Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

This is a business post, as you can tell by the category, but I didn’t think that the title was appropriate for the Own Web Now Corp blog. So here goes the pitch, I’m interested in your feedback if you’re giving us money.

For years our business plan has been to offer high-quality SMB commodity services with a high degree of actual service. So instead of driving the cost of the service straight into the ground and making you pay through the nose for support or through lost business when we embarras you like my competitors do, we kept our pricing at levels where we can all make a profit but you get the benefit from a true partnership. Makes sense, right?

Since the startup and maybe until a year ago or so most resellers we dealt with were just happy to either get a check or pass the discount on to their customers and just move on. Not quite the case anymore. Today resellers are firmly embedded in the clients IT infrastructure, support, etc. They more you promise to those clients in terms of flat support costs and services the less margin you have to use to deal with services that will fail you – the services everyone needs like offsite backups, web hosting, email, virtual servers, dedicated servers, etc. OWNs are more reliable, thus cheaper overall. In the end, we grow much faster together.

But…

But times change.

I have been one of the most prominent pimps of the work Karl Palachuk has been doing. The books aren’t cheap – but I’ve yet to meet a person that wouldn’t have paid 10x as much after having read it.

Last weekend I was in LA and Erick took me to check out what Intelligent Enterprise is doing. I got to watch one of their MSPU bootcamps and.. well, wow. If you thought the book was something you’ve got to check that thing out. Erick actually let me tape one of the sections of the bootcamp and show me their entire practice.. I was kind of skeptical of the SMBer that would pay $3K for that training but having seen it live… again, wow, they got their s… together in a really big way, talk about an investment in getting to the next level.

Amy Luby also has an organization that spawned out of the SMB Managed Services yahoo group, that takes an online community approach to helping VARs scale up. I haven’t seen it yet but I keep on hearing good things about it.

So here is the point..

All of these things cost money, in some cases a lot of money. And they are well worth it. It is in Own Web Now Corp’s best interest to support these organizations because they produce content, training and support services to help smaller IT shops make it big, take things to the next level, get organized, etc. For example, we’re sponsoring SBS Migration’s ITPRO conference because its a pure SMB community event where people can come and exchange ideas without being harrased by vendors posing as presenters and forcing people to eat out in a parking lot. It just makes sense for my partner base.

The more embedded my partners become in the SMB they support, the better off OWN is because we get more business, more support, more feedback and in turn provide better services that make us all more money…

Get to it already..

…. so I’m really happy to pimp what others in the community are doing because it makes sense for everyone involved. Thus Vladfire, SBS Show, Vladville and the thousands and thousands of people that have partnered with us. I can tell you to go buy Karl’s book, but what if I actually gave you a cash incentive?

So here is the pitch I want your feedback on: Any discount offered on ExchangeDefender service would just go on to pay for something else. Maybe power this month, rent the next, etc. Most of you that are in the partner program and took the time to join our conference calls last night already know just what we’re up to in terms of the new support services and so on… but what if I gave you a true incentive to sign up for some of these SMB services by giving you a discount if you’re doing business with me AND you belong to their programs, books, camps, etc?

I want to give you a financial incentive to get training and stay involved in the community as you grow your business.

Look at it as my investment in your business by taking a part of the revenues you bring in and reinvesting them in education and training that would scale you to the point where you’d need even more of my services. Not that I don’t believe in that very thing today, but lets face it, money talks bull…. walks.

Good idea? Bad idea? You know where to let me know whats on your mind…