Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

I rarely blog about my actual work and what I truly do as a CEO. Too much of what I do is so unbelievable that I think most people would misread my blog posts as true ramblings of an insane man, not just progressively vulgar humor. But for your enjoyment, and for the entertainment of those soon to be laid off and considering a career in IT business ownership, here is my daily log:

Midnight – Friend/Partner keeps on bouncing his issues with ExchangeDefender directly to my email. His comments make it obvious that he has no idea how the product works, which on a level makes me think he ought not to be selling the product in the first place, but despite multiple requests to follow the protocol, he refuses to. Miscategorized SPAM is to be reported to spam@ownwebnow.com – he outright refuses to do so. Issues with the product support are answered by product support, https://support.ownwebnow.com, not the CEO. On top of which he hasn’t deployed ExchangeDefender correctly to begin with (wide open, no IP restrictions); For anyone else, I would have dropped all accounts instantly. But since he is a friend, I am wondering how far the friendship goes – remove accounts within 3 days or 7 days?

6 AM – Note from the analytics overnight job, and I quote: “It appears the system design is racist towards the Irish. Recipient restrictions cannot be enforced against the Irish with ‘ in their last name. Please discus with customer.” Well, that one is just going to go swimmingly well, “We need you to change your name because our system doesn’t like the name O’Maley.“

7 AM – Orange.co.uk, which appears to be the AOL of United Kingdom is totally broken and has 0 postmaster contacts. So far ignoring email, voicemail, phone calls and virtually every way of contacting them, both from their direct customers and from us. Frankly, I am pondering nullrouting their entire address space to see if we can get a phone call from someone over there.

9 AM – Still dealing with Blackberry and the exercise in futility that is their alliance program. I have been dealing with some 2-bit sales jerk for two weeks now over the name of our company so they can accept the NDA so they can tell us how to even begin offering their services. At this point we sit on 10 emails, 3 faxes, and two phone calls all trying to explain to a friggin Canadian that the name of the company is “OWN WEB NOW CORP” and there is no punctuation. 

9:20 AM – Letter from our international SIP carrier, notifying us that they are now in bankruptcy court and are discontinuing our service.

While writing this blog post, something just exploded outside of our building and all the banks around me have their alarms on, which is just the kind of soothing background noise I need on a difficult day.

I need to pick up some sort of a heroin or alcohol addiction. The downside is that I’m a wuss when it comes to liquor so it puts me to sleep, and I don’t like needles so that kind of kills the heroin track.

The joys of CEOdom. I think I’m going to take the advice from the bank alarm thats six blocks away and calmly walk downstairs to the art shop and hang out with the brothers and see if I can get a second hand high.

Hope this satisfies the curiosity of the people that ask how I come up with all the funny blog posts. You have to have a way to laugh at yourself or throwing yourself out of the window becomes a real option. Or you crack and go work for TS2 🙂

It’s what you’re hearing more and more these days. Rackspace is a direct competitor of ours, I have a lot of respect for their marketing and don’t have anything bad to say about them. They certainly are a leader in the hosting space.

It’s interesting to see how Rackspace came to prominence. It wasn’t through a distributed global network, it was not through a break-neck low cost hosting (as a matter of fact, they are among the most expensive), it wasn’t through any particularly innovative move – it was through service. They promised an answer on the first ring! Fanatical support!

Those things rock when everything is running ok.

They backfire when something goes wrong.

For example, one famous fish producing SPAM appliance maker sold our dumb ass customer $10,000 in equipment, most of it in warranty services and 24/7 coverage. The very first time we had a problem, the customer (let’s call him Rich for anonymity sake) called with a problem during early AM hours, the “24 hour support” guy told him that he has paged the lead engineer and will have an answer for him in the morning.

See, that’s not service. Promising 24 hour support ought to mean getting support activity around the clock. Not that the $10/hr guard on duty is answering the phones and dispatching you to queue voicemail.

Customers expect a human contact, an agent, a representative of their best interests in a large company. When that is the leading selling point – “the human” – and they don’t get a human to contact them when things go wrong, they get upset. Rightfully so, they bought a human, instead they got a PR junkie that shot a mass mail.

Marketing has to match the deliverable, no way around it.

Compounding the problem is that when our backs are against the wall, we tend to overreact. A few months ago one of our clients patched the box out of existence. The box cycled and was unbootable. Let’s call the guy Allen. Allen opened up the ticket saying his system was down and unbootable and the ticket was marked as urgent. My staff answered the ticket immediately, offering a free reimage and a restore from backup, or if Allen wanted us to work on the box and do a Windows repair, it would be $125.00 per hour for us to pursue the Windows Repair and we’d throw the prayer in for free.

Mind you, this process is there for a very good reason. When people blow up a production server, they want to be back, up and running within minutes. Maybe an hour. So we offer the recovery service for free. If they had something ultra critical that was not backed up, that must be restored to previous condition without reinstall, etc… then we can work on the box on the hourly fee and try everything we can. Business recovery and business continuity are the two different things.

Allen got pissed off. He cancelled both servers, ExchangeDefender, offsite backup, every service he had with us and I’m sure had quite a few four letter words for us too. In such situations, I don’t even bother trying to do any crisis management. We’ve betrayed the clients trust, we messed up, and keeping them on the service list is not a good idea because they just become bashers of your service. “Who do you use? Oh, I use OWN but they suck.”; But Allen was a friend, so I figured, what the heck, let me see if I can do something.

Quick guess, what do you think Allen was pissed off about? That his server went down? That we were going to charge him for the repairs?

Nope.

He was pissed off that the request was answered immediately, and that he was given only two options: reinstall or hourly.

Now, stepping back, ordinarily this guy never would have acted this way. When we see an urgent ticket pop up its equivalent of a five alarm fire – you want me to piss on it or call in the truck? You are down, you opened an urgent ticket – I will give you the best possible scenario I have!

Pretty damn good, that the staff replied right away and gave him the options we considered to be the best. But those were not the options he thought he could count on, he thought those were the only options and he had 0 recourse.

Now, we did give him a KVM, install new hardware, and CD into the system along with the media for the repairs, etc. So we definitely accommodated him, and it took a heck of a lot longer than what it would have taken us to get him back up and running. But that is what our client expected.

And the client is always right.

So when your promises don’t match your clients expectations, no matter how good you are, you “suck” by default.

The only thing that can moderate the “suck” is a human being, but human beings don’t scale and that is why the larger the organization, the less service oriented they become. If you work with a large org and their person moves.. who do you count on? Who do you look to in order to get the message?

There is one company that does this rather well (It’s gonna be cold in hell today) – quick, how many people from Apple do you know that communicate their message? That’s right, Steve Jobs. One guy. One web site. The most impressive marketing campaigns of the last decade.

Something to model I suppose. Or you could sell night guards and janitors answering phones 24/7. Your call 🙂

By now you’ve surely heard the assessment of the US economy from the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke which was basically a two hour oration summed up best in these words: “We’re fucked.” Not to be outdone, Captain Chokes On Pretzels wasn’t far behind to join in by saying he plans to beg congress for more money for a stimulus package that (quoting Henry Paulson, another overcompensated banker):

“What he believes is that we’ve got to do something that is robust. It’s going to be temporary and get money into the economy quickly. It’s going to be focused on consumers, individuals, families — putting money in their pocket. And it’s going to be focused on giving businesses the incentive to hire people, to create jobs.”

Now, I hope you endulge me for a moment.

For a second, suspend your disbelief, assume that some 29 year old with a business/engineering degree from a fine school (by NCAA standards) can get into an argument with the guys that got their PhD’s in economics by writing lengthy useless papers on the economic expansion of third world kingdoms that discovered oil.

Allow me to translate what these guys are planning:

“ We have about ten months until this is no longer our problem. So, let’s do a quick fix and hope nobody notices.

Let’s give people more money back from their W2’s. $800 or $1000, whatever.. let them buy an iPhone or a Big Mac or a new TV. Americans are morons anyhow, if they see a lot of people at Walmart they’ll assume it’s all good and we rock out! Let’s hope nobody notices the big chunk of that tax break not going to create jobs, but shifting more wealth to the producing country (China) and then they’ll buy our banks and stock price goes up and nobody is the wiser.”

We suffer from the quick fix amnesia in this country, a retarded fiscal and spending policy on the government and population sides alike, that is obsessed with the instant result, get rich quick, consumer is the king mindset.

I wish I could run my business like that. But it doesn’t work like that in reality. Cash does not stimulate anything other than spending. Perhaps for the wiser crowd, it stimulates a payoff of debt, but overall the money just goes down the drain.

Here is the big picture. Stop letting retards talk about the economy. I know its a great news bit to stick a camera in the face of someone at the gas pump and let them cry about how a 200% increase in gasoline is making them weary of the economic outlook while they are towing a new 42″ HDTV in their brand new Ford Explorer, Eddy Bauer Edition, to the house they can’t afford. Really, we need to hear more from such geniuses that obviously got the economic pulse firmly within their grasp.

Thank you for your attention, and for playing along. Let’s just drop the economics now and talk shop.. for this one we don’t need to pretend, I actually run a business.

I intend to hire nobody as a result of this fix. As a matter of fact, I am more likely to focus on outsourcing the bump in the demand it may generate because you already told me this is just a quick influx that is going to end in a month. How stupid do you think I am?

Even if I were to hire someone, I would look to a temp agency with a slight premium, what kind of an idiot hires someone knowing they will be gone in a month, then fired resulting in an exponential increase to our unemployment insurance.

No way.

Meanwhile, for the labor I actually do need, I am left choosing between tweedledee and the tweedledumb with less education than the guy that plastered the drywall in my office.

What should they do

Economic program benefits are not instant. They are not a quick fix. The business that are building and growing in USA today are highly skilled, highly specialized roles / organizations. We can’t staff those. Why? Nobody can afford to go to college because since I left in 2002, the public school education cost has quadrupled in Florida. My state finances its education system through the legalized gambling (by the way, thank you for putting me through UF!) giving young people an option of getting into a get rich quick unskilled labor force of realtors, mortgage brokers, ITT flunkies and medical halfwits… instead of making it dead easy to get into college and sustain a high five or six figure salary for 30-40 years.

Is it any surprise our country and economy is going into the toilet when its in the hands of people that guide its expansion in the same way the elderly smoker in front of a slot machine does when he gets a small payoff – Ooo, 10 quarters, quick, let me put it back in and lose it all.

Update: In case it wasn’t clear enough, I hope someone in DC wakes up and says “Economic incentives need a long term return, so instead of feeding your debt-crack habit of cash back for new gadgets, we are going to give you an incentive to earn more money. Starting tomorrow, all community college education is free and you will get an incentive for completing a four year degree in a field that our country can benefit from in the long term. We’re up for a few tough years as our work force accepts that we’re in 21st century and we don’t intend to be a recycling country for cheap crap from China and only work in the consumer sector.”