Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

I spent most of the day today cleaning up the place, in particular, the nightmare that is my home office. I think its more precise to describe it as my home “storage locker” as it seems to have degenerated into a semi-intelligent live mass that inhibits one of the rooms along with cables, media and mail – constantly moving, shifting and repositioning in the most perfect way to eliminate any chance of actually finding anything in it.

Today I decided I would go through the mess, brave the mess, and clean it all up. I came to a single conclusion:

We do way too much marketing.

Not we as in OWN, but we as in IT people. I’ve easilly scraped off at least $10–15,000 in swag and marketing off my beta bench alone. Not to mention the closet, the floors, the bookshelves. My god. It was everywhere. Media. USB connectors. SWAG. More backpacks than Noah could have used to transport all the animals. Tshirts. Stuff that looked like a software box but was a tshirt. Flyers. Flyers. Computer gadgets. Portfolios.

I think I’ve decided, today, on my own…. to do away with physical marketing. Remember, this is my home office. This is actually the little tiny percentage of crap I actually thought was interesting. I probably threw away 10x as much. And I bet you everyone is exactly the same, so it doesn’t make sense to blow money on things that will just be discarded. Why buy marketing collateral if people won’t pay attention to it. Might as well invest in some airline stocks

This came at a rather good time, just when we’re gearing up to update our semi-annual maketing and partner guide. That sucker is gonna be 100% electronic, at least based on the junk I threw out today.

It’s been a rough week at Vladville, perhaps the worst one I’ve had in quite some time. The core of the issue is really related to the growing pains, that as you grow you don’t look at certain areas of your business as much as you should. So, after todays house cleaning and random executions (hey, it’s Texas!) I’m starting to come to terms that the next week or two will be spent calling people, apologizing for the billing mistakes and finding a way to get paid for the services we rendered since roughly December. F…

Anyhow, I got to talk to one of my partners today and I tried to pitch him on the changes we’re making to streamine the business a little and make sure all the organization is done as efficiently as possible (implementing ShockeyMonkey correctly). He shared the following with me:

They are starting to call me daddy around here because I just run around baby sitting.

When we were done with the call I just wanted to thank him for the ideas and suggestions, when he shared what perhaps ought to come with a service mark. “Hey ___, thanks for the suggestions, I really appreciate it.”

 No problem, I’m full of bad ideas.

Now you can understand why I can’t share the name but you can expect to see those added to the Vladville lexicon: Jimmy Joe Bob Bait & Tacle Computers, SPF, Schragged, To the Gaypile!!!, DFO and DFWVF.