloud – or why you’re not making one at all – it’s been extremely valuable.

I’ve already added four things that were previously not on the map.

I really, really, really appreciate all the support. It should be out very shortly, first as an ebook, second as a dead tree and eventually audio book if enough people happen to be interested in either of the first two.

Sad to say it, but for the time being I have enabled comment moderation on Vladville. If you post a comment, it will not immediately show up.

The recent series of DoaSS has increased the traffic and pushed Vladville earnings into a new level never seen before – not really into the figures sufficient for retirement So for the time being, I don’t have the hours to upgrade WordPress and it’s new SPAM filtering so I’m flipping the moderation to on. Since 99.999% of you choose to email me (and I love it: vlad@vladville.com) or Tweet (@vladmazek) or Facebook (same email) this hopefully will not be a big deal. Comments will reopen as soon as I get the antispam update together.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie are some of the finest plays in the American history. Every high school kid is forced to read, analyze and write reports about these plays. Why? Looking at tragedies and analyzing how characters react to them and cope with loss/change is supposed to teach us valuable lessons about how to handle little things that life throws at us.

Next week I will be going on a vacation. And you’re not going to hear much from me. I know, I know, I’ve said this before but Katie is taking us on a cruise in the Bermuda triangle and now that we own yet another sports car I need to be on my best behavior.

But I am leaving you with a few queued blog posts on the “Death of the Services Salesman” in particular how the market developments and industry trends are making the “small” technology disappear.

I hope you enjoy it.

I also hope that you consider the arguments and the facts at their face value. Those posts are not written for attention or to pad the McDonalds Fry Boy salary Google Adsense brings from Vladville. I write them because as a leader in this space, I have a responsibility to offer an opinion for discussion. Something that has served my company very well through the years and I believe will make a difference in the future. If you read these as your obituary, that is your choice, I am hopeful that many will look at these facts – wake up – and be around to talk about it 10 years from now.

Thanks to all you do for me, Own Web Now, the Vlad Ferrari Fund and enjoy!

I’ve been bombarded by requests both by phone and email about how everyone is doing. If I can be forward enough to guess, it’s because so many are seeing news of things going great for large software/ hardware – yet their businesses are not seeing anything near those numbers despite the increased interest.

I’ll make this brief because I am in a line for an ipad with a few hundred people and indeed, things are better – just not for MSP’s.

I’ve covered this before, but I’ll say it again: “Economy is never bad for things that people want to buy.”

In 2008 we started seeing a huge push to the cloud as customers rejected large and long term investments. The cloud opportunity was awesome. People downsized, cut spending – and yes in 2010 they are interested – just not spending at 2008 levels. And don’t kid yourself, they won’t again.

Now we are in 2010 and the clown truck has pulled up – your usual trunk slammers and experts are all knowing cloud experts now and the competition is fierce there now too so there goes another opportunity.

The reality of the business is that only first movers and eventual efficiency (read: low cost) survive and thrive. The rest (and I’m assuming that IT services are not luxuries or highly specialized/ skilled things anymore) die a slow or mediocre death.

2010 cloud expert is the 2008 MSP expert which is the 2006 SBSer.

What’s next is the big question.

One that you likely won’t find on a blog. Unless it’s yours.

And frankly, for many it doesn’t matter – you could still make money in any of the lapsed technological evolutions – the mirror match is just the question about how long you will be willing to wake up and go to work as an underpaid dinosaur.

No Vlad, tell me how you really feel…

Arnie recently told me that most people see me as an angry guy by reading the blunt comments on this blog. I get this in person all the time – “Vlad, you are nothing like I expected you to be.” Perhaps I’ll start a blog to blow sunshine up my fans asses as they march their way out of business – there are enough people out there that do that already though.

The reason people keep on coming back to this blog in such massive numbers is because there is very little veiled or shielded or polished or otherwise politically correct stuff to entertain you on Vladville. Every word you read here is exactly what I have on my mind. Really, really. And at the end of the day, if you find this abusive, I truly feel that you are the person in control of your destiny (life, business) through the decisions you make. If you read this blog, feel like it’s written to beat you down, you ignore it and you fail – thats your choice. I don’t write it to beat people down. I write it because I honestly believe that what I write here and so many people pick up on it and recognize the stupid things they do in their life/business. Do you REALLY think that with over 40,000 weekly visitors I am really writing it to you, yes you?

Either you’re in charge or you’re not. Either you’re going to do something about things or you’re going to sit back. Leadership is not something assigned, it’s something you just do and what you are. So love it or leave it folks, in the meantime this is one of the few places you can actually listen to a CEO of a multimillion dollar company and see how it’s done – even if I’m dead wrong about it.

So I sat on this topic for a few days now and ran it past several of my peers in the business that all got their shops started with their own money and blew them up into successful multimillion dollar companies all on their own without help.

The last post (“Success”) generated the most commentary… ever… for any post ever published on Vladville.

Almost all of the emails were quite gut wrenching, some even desperate, pleas for help. Lot’s of people that are in the SMB IT are struggling and wondering if this is just the time to close up shop, sell or carry on. Ouch.

I have not yet responded to the emails because almost all of them were quite personal and as much as I love this Vladville persona, there is a real Vlad behind it and I just don’t know how to help you address the same problems that I’ve had to figure out in the past. As soon as I come up with something coherent to say, I will post it here.

In the meantime, try to be honest and realistic – not every great idea pans out, not everything can be fixed with money or effort alone. Everyone has problems. You have to focus on just being a little bit better with each passing day, establish a support system and find partners because no matter what you’re doing, it’s better when others go along with it with you.

Keep your head up.

Earlier today I was sitting at lunch with the guys from work talking about the new line of business we’ll be launching this year and the discussion turned to certifications:

Vlad: I remember a long time ago when I was taking my first Microsoft MCSE exams and dealing with questions like: “You have an active directory with sites named AMSTERDAM, LONDON, BOSTON and SEATTLE…” and I thought to myself – I will never have to deal with a global scenario!!!!”

Everyone laughed. Then everyone groaned – because that’s what we have on our hands – a growing global company.

It wasn’t that long ago that Pablo and I sat in a garage making jokes about what it would be like to build a company and a network this large – while we watched gcc fail repeatedly on a Gateway 386 DX. Every now and then I look at my life and can’t even imagine what I did right to be this lucky. This morning I was planning a short day because I thought my flight departed earlier than it actually did. What did I do with my spare time? I went to buy a Porsche at lunch.

I am not telling you this to brag, I am telling you all this because I know many of you are dealing with a tough economy, tough job market, tough competition and the world is not a very happy place. But one thing I can tell you is that if you put up with adversity, welcome it and do all you can to address the challenges life gives you – you will succeed.

Nobody will give you anything – you’ve got to fight for what you want. You constantly have to bite off more than you can chew and constantly overdeliver. You gotta fight to improve your game every single day. And when you do, the rewards are more than what you even expected. That’s the difference between the average – where everyone is – and the good stuff.

I for one have been blessed with a lot of luck and even more Mountain Dew – and a wonderful wife that makes each day better than the previous and feeds my insanity.

Forget the negativity, don’t dwell on your woes, focus on what you want and go for it.

Back from my first big (3 days) conference trip of the year, I’m full of ideas and suggestions that I can’t wait to share with the team and see how we can implement them quickly. Here are a couple of the thoughts that are on my mind:

My buddy Howard Cunningham (www.macrollc.com) is having back surgery this week. Howard is perhaps the most valuable employee of Own Web Now and ConnectWise while not receiving a $1 paycheck from either company All around a really great guy and a tremendous resource for the SMB community. If you’ve had a pleasure of working or talking with Howard I hope you pull for him this week.

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On an entirely different note, when you live in a public eye and share your life with people, you have to have a sense of humor. When you don’t – and you confront people with it – that tends to backfire and spread like fire through people who both like and dislike you. End result: instead of laughing at a joke, you become a joke. It’s really sad to see but it is a reminder that for all it’s benefits this “social networking” stuff isn’t just a great tool but the real people behind it have real feelings and if you can’t handle that, blogging / twittering / facebooking / etc probably is not for you.

…

The missing piece is the track record. Everyone has a great idea now and then. It’s not that difficult to raise a hand, buy some PR and say you’re the next big thing. For each brilliant innovation there are dozens of existing things that are already successful at it. The difference between everything that looks pretty much the same is the track record: because everyone has ideas, few people can actually show results.

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Don’t ask me to talk about disposable email addresses. Seriously, even gmail.com supports an on-demand email address: vmazek+whateveryouwant@gmail.com – you can even find out who shared it with someone else using the search and see how many times it was reported. And I understand that some of you think this is the coolest thing since sliced bread and love that we too support it, I am not going to make it a part of my presentation. Sorry. I can’t stand in front of people for half an hour and talk to them about SOX, SEC, HIPAA, explaining the policy management, policy violation notifications, traffic shaping, routing and business continuity, blah blah blah… oh, and by the way, just append a dot at an email address to bypass all that shit. Maybe if I didn’t have encryption, web filtering, web sharing, LiveArchive, compliance archiving or routing policies to speak of I would mention it but in the meantime, if you need your viagra orders to get by the spam filters just do everyone a bit of common sense and don’t use your business account for it

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// By the way, the rant above sounds much better when I’m yelling it out loud at Brian

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Redeye flights suck

I hope Santa got you what you wanted and that the holidays are peaceful and joyful.

Looking forward to 2010!

Earlier this morning I battled fog, two accident delays, leaving one of my bags at home and general sleepiness on my way to the airport. I made it on time, and proceeded to spend the next 50 minutes in line as I missed my flight. I got an hours worth of reflecting on how I could fail so bad – trip with potentially millions of dollars on the line, arranged and booked weeks in advance – all blown because I didn’t pack a carryon.

Suffice to say, I got my faith and my work ethic tested. On my drive back to work today I played all the easy ways I could potentially hold my meetings without leaving town. Fourteen hours of travel for what is likely less than 8 hours of meetings. Welcome to the top of the inverted time productivity pyramid.

The Easy Button

The easiest thing I could have done is gone home and figured out a way to do this over the Internet. But 13 hours later, I am typing this blog post about 30,000 ft over the Gulf of Mexico on my way to LAX. I have one thing I’d like to say: you have to keep on fighting.

Keep Fighting

Every day you wake up, you have a choice. Work hard or take it easy. This morning I didn’t have to wake up at 4. I didn’t have to fight the traffic. I didn’t have to stay in line. I didn’t have to stand in the second line. I certainly didn’t have to stay in the third line after they told me I missed my flight. I didn’t have to make the flight today, or at all. I could have gone home to scrub the brake dust off my new Michelin P0’s. But I went to work. I worked all day. And after this brief break, I will put in about 4 hours of work before I get to Los Angeles. I don’t have to do this, I have a pretty good life – but I have a pretty good life because I do this. It’s just who I am. I don’t know of anyone that is successful and doesn’t have the same work ethic. So if you disagree, you and The 4 Hour Workweek can kiss my big black ass.

…

I have spent the past three weeks talking to partners exclusively. I have been there to encourage, educate, motivate and direct people on how they can take what we’ve created and build it into a virtual cloud goldmine. One overwhelming impression that I’m left with is that most of the people will not make it: and I base that on the endless excuses I got for why things aren’t going the way they should. And in almost every case, they claimed it was not their fault! The amount of bull I have been subjected to would get a 15 year old smacked off the chair in a guidance counselors office for failing PE, I don’t even know the relative translation of that for the grown men and women that drive the small business engine of the world. Here are some of the choice ones:

“Nobody is buying anything until the first”

Are you friggin kidding me? Who are you selling technology solutions to? Welfare recipients? Are they paying for monitoring with food stamps? Everyone is buying, every day. Do you really want to waste my time trying to excuse yourself for leaving money on the table and not asking for the close today?

One day I hope to become successful enough to just turn people away because it’s not the right time of the month/day/year to have a sales call.

“We are taking December off”

Oh yeah, how was 2009? Well, good that you’re rewarding that type of a success with some hard earned time off so you can start fresh on January 1st.. when they are going to be solicited by everyone else on earth.

This type of behavior infuriates me, especially in the SMB sector. Listen: the only time of the year that you will get a sit or an ear of a decision maker in the midmarket is now. Now that they are likely at the home office. Now that they are at parties. Now that they are in a good and cheerful mood. Now is the time to call. The rest of the year you will have the pleasure of talking to their voicemail or their receptionist as you sink to the bottom of the “annoying salesperson” pile.

Think about it: Would you hire someone that took an entire month off?

“We are going to do that in 2010”

Let me say this very slowly and eloquently so that I don’t confuse you with big words: Nothing will change on January 1st. Nothing that is in your favor at least. If you are not able to get your message across tomorrow, you will not be able to get it across next month or next year. It’s really quite as simple as that. You (probably) aren’t an executive at a billion dollar company – don’t act like one. What are you doing this week? Getting a head start on filling out your 10K because you’re not going to move your business one inch forward until Dec 31st?

Every day is an opportunity to do something great.

It’s not easy.

I get a lot of flack about the Always be Pimping moto but right now I am 30,000 feet above ground arranging two webinars for Wednesday, one that got organized two hours ago while I was going through the airport security. Every day is an opportunity to get to the next level. And it’s something that’s been driving me for the past 12 years.

Do likewise.