Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog | Vlad Mazek on IT, Business and Technology

Help me Vlad, I can’t make money in the cloud

Posted: 8:58 pm
November 29, 2012

Uncategorized
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Recently they let me escape the office and go abroad to a trade show where I got to interact with the indigenous population and hear about their problems and challenges. For the billionth time on Vladville: what your clients are buying is you.

Every day I get to talk to a bunch of people who don’t understand the cloud or even worse, willingly buy into the marketing hype that surrounds it. Instead on focusing on the solution, folks focus on the product, features and tons of other stuff that their clients both don’t care about and don’t understand.

Quick math question: What is the value of something I don’t understand, don’t care about and don’t think I need? Exactly.

Longer math question: Do you often find yourself in your office, bored, with nothing better to do? Or perhaps you’re just slammed dealing with orders, clients and tons to be done? In either situation, I’m guessing that talking to someone that is trying to tell you something is pretty much dead last on the list of things you would want to do. Now flip the table as a service provider trying to sell the cloud – someone has just decided to give you their time to sell them the cloud. Why? What have you heard about the cloud? What is driving the decision? Is everyone that is making this decision here? What are your needs and major goals with the move to the cloud?

They are still sitting there, still listening to you and still answering your questions. Which goes against just about all the sales training you’ll ever get – where you’re supposed to drown your prospect with information, confidence, pressure them to close and so on.

If time is money… What do you do for a living again?

If your clients and prospects wanted Gmail or Office 365, trust me, they wouldn’t be talking to you. They would have signed up and would have been working not sitting around chatting about stuff you want to sell them that they don’t care about.

That said, how do you make money on things you cannot charge for?

The answer is simple. Our company provides service and support end-to-end and we have several platforms that would meet your requirements. Here are the options and they vary but our support service is $20 per month per user. Whichever platform you choose is up to you and I’ll demo the few but we handle your onboarding, training, support, backups, escalation, implementation, upgrades and virtually all other IT services related to the cloud. Yes, the small monthly fee you saw advertised covers the cloud service but there is a lot more to using it effectively and we’ll make sure we take care of that while you do what you love.

Bam. Done. You’ve just made the money in the cloud.

The wiser alternative is of course to design your own bundle with your own tiers and actually structure the solution in a way that maximizes your potential revenue. But if you suck at sales and you’re dealing with clients that are more business savvy and want to be in control.. this is a way to do all that other stuff that the cloud doesn’t.

While yes the cloud is in certain cases cheaper, easier, more reliable, more scalable and more effective and backed better financially – it is only a part of the puzzle – and IT Solution Providers complete that puzzle with the services to consume the cloud properly.

Sure, smaller businesses may not need a partner for IT and may just DIY it. Larger companies don’t have dedicated IT staff and when there is a problem they either deal with it themselves or the problem cripples the business.

The only questions the prospective client has to ask themselves is if they value your service and if they trust you to do the job. It’s really no different than their hiring process for any other role – full time, part time, contractor or intern – is your task valuable to them and do they trust you to do it. So long as you can sell yourself on that – and not the irrelevant stuff – it doesn’t matter who bills, how, when and where – or how much.

Like that? Hop on over here and we’ll teach you the rest.

P.S. Shockey Monkey 3 is coming in December.

Shockey Monkey New World

Posted: 1:24 pm
November 14, 2012

Shockey Monkey
2 Comments

The way people run and manage their businesses has changed fundamentally over the past decade with the introduction of new technology. First-run CRM solutions looked little more than digital forms of the existing paper inefficiencies with Microsoft even adding a product to it’s Office flagship to do nothing but generate digital forms. Yes, it sold a lot of software but never really had much impact in the way business is being done because nothing was connected in a way that involved senior management and transparency through the layers of employees or communicated any level of standards for how business was to be done.

Everyone made their own thing up until they hit the limitations and then they went elsewhere – without senior management oversight – the whole thing was just allowed to flop.

There you have it.. The brief history of SMB business management solutions, according to Vlad Smile

Shockey Monkey is perhaps the one area of my business where I’m not looking at the past or what has been built in the management space for inspiration where people are forced to use the software they don’t like… but at the solutions that people love that have an element of motivation.

As a business owner/manager, critical part of the job is to motivate your employees to do better than their best so that you don’t have to do their jobs for them.

With that, I’m extending the first of many Shockey Monkey 3 invitations to you:

Thursday, Noon EST

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/440236337

For example, consider the following:

This is my Fitbit report which basically monitors my physical activity and tells me when I have days that I haven’t done enough. I could just ignore it, take it off, throw it away.. yet, I need to lose weight so I can post better times on the bike so I can do the full Ironman. It lets me set simple reports and metrics that allow me to go from fatass CEO to an Ironman finisher.

Work, or really any level of effort, is incentivized in much the same way. The smaller the small business, the less knowledge it has of the millions of hours that have been spent studying management, motivation, incentives. Most small business owners don’t happen to be business college graduates or MBA holders – and even those of us with those credentials make more mistakes than we’re willing to admit.

But I think we can all agree that there needs to be a level of accountability across the organization.

We can also agree that there are significant benefits to business transparency.

After all, if the employee isn’t performing is it their fault or the fault of the management that has not incentivized them properly? Does the employee simply not care about doing a good job or do they not understand that doing a good job leads to rewards?

You could get really cynical…

And say that the awards and the screenshot above are fantastic for 5 year olds trying to collect badges for their Xbox avatar.. or to unlock a hidden feature in Angry Birds.

Yet if you can agree that you benefit from transparency and your staff buying into the platform and using a combined common set of metrics.. then a visual indicator of progress is important. Rewarding a user for using more than one module (Support and CRM) or creating X number of leads or Y number of opportunities or creating a report.. gives them visual indication of the progress that you want them making with your tool. If there is a bonus at the end of the rainbow, more people would buy into the process more and standardize on the way business communication gets done.

I can teach you what I want you to do and I can force you to use a platform.. but if I want you to embrace it more than I’m forcing you to.. then all I need to do is slap an incentive on the end of the trail of awards and let you motivate yourself.

Little candy along the way can’t hurt.

-Vlad

Work Sucks

Posted: 3:33 pm
November 12, 2012

Boss
1 Comment

Work sucks.. but someone has to do it. The more you care about something, the harder you will have to work. As I mentioned last night on my Facebook:

Problem with a lot of good advice is that someone still has to do a lot of hard work… and most people don’t want to.

This is the impression I’m left with after a few days of intensely interacting with partners of all walks of life and all levels of financial and lifestyle success. I’ll make this brief:

It doesn’t really matter that you have the best product. Or the best practices. Or the best people or the most money.. What matters is that you have a work ethic and a sense of awareness – for when you are wrong, for when you’re stupid and for when you win. People with the best products fail too. Rich people end up in the poor house. So long as you’re willing to wake up each day and make tomorrow just a little bit better than today and understand nothing happens overnight – you’ll do great.

My legacy in the business world is completely aside from my success as a businessman.

My success in business is directly attributable to the hard work, sacrifice and incredible streak of luck. As you’ve seen on this blog through the years, shit happens to me too (a lot), but my unwillingness to give up is what keeps me and my team moving forward. We didn’t get here overnight – it took over 15 years – and we’re still nowhere near perfect. But we work much harder because our objective is perfection – not an IPO or sale to someone or an exit strategy that I see so many of you worrying about. Worry about your clients, the rest will take care of itself! Screw them and you won’t have to worry about anything else.

My legacy is that I’ve given thousands of people the opportunity to better manage their IT business with Shockey Monkey. Much like Microsoft and many others helped me. I didn’t build this company on my own and I wanted to make sure that we have at least some piece of our non-transactional business contribute to the growth of the industry and it’s people.

The many lessons I’ve learned and the mistakes that took me there are on this blog in black and white. The only advice I have looking back is that if you’re excited and expecting it to be easy… business ownership is not for you. Having a job is not a failure and there are days on which I’d love to trade for one.. but if the only reason you don’t have a job is because you’re building something and firmly believe you can make a difference, get ready for the long hours. Success in business is not about you not working in that business anymore as so many dream, success is being in the business and being happy with what it does.

It really is that simple.

Love,

Vlad

What I’d really like to say..

Posted: 3:26 pm
November 6, 2012

Boss, Cloud, Uncategorized
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Pretty much the only downside to running a business is the sense of responsibility you have to your staff and to your clients. It sucks to fail because when we fail it’s not just something we get to deal with – it’s something that affects our partners, our clients, our staff and our families. And since we care about all of that we don’t get to go home and not think about it and we also can’t act recklessly and say exactly what is on our mind at all times.

Today.. you’re going to have to pardon me because this monkey has been sitting on my shoulder for a few years and I have finally delivered something so many of us have been building for years. All I’d like to say is:

I friggin dare you to work with our competitors.

That’s all.

Yesterday we publically announced the launch of the ExchangeDefender Unicorn aka “Business Monitoring”. Here is the premise:

Bring us your email security, storage, filtering, Exchange and Sharepoint hosting business and we’ll eliminate the cost of operating your business (reduce how much you spend for monitoring and remote access) while giving you an edge against the big boys (now you can offer free monitoring too) – the more ExchangeDefender makes, the less it costs you to run your business at worst or the faster you’ll grow at best.

This initial release is all about the remote monitoring – server and workstation monitoring templates, alert-to-ticket integration, free remote desktop access via VNC even if they are behind a firewall and a few other tricks as well. Free. Next up, screenshot logging, application activity monitoring, web site traffic audits and more.

This is not an RMM. There are tons of great ones you can buy if you want to automate an IT response.

This is a business monitoring solution. In my experience, business owners care a lot more about what their employees are doing at work than what Microsoft background services and virus definition updates are doing. Maybe I’m an idiot – but I’ll give it away for free.

Without our partners we don’t exist. The end.

For our partners to grow, something has to give. You either gotta market and sell more or cut the costs. With Unicorn you’ve got both – reduce your bills right now. Next, promote free monitoring (heck it’s not like it’s gonna cost you anything) and let the business owners now what’s going on – then offer to fix it. Then offer to continue fixing it for a low monthly fee.

While everyone else is racing to find more shit to sell you, I am investing in making my partners more successful.

That’s what I do here. I no longer write code, I no longer touch servers, I no longer answer support phone calls and for the most part I am not dealing with anything day-to-day. My job is making sure our partners thrive in 2015, not that you sell $X in 2012-Q4.

So by all means, go ahead and ignore this.

I don’t have to get every one of you. I just have to get one that’s near you – and give them a chance.

The synergy of the cloud, infrastructure, consulting and business management is here. Between ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey, Unicorn and all our partners – I’ve got a shot at a baby IBM. And I’m a modest guy, I only need one Ferrari in each color of the rainbow. You can’t drive two red Ferrari’s at once.

My partners got us to this point… and I’m going to repay that favor. Some haven’t been that kind – from bashing us in the forums, blogs, peer groups – that’s your call and as you may know, I have no interest in fighting with you in public and I’ve asked my partners to do the same. Because you know what, screw you – my job here is not to address disrespectful whiners who don’t want to work together, my job here is to take the crap we’re dealt and make the best out of it. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, I keep on coming back to work because ultimately it’s my responsibility.

Felt good to get that out. The choice is yours – our ExchangeDefender Partner Program as it is today will be closed Dec 31, 2012. If you want to work with us, call me, visit me, stop by let’s help build up each others business. Otherwise, thanks for reading this blog and sorry about any hurt feelings.

Love,

-Vlad

Microsoft Surface

Posted: 12:27 pm
November 1, 2012

Microsoft
10 Comments

I need to get some disclaimers out of the way first because I do not believe there is such a thing as an objective device review. I own a bunch of Windows 7 PCs and slates, iPhone, iPod, MacBook Air running Windows 7, etc. I don’t really hate iOS as much as I find it to be useless and Microsoft Office for the Mac feels like driving a replica Lamborghini built on a Fiero.

Reasoning for Purchase

I already own an iPad but my kids use it more than I do. I only use it on the road and mostly for email and some light browsing when I don’t want to power on my laptop and mifi. Movies, games, chatting, etc. I’ve just never been a big fan of it, I find the tablets in general a very painful intermediary between phones and laptops.

When Microsoft announced Windows RT powered Surface that cost less than the iPad I jumped on it because pricing this device reasonably means it might actually have a feature instead of being added to the collection of failed Microsoft projects.

I did not buy the Surface because I wanted a laptop replacement – in my opinion, such a thing does not and never will exist – it’s a 10” screen. I bought it because I wanted Microsoft’s version of a tablet that ran Office.

No, this does not run Outlook. It does not run Windows x86/x64 applications. But is this just a large Zune or is it a mini-PC? Read on.

Visually Speaking…

This thing is stunning.

It doesn’t look or feel like a cheapo Android knockoff tablet.

It does not come in a package that you’d expect out of Dell, full of packing material they wouldn’t even ship eggs in. No stickers, no crapware, no unwrapping the device out of padding, wrapping foil, bags or other nonsense.

It’s just a huge piece of glass. Well packed.

The display is incredible. It’s no Retina but I could not see the difference between the Surface and the iPad right next to it. Netflix played just as well as it did on the iPad and on my PC as well as the laptop.

The Bad…

This is very clearly a 1.0 product. There are lots and lots of bugs.

It took it 10 minutes to get my PC ready. For what, I don’t know.

Keyboad: The soft touch keyboard cover is terrible. That’s the best way I can put it. It gets dirty easily. It doesn’t register the keys as well as a visual keyboard or any other tablet keyboard I’ve ever had. To add insult to injury, when Surface goes to sleep and I open it up again… the keyboard no longer works and requires a reboot.

OS: The OS doesn’t run x86/x64 Windows apps – not a show stopper since this is more of an email/web/entertainment device with a Windows look and feel and Office – but if you’re expecting to fire up Quickbooks on this and do books on the road, it’s not gonna happen.

Size: This is not a one-hander. Not even close. The device is very heavy compared to other 10” tablets and it’s not something you’ll likely ever use without setting it down. While the device was clearly designed to be sat down with it’s kickstand, I do use my iPad for reading and I often hold it in my hand – not gonna happen with this one. One more thing: The power brick / cable for this thing are friggin huge! So much for just throwing it into the case.

Perhaps the most disappointing piece.. no Flash. It would be nice if it came with some Azure service credit to transcode my collection. Smile I know, inappropriate.. but if you’re going to come out with the Internet consumption device it better be able to consume the thing Al Gore designed the Internet for.

The good..

Kickstand: Very elementary but very nice. I often end up standing my iPad up either on the mattress or a stack of magazines or against the seat in front of me – it’s always propped up against something and to be honest not quite natural at all. The kickstand puts it into a natural position.

Office: Nuff said. I’ve seen other office products and well… yeah. This has Office RT which is damn close to the real thing.

Look & Feel: This looks, feels and acts like a Windows PC. I don’t feel like I’m crippled to a phone experience on a large screen, it feels like something you can write long emails, create documents and forward them along with pictures, video, etc all in the same shot.

The verdict..

It’s 1.0. Definitely not worth your money right now. If you expect to use the keyboard, buy the more expensive/bulkier one because the soft cover one is terrible.

It’s replacing my iPad that’s for sure.

As for the lack of Outlook / x64/x86 apps and so on – if you need that, wait for Surface Pro. Personally, I am never going to get anything massively productive done on a 10” screen so this one is good enough.

Seems like Microsoft is back?

Unicorn Sighting

Posted: 4:40 pm
October 30, 2012

ExchangeDefender, Shockey Monkey
Comments Off

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow! I’m very excited to go back to work tomorrow and talk about Unicorns.

Not signed up for the webinar? Please join me! I’m pretty sure you’re going to like what I have to show you.

Wednesday, October 31st, 2012

Noon, EST

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/358136920

I will blog about this in detail but needless to say things have changed quite a bit when it comes to IT business with the mass adoption of the cloud. What it hasn’t changed is the relevance of good technology advice, management, support and customer service.

While so many debated about what the cloud was going to do and how, many took advantage of it and built significant businesses on top of it.

To those that did it with our platform, worldwide, this is a way of saying thank you.

So tomorrow I will be talking about the Unicorn, I will be talking about Shockey Monkey 3 and I will be showing you what we have in the store for you during this final quarter of 2012. We want to make sure that you are ready for 2013 and beyond and that you have a solid platform underneath you – from the CRM to marketing to support to choice of different messaging, storage, server and colo options to build out a product and a solution for your clients.

Cloud is the most dominant business technology today – but it’s far from without fault – which makes the prospect of being a part of that business solution very profitable.

ExchangeDefender is only a piece of that puzzle. I hope you join me at noon tomorrow so you can see how we’re putting together the rest of the puzzle and just how much opportunity you have in it all.

Partnership Details

Posted: 3:54 pm
October 24, 2012

Boss, IT Business
3 Comments

Building successful partnerships hinges on work done on both sides of the vendor/VAR river. If you ever wonder how some people seem to love working with companies that may have left you with a bad taste, it’s probably because some people get better treatment than the others. But is that a matter of random luck or actual partnerships?

Yesterday I sent a very generic email invitation to our whole partner base. Here is what it looked like:

Fairly vague, right? In fact, intentionally so. If you haven’t read our newsletters, Facebook, Twitter or seen us at an event this year – this would make no sense to you and you’d hit delete and walk away.

Which is exactly what we want you to do if you aren’t paying attention!

Bunch of people didn’t quite figure out what was happening so they took a moment to email me their outrage that I didn’t share the details, didn’t serve it up on a platter to them and didn’t make it completely easy to figure out whether or not this is worth their precious time. Sigh.

In my 20’s I probably would have posted their emails, comments and broken them down point by point. I probably would have even responded to their emails generating tons of back-and-forth traffic that would not have done any good for anyone. These days I neither have the time nor am I concerned because.. well.. people who aren’t interested in the details tend not to stay in business. That’s the harsh reality.

Clients affect the product as much as they buy it

Here is another harsh truth: We make far more money, worldwide, off people who barely ever talk to us. Many of whom I’ve never met and never had the pleasure of thanking them for all their money.

Here is the bitch: It’s the guys that work with us every month that make the most profit. Far more than random folks that subscribe their clients to stuff just because someone recommended it.

How the hell is that possible?

Well, when you experience the products for yourself and talk about them with me or one of my VPs that spend nearly all day long on the phone with our partners, you don’t just get my opinion but the opinion of everyone we work with. That happens to be the difference: You’re not just building your business on top of what some IT flunkie decides is the best practice, you’re actively promoting it in a way that very few people are. It’s kind of how the first movers in the MSP space went on to generate the biggest revenues and the folks afterwards barely made it outside of their zip code. Timing matters, message matters and effort to understand the details matters.

The rest is retail.

Success in business, at least the personal one that we all happen to deliver in IT, hinges on being able to close large profitable deals – not a crapload of little, low-margin, low-profit ones.

I don’t live day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter. Most successful businesses don’t. That’s the problem with VC, if you have to justify everything to your daddy and dress the numbers and the product up all the time by investing very little then you have to cater to the lowest common denominator of the client base.

Long term success in business is about the details, about the execution, about resolving problems and about looking at the long term. This is why the few smaller players will continue to be more successful over time than the few bright flashes in the pan looking for an exit strategy.

As much as that may reveal vendors standing – it also self-identifies VARs and MSPs – if you’re not willing to work with the vendors and actually build a solution then are you really that much better than the end user and even worse, why would that end user even need you down the line?

Food for thought. Know what kind of business you run and where you focus needs to be.

Unmanaged Management

Posted: 12:13 pm
October 22, 2012

Boss
Comments Off

Employees spend so much time dealing with the “feedback” (or “blowback”) from their managers that they rarely consider the fact that both sides manage the relationship. This is true in business to business environment between vendors and clients just as much as it’s true between employers and employees or managers and reports. In almost all cases it’s a two way street (unless you work in a sweat shop… in which case you’ll be beaten severely for reading this blog in 3..2..1)

Here are few simple steps for a happier work environment.

Step 1: Know who you work for

Spend some time getting to know your boss, client, vendor.

You’ll find that most people are either polite or outright fake to your face because their interaction with you is purely political and business oriented.

I happen to feel that most people tend to be nice and just want to be happy and do what makes them happy underneath. They just don’t happen to broadcast it.

Find out how people respond so you can differentiate compliments from insults, encouragement from criticism and body language in general.

Step 2: Know when they are having a bad day

Management of time and resources is as important as management of your bosses, vendors and clients.

Know when to skip a step.

Fair warning.. this is about to get a little filthy. Smile

Step 3: Make it their fault

It’s never the managers fault. Ever. Ever, ever? Ever. Disagree? OK, Fuck you, you’re fired.

If you’d like to argue with the above from an employee perspective, consider the relationship between the vendor and the client. There is no situation, ever, under any circumstance.. where blowing the expectations of the client is a fault of vendors employees. The CEO (boss, etc) is ultimately responsible for what the company does.

There are no excuses.

Oh, you didn’t know what was going on in your company? You are an idiot.

Oh, your staff is incompetent and they made a mistake? Who hired them, who implemented controls, who reviewed or monitored te execution – you are an idiot.

<insert excuse> – … idiot.

Now that we’ve covered the fact that there is responsibility and accountability at every level and in every relationship, it follows that he who has the control over the job being done is ultimately the one that is responsible. Read that again. Since the receiving party has no actual direct influence over the deliverable, they get to feel happy/sad about what they receive from you.

Now.. that’s not really fair, is it? Your schedule might be packed. You may not have the resources. You might be feeling under the weather, problems at home, losing money in the stock market, found out the kid wasn’t yours, woke up in a ditch feeling sore, you adopted a dog that ate your car keys.. hey, shit happens. This is why you have to find a way to make it their fault.

But how? How do you twist a terrible situation into not being blamed for it? Simple: Get tons of feedback and make it exactly what they want.

Nobody.. ever.. ever.. woke up and said.. “You know what… I want a $60,000 Mazda Miata with a poop colored interior and 4th day of my period toned roof on top of a silver car.” – But Porsche sold thousands of them!

Friends.. simply put, it’s what the customer wanted.

As an employee, your job is to meet expectations. No matter how ridiculous those expectations and demands may be, your job is to make your boss happy. If they are happy, you’re happy. Yeah, from time to time it might make you want to cover your eyes or look away every few seconds as if someone tied you down to watch 2 girls 1 cup video.. but recognizing what your job is and the fact that you do not have all the perspective that your boss may have is what it takes to win and hopefully get promoted as far away as possible.

How.

Go through steps 1-3.

Solicit input. You’ll never know what is actually expected of you if you don’t ask. Ask for as many specifics as you can reasonably expect a clear answer to and pay attention to the details. Are they offering a lot of details about a particular aspect of your deliverable – that means they know exactly what they want. Are they being vague – they have no idea what they want.

Offer options. Everyone has an opinion. Unfortunately, most opinions are stupid. By providing lots of different alternatives you have a way of playing hot and cold with the boss or the client.

Offer revised options. Based on the feedback from the previous step – offer revised options. See if you’re going in the right direction or if they change their mind. Reasonable people often change their mild – wildly – when they are proven wrong. There are no geniuses, just people with tons of options and the luck to choose the right one. Some people make great choices. For the rest, there is a poop colored Porsche.

Make them choose and give them the alternatives as well. Once your boss and client have made their choice, spend all the time you’ve got into making their choice the best it can be. Spend 10% of your time working on the other options as well. You never know, maybe they will change their mind down the road – as much as you want to give them choices initially, you want to also provide them with a way to provide choices to whomever they are trying to sell their idea to as well.

Provide vague progress reports. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever be specific about what is going on. It invites micromanagement. Worse, it lets them know just how much of your time is spent taking what we at Own Web Now call “Frankcation at the keyboard” – an act of being at work but also working at such a slow pace that you might as well be on vacation. Or pinterest. Try to be a sales guy – they provide for a perfect shitstorm of vague information: lack of intellect combined with compulsive lying and D+ math skills. This is also known as downplaying your pipeline – you want the expectations to be so low that just the miracle of getting your job done is a positive. Instill confidence at the same time as you distribute doubt:

“Yeah, I’m almost done with it, I’d love to show it to you but Bob messed up my PC so I’m waiting for the patch.”

This bait and switch is terrific because not only does it make them feel good about what you’re doing but it makes them go and unleash their frustration on Bob who let’s face it, is likely on the shitlist to start with. So long as Bob isn’t an axe murderer this is known as a corporate win-win-win.

Only show it when it’s done. Never, ever, ever show your work in progress. It will only prompt more feedback, more ideas, more suggestions and it will give your boss/client a sense that things could still be tweaked. God help you, that project is never getting done. Only show them the finished masterpiece – make them ride that Poop Period Porsche off the lot with pride!

Conclusion

The few of you that are sensible.. or naïve.. might look at all this and find it completely defeating and sad. It is. Yet, this is the nature of how things get done among imperfect people, mismanaged companies, unmotivated workforce and diversity in general.

Maybe Poop Porsche isn’t for you? But it beats a Ford Model T “in any color you want so long as it’s black” any day.

I find that most people struggle and get demotivated by the things they cannot change – yet refuse to tinker with so many things that are in their control.

You can be happy and you can put out great stuff – so long as you are willing to put in the extra effort and be a part of the solution. World already has enough mindless drones following the management pyramid and most of them work at Foxconn and sweatshops where there are occasionally suicides.

The choice to do better starts with you. Happy Monday.

Designers Challenge

Posted: 3:02 pm
October 17, 2012

Shockey Monkey
1 Comment

This is not a sales/SPAM post but I do have to frame it for you in perspective: We’re working on the updates to Shockey Monkey which will soon be powering over 10,000 businesses worldwide. Design of the look, feel, flow and integration of elements for the total user experience is not an entirely random task left up to focus groups, it goes down to the core of business design.

Compromising On Goals

You can have it simple or you can have the details.

You can’t have both.

When you design something with simplicity in mind you cannot pack it with controls, input boxes, text areas, sliders and jam everything on a single screen. You also can’t embed it into 50 tabs because the user interface will look like a gorilla sat on the keyboard while Excel was open. “Oh, you want to see your sales performance? That’s in tab AAZ”

The case for simplicity is easy: When you have a small company (or staff it with small minds – think cashiers and point of sale personnel) you want to eliminate anything that can cause confusion. The goal is to make everything so easy and clear that nobody can make a mistake or take a long time to perform a task.

Small companies need to focus on simplicity first and foremost because the challenge of attacking a bunch of problems with a complex tool doesn’t solve problems – it just adds another problem to the stack!

But after you’ve gone through the process of accounting for the simplest of tasks, do you jam people into a complex CRM? (Hint: Remember what I said about small minds..)

You will always have newbies who are not familiar with your system – who are not familiar with the way you manage and run your business. In a nutshell, you will always have to chase simplicity and productivity. Always. No exceptions. Ever.

Yet when you get organized and have all of your information in one place, diving into that information for details or collecting additional information does something productivity improvements never could: it improves profitability and accountability of the organization.

Lot’s of inefficiencies and lost opportunities hide in the details. Yet without simplicity and getting your business organized in the first place you can never find out where they hide.

Challenge

As we’ve been drawing, redrawing, looking at user feedback, requirements, customer feature requests, bugs, our notes and so on I’ve had this in front of me:

Remember:

People love your software because it’s simple.

Every time I think of adding one more control, one more tab, one more popup, one more thing… I try to remember – nothing can be more than a few clicks from the login. Nothing should span multiple pages.

When it comes to design – be it for software or for stuff you present to your clients – it needs to fit on a single page. Ever wonder why trifold brochures never work or why nobody reads marketing collateral that comes as a book? Because it’s too much crap, all piled in and jammed onto as little of a space as possible because we can’t afford not to do what other guys do so we must mention it and talk about our stuff as well. In other words, Microsoft.

If you can’t fit it on a single page, you’ve failed.

If you can’t simplify it, you’ve failed.

But if you can’t effectively evaluate your process because you’re driving a car through the forest at 90mph.. then you either have to come to terms that you’re going to make mistakes.. or compromise.

In our case, compromise comes at the expense of inconvenience for some. I wanted to stress that because from the design standpoint, I won’t put out a product that is difficult to use – ever – because that’s already done. But if someone wants to be difficult and put their users/employees through some inefficiency because they feel they can gain better corporate performance – hey, I’m all for it!

Micromanage them to death, baby!

{Everyone that works for me just started crying, in unison }

Vladstradamus Part 2

Posted: 4:34 pm
October 5, 2012

IT Business, Microsoft
3 Comments

Yesterday I wrote a little about the stuff that’s currently bugging me about the overall state of the SMB IT Land and to sum it up, I don’t appreciate it when people don’t like the reality they see and try to argue it as some sort of a future event that won’t affect them. And believe me, I understand why the majority of our industry refuses to come to terms with it – it’s busy with the mundane tasks to pick up their head and see what’s going on around them.

So go ahead.. get mad at me if you will.. but I’m going to take you down the fortune telling exercise of consumerisation and what will happen over the next few years (unless you actually pay attention to the news, developments, CEOs and so on, in which case this is just history and common sense)

If you are partnering with your vendors, you are an idiot

Several years ago, when everyone got mad at me for pointing out the mess BPOS is about to make, I posted a very accurate picture of the New SBSC program.

In hindsight, I was nice. I had a screenshot of what appeared to be a sex act with the female SMB partner actress in pain and the Microsoft actor in heaven. Now the factual inaccuracy of that picture is that the female actress made 5-10 times what the male actor made – whereas the reality today is that the Microsoft partner (if still even barely alive) has to pay thousands of dollars to wash Microsoft’s car but the benefit is that you get to put a picture of that car on your business card. Welcome to 2012.

At the time I worked closely with a lot of Microsoft people and was actually among the many that praised what used to be a very good program. When I posted the picture and pointed out to the partners that Microsoft is about to screw them out of their business, one of the very senior worldwide Microsoft SBSC folks (no, not Eric) confronted me about it. Here is how the conversation went, paraphrasing:

M$ VP: You know, instead of criticizing it, you should help the BPOS team.

Vlad: You mean you want me to help you obliterate the channel by perfecting your poison?

M$ VP: I wouldn’t put it exactly like that but yes.

Those would be the last words that we’ve exchanged and she has since moved on to greener pastures because.. well, you see what Office 365 has done for you so far.

Every war front needs an idiot to carry the flag

I understand that. Because whoever happens to be dumb enough to pick up that flag is going to be praised by Microsoft and championed for being the most innovative and leveraging the new path of Microsoft success.

Why the rest of the morons are climbing the mountain of dead bodies to stand up there is beyond me. There can only be one fool at the podium presenting awesome fictional models of making money with Office 365 but all the folks that fell off that mountain will tell you the truth: Only Microsoft makes money, you’re lucky to be able to pull off a sideshow project.

The upsetting part? This is ju96st the beginning. This is what Microsoft is working on and they need your help to make you obsolete! So please, sign up, certify yourself as a sales person, let’s hurry up this consumerisation move and we’ll pretend to triple your margins on that single digit revenue product.

Those are not my words by the way. Or the IT Solution Providers. That is the vision offered to you directly by the CEO of Microsoft and everyone underneath him. For the past 5 years.

Do you really think you get to play in Windows 8? You think Microsoft Surface is going to make you relevant?

Listen, it’s Microsoft’s problem that they are too big, too old, too overinvested in stuff people no longer want and it’s their perogative to keep on pushing the same old thing with a different package.

What the hell is your excuse?

It’s not just Microsoft.

Nearly all the vendors across the field are looking to work directly with the end user.

So why are you stuck trying to be someone elses agent when you have the location, accessibility and customer service that almost always trumps just about everything except the price?

IT Solution Providers are thriving. Worldwide. But only because they are focusing on the Solution to the customer problems. The guys that are stuck, physically/financially/mentally, on solving the problems we had with IT back in 96 are in the same place as the guys back from ‘06.

All the vendors are pumping you down the road to consumerization. The consumer makes the choice.

Oh yeah? Then guess what, all my money and all my marketing will go to them spending it with me, not with you.

This isn’t the future. This is just common sense – if your vendors are not working for you and making you money then they are fired.

It’s that simple.

Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog