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

Shockey Monkey Sponsors & Ads

Posted: 1:31 pm
January 3, 2012

Shockey Monkey
Comments Off

Two weeks ago we sent out sponsorship invitations to a few companies we work with closely (if you haven’t gotten one please email kate@ownwebnow.com). Shockey Monkey and I wanted to offer you the big picture of where things are heading. As you recall, we launched Shockey Monkey Reloaded (2.0) in November with the major news being that the entire solution is now completely free with all the features included free of charge. It is vendor sponsored so you will see ads in it (and yes, you can opt out of them as well as pay for support and onboarding assistance).

Now, here is some background that I hope puts it all into context.

We are still very much in the huge development cycle for Shockey Monkey. I have some very big plans for it that mostly center around how small businesses actually manage their businesses.

We’re a small business. We’re also a rather modern one at that – with iPads and remote workers and multiple offices and SAS 70 Type II audit / compliance needs and a global client base. We cover a lot of ground that costs a lot of money for very sophisticated stuff that we barely use. So we look at those essential components and we build it into Shockey Monkey. For example, here is what I mean:

If you’ve gone beyond scratching the surface of support and client tracking information you’ve probably discovered chat integration. You’ve also noticed the alerts system that allows every Shockey Monkey event to be discussed, tracked and commented by the whole staff. Now how is this useful?

Think of it as Facebook. People upload pictures, friends comment on it. People update their status, friends comment on it. Now apply it to your business. Employees update tickets, employees comment on it – Add it to documentation, bill them for the hours, escalate it to the boss or send them a thank you note. Every business event worth tracking is an event worth commenting on and driving towards the well oiled machine we all want our businesses to be.

This is why Shockey Monkey is so important and why it’s free. We want everyone to use it.

Now, by the end of 2nd quarter, all of OWN partners will be using it. That’s a given since that’s how everyone will be managing the business they resell from us. And we’re more than happy to cover that bill.

Now before you start thinking I’ve gone crazy and am just burning through what is a multimillion dollar business line on it’s own, slow down and think about it for a moment.

The money (Vlad’s Ferrari Fund money) is not in the software. The money is in the services that are sold through it and supported through it. The money is in end user / end business support.

Sponsorships

Last week we sent out a sponsorship package to a bunch of folks we work with. We’re looking at max of 17 sponsors with total revenue accounting for about $500,000.

That’s about a half a dozen developers and some support and marketing money.

As you can tell, it’s all about the product for us in 2012 and the low # of sponsors backs that. We do not want to turn Shockey Monkey into some sort of a free adult entertainment site with banners and spyware everywhere and sponsors are tied into our LooksCloudy.com site whose mission is event coverage and partner development. So there is more to this than pure sales as well. It’s about more effectively connecting partners with their vendors, in the same way that SM will better connect our partners to us.

Where this leads is sort of up to the vendors that choose to sponsor our solution. I sincerely believe that Shockey Monkey is a great stepping stone to some very mature solutions in the channel with a very advanced feature set. I think a lot of companies will choose to sponsor us to assure that it’s their solution you step up to, not their competition. What we’re pretty much guaranteeing is that Shockey Monkey will be the entry point for all aspiring and growing MSPs – because we aim to keep it free – but where they grow from here is up to the market to decide.

The future of the monkey is up to the users and to the sponsors, we have to please both.

Certainly the revenues are in the services and we run that business better than most.

With Shockey Monkey we have a unique opportunity to build a huge platform and expand it. Most of my investment is to tie Shockey Monkey further into the backoffice and the way small businesses run their operations. This means connecting the monkey to email, Facebook, twitter, instant messaging, payment services and more.

This is the point at which Shockey Monkey goes from being worth a few million targeting IT Solution Providers (now) to being worth a huge multiple of that to just about every small business out there that leverages social networking.

We all seemingly use things like Facebook, twitter and Gmail for personal interaction.

And the biggest trend in IT is consumerisation.

So connect the dots. Consumers using a social backend for business management.

Shockey Monkey.

Smile

So to sum it up: Shockey Monkey is free and it will remain free. The sponsorship opportunities are available in a limited amount because we want to make sure that ads do not interrupt your ability to work and give those that sponsor a solution good ROI. The roadmap for 2012 which will be released later will include two major updates and is aimed at tying more backoffice automation into the Monkey. The big picture goal is to build Monkey into a broader SMB process automation tool tied into the web, social media and email – which will help you expand your client base while also improving you own operations. Win, win, win.

Update: I just wanted to make it really clear that Shockey Monkey will remain free for the long term. We killed “Shockey Monkey Free” and “Shockey Monkey Fro” and all the features of Shockey Monkey Pro have been made available to everyone. You can still buy Pro if you want phone/email support, onboarding assistance and more.

ExchangeDefender Essentials Emergency

Posted: 5:05 pm
December 29, 2011

ExchangeDefender, IT Business
Comments Off

As I’m sure many of you have already seen, we’re really beefing up the ExchangeDefender Essentials lineup before we announce the final move in the 1-2-3 punch that will carry our partners up in 2012. This time, we’re adding an ExchangeDefender LiveArchive-like feature to ExchangeDefender Essentials, our budget-friendly solution.

Now on the corporate blog I have to be friendly and make it seem like sometimes you need to make tough decisions with tight budgets and make calculated compromises.

On here I don’t.

Now that little fact in itself makes some of my friends, employees and partners cringe because they try to imagine what’s it like to be on the receiving end of this. Those folks, fundamentally, do not understand how social media works. The main goal of this blog is not to beat down MSPs. It’s also not to pump up products and webinars. When you do that stuff too much people tune out in the most worthwhile way – they stop talking back. Feedback is the primary reason I write this blog – it gives me the opinion, insight, marketing research and everything else I could ever need to get the perspective needed to run my business. That’s also how we stay ahead of our competitors and why our products find so much success, as if they were built to order. Because on a really fundamental level, they are. Even when they conflict with one another.

So with that in mind, let me explain the Essentials, Emergency, all of ExchangeDefender and how it fits and where it fits and why even bother doing it.

The Basics

Typical abusive opinion should be written this way:

If you’re an MSP running a clients server without a failover like ExchangeDefender LiveArchive, you’re a fucking moron. Do you really think saving pennies and dimes is going to come even close to the losses you’re about to incur when the Exchange server goes down – and it will go down – and the client blames you – and they will blame you – and ruin both your reputation at worst and your ability to sell them additional products and services at best? Seriously? The business that is sitting there deciding whet her or not they need to be put out of business temporarily or permanently over a few bucks a month is a business that is gambling with it’s existence, do you comprehend the level of risk you are undertaking by trying to play into their nickel and diming games?

Now there are grains of truth in the above paragraph (I’ll get back to them in a moment) and to an aspiring IT industry sociopath writing a blog post like that would be incomprehensible. Oh my god, who would do business with someone that speaks in such a way? Turns out a lot of people – because the fact is that we don’t necessarily do business with people because we like them but because the product fits. When it comes to business all that personal stuff goes out the window.

I wish someone had told me that years ago, it would have saved me a lot of time and grief.

Eventually I figured it out on my own by accident and it’s what’s brought you our cloud services, expanded ExchangeDefender, LiveArchive, Shockey Monkey, Looks Cloudy, etc. In order to be successful you either have to be the best (the odds are against you on this one) or you have to work the hardest (this is really just a matter of choice).

The Essentials

Technically, I held back on approving the buildout of Essentials product for years mostly because the profit margins in the high end product were great and I didn’t have the resources to support more than one product per category. There were also a shitload of problems and scaling issues that took years to resolve, but those are minor details.

Emotionally, I also grew so tired of people who had to sit and think about whether or not a $2 hit to their MSP bottom line would be worth it. I also grew tired of explaining how my $2 product did what my competitors charged double digits for.

Insecurely, I felt that introducing multiple products per category would lead to cannibalization. Surely most people will just switch to the cheaper solution from the more expensive one if they are not using it completely. Right? Right? Wrong. I was wrong about this.

Finally, the essentials product came about because it was a fundamentally different product (even though it is built on the same base with same features at the core) because it appealed to different kinds of partners/clients and it had an entirely different marketplace.

Initially I felt quite dirty about the Essentials product because I felt like partners were selling a product that would ultimately serve as a death trap. I spend millions of dollars building redundancy around redundant systems and really am consumed around making sure things never go down. Yet there were tons of people knocking down my door saying outages were not an issue.

Well, which is it?

Turns out, it’s both. There are just different requirements. And over time the products pick up critical mass and create a profit margin that allows us to include additional features without an overwhelmingly large cost structure associated with it. For example, the Essentials Emergency will cost us less than what it would cost us to sponsor a conference circuit aimed at low end and startup clients. In fact, it will cost less than a half.

Now quick question – what do you think will sell more products: word of mouth and referrals or me in a white suit in a hotel in Baltimore?

The way I see it, ExchangeDefender will continue to appeal to high end partners and MSPs worldwide. The Essentials product will appeal to those who only need the very basics. But with both, our entire team will be able to sleep at night knowing that we’re doing everything in our power to deliver the feature set that backs people up even when they make a decision that doesn’t make sense – because you know what, every software developer feels their features are the most important.

So I’ll introduce you to ExchangeDefender Essentials punch #3 shortly and I guarantee you’re going to like it. My opinion (and that of OWN) is that the MSPs will continue to grow in the cloud – and that the old infrastructure business support services (filtering, security, backups, management) are up for grabs and prone to more consumerisation and consolidation.

For years, I only chose to do my business on the high end. And for years, Postini kicked my ass simply by offering a barebones product for a $1. But if the clients chose a competitive product based on cost, how loyal would they be to it once they could switch to a product to boost their margins? And at what point is a switch no longer worth the effort?

Ah, the fun of running a business. Here is to an awesome 2012!

The trail of broken promises is paved with the bricks of best intentions

Posted: 9:10 pm
December 22, 2011

Shockey Monkey
2 Comments

So you know how you suck at being organized?

There are people out there that are perfectly organized in every way. They know where everything is, they can find it in a split second and you probably feel like they spend every moment of their time organizing their junk.

Personally, I like to stack my junk. Then pile it. Then push it around and every now and then toss it into a box to move somewhere where it can be less unsightly. I call that activity cleaning.

I designed Shockey Monkey for people like myself.

Helpdesks, PSAs, CRMs and SharePoint portals probably have a higher failure than success rate. Why? Because people spend more time trying to plan organization and processes that the first time something falls out of the process they fall back to what is more convenient – and completely untrackable.

We didn’t want Shockey Monkey to be SharePoint.

As a matter of fact, that was the design cornerstone.

You don’t have to plan onboarding yourself for months. Or weeks. Or days.

You don’t even need to spend the time talking to us. We actually designed Shockey Monkey so that it would be quicker to do stuff on your own than to call us and do the same.

Check out this 10 minute getting started guide to Shockey Monkey.

It will take you less than 10 minutes.

Step 1: Setup portal settings. Step 2: Add portal address to your email signature. Step 3: Add your largest client company & contacts. Step 4: Upload your logo. Step 5: Customize the postcard and mail it out or hand deliver it.

The first four steps take less than 5 minutes.

And that’s all I ask.

For the love of god, do not try to figure out every status, every email template, every setting and every little nook of the system.

Baby steps.

Just start tracking your activities.

Start tracking your time.

Then start posting it to an invoice.

Then add other clients and start sending invoices to Quickbooks.

The more of the system you use, the more efficient you will become.

But don’t do it ackbasswards and try to build this huge process flowchart that you will never implement. All that activity serves to do is scare you with your inefficiencies and take time away from actually tracking what you do.

Start small. Build up. You can’t fail at that. Hey, it’s free get on it!

Shockey Monkey Reloadeded

Posted: 1:47 pm
December 14, 2011

IT Business, Shockey Monkey
1 Comment

It’s been over a week since I said anything on the subject and nearly two weeks since we officially launched Shockey Monkey Reloaded.

Watch the Shockey Monkey Reloaded Launch Webinar

Since that time we’ve signed up nearly 1,000 new portals and you keep on coming in strong as is the interest for sponsorships, etc.

Most of all, I want to thank to the many of you that have taken the time to talk to my staff and work with our support and developers on the bugs you’ve found. We’ve been squashing them daily and all the development resources have been assigned to making it flawless which it pretty much is. Hank got a much deserved vacation (I sent him to Las Vegas) and he’ll be back in the saddle next week with the priority being new integrations and some of the incredibly useful features some of you have brought to me.

Again, I can’t say thanks enough… well, short of giving you a free portal to run your business and serve you customers. That’s a good deal right?

Next Up..

We will be holding a webinar next week to discuss some of the questions that we get often. We also want to talk about the “Getting started in 10 minutes” which we feel is kind of critical for everyone signing up right now. We’ve hired two new people in the past week to help deal with this. And we’ll hire more if it keeps on going this fast, so please tune in and hear what we’ve been up to over the past two weeks.

Tuesday, December 20th, Noon EST

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/236053112

Many of you are good to go and are set to use Shockey Monkey full on in 2012, if you aren’t yet the great news is that it only takes 10 minutes so what are you waiting for?

Before I forget..

The Shockey Monkey training video has been updated for Reloaded. It used to be 67 minutes. Now it’s 17 minutes. That is hopefully the evidence of the commitment we have to making this software simple enough for anyone to use – you, your clients, your clients clients and everyone that doesn’t have an IT experience. Why? Well, the reason why portal and CRM deployments fail (SharePoint) is because nobody uses them, even when forced to use an industry specialized PSA solution folks use less than half the features and that’s among the best of the best! The goal for me with Reloaded was to make you more efficient without having to do more to gain that efficiency. In street terms: money for nothing and monkey for free. (que Dire Straits)

Finally..

Listen, I know I get a bad rep out there due to the many (many, many) blog posts I’ve written about the shortcomings we as an industry get. I don’t tolerate rude people, under any circumstances.. but it’s the stupid ones that bother me more. Everyone reads this blog with their own opinion of me, OWN, Shockey Monkey, ExchangeDefender and so on and I don’t spend much time putting lipstick on pigs.

Yeah, we’ve fucked up a lot over the years and we keep on chugging along, services get better, people get better, products get better. Everyone works on stuff.

What I’d really like to say is that we’ve got your back and we’re putting enormous resources behind this stuff because it’s important. I know a lot of you would rather see me spend it on Exchange or support or customer service or direct sales people so you don’t have to deal with any of the cloud stuff… and I understand. But it’s my money on the line in this company and I’m not running this company for the next month, quarter or year. I am looking to establish a portfolio that will make OWN relevant for another decade and that unfortunately (as some of you have put it) requires me to take an eye off the ball… in order to setup the next few plays.

P.S. As for the title.. I’m just going to keep on adding –ed to the subject as I go along with Reloaded. Kind of how people name their kids Erinn when it’s exactly the same as Erin. Why not Erinnn? While I’m on that subject, congratulations to my buddy Erinn Davis who got engaged this week!

Antispam Business Endgame

Posted: 3:36 pm
December 6, 2011

ExchangeDefender
Comments Off

Some of you that are my friends on Facebook (www.facebook.com/vladmmd) have heard me talk about us intending to drop a nuke on the antispam industry. Since we’re way ahead of schedule at Own Web Now, this is getting to market sooner than expected. Here is the basic idea:

In the past year, volume of SPAM to be filtered has gone down over 60%. How about your antispam bill?

Vendors make an excuse that most of the cost in providing the service comes from support, marketing, management and maintenance so the impact to the price you pay cannot be changed.

If you’re an idiot, go ahead and believe it.

The smarter ones among you know the reality of the situation, if the client is not complaining about the price why bother lowering it? Even if you are pressured to do it by the client, it makes no sense to do it because you’re technically better off letting them go through the pain of switching than consider lowering your pricing. What are the odds you lose all of their business, right? Correct, unless you’re building a growing company.

We’ve always operated ExchangeDefender as a growing business and the ExchangeDefender as a antispam product has continued to get additional features that you get charged huge premiums for at other companies that don’t write their own technology but instead partner and license someone elses. So things like LiveArchive, Encryption, Web File Sharing, Web Filtering and so on are incredibly expensive addons everywhere else… so sometimes comparing ExchangeDefender that gets all of that for $1.50 to $2.00 depending on volume with something that just does antispam/antivirus can become a losing battle.

So I should offer just the basic (“Essentials”) product for $1.00, bring it to apples and apples, and call it a day?

Where is the fun in that? Smile

If you’re currently reselling our ExchangeDefender Essentials product, or if you are currently selling the full ExchangeDefender product and facing questions about the pricing… I’d like to talk to you. You know where you can find me – Facebook, email, etc.

We’re about to drop a nuke on the antispam business and clear out our competition in this space because honestly… $1.00 for the basics is way too much.

Shockey Monkey Reloaded Reloading

Posted: 9:34 pm
December 4, 2011

Shockey Monkey
2 Comments

Last Thursday (December 1st) we officially took the wraps off the Shockey Monkey Reloaded project, with nearly a year under development we believe we’ve built the best possible mix of features, simplicity and business model mix to help propel our partners forward and help you win more deals and more billable time.

Now I’m not going to say how many times I’ve gone to the bathroom the morning of the webcast but I’ll be honest in saying that I lost count. It was by far the most nerve wrecking experience on my professional life. The feedback has been tremendously positive. I know we’ve got a killer thing on our hands and I am so immensely grateful that I have no words for it. So I’ll stop my emo crap here. All I ask is that you take the following survey if you saw the presentation and let me know what you thought:

Shockey Monkey Reloaded Survey

http://www.ShockeyMonkey.com/reloaded

It will take you a minute, tops.

If you take an hour or so to go through the 10,000+ words I’ve written on this subject during the past two weeks, you know my opinion of where we are and where the SMB IT space is going. The best and most profitable days are ahead of those that think smart, move fast and consider the future instead of the past. Our industry has had to battle so hard because being “an IT guy” was so simple anyone could do it – and nearly everyone did. Now that there are some real challenges, things will be great for those that are serious about IT. And I believe that Shockey Monkey will be a core part of that solution. Yes, even if you use Autotask or ConnectWise or anything else for that matter, Shockey Monkey will be a big part of your future.

The Next Few Weeks

Shockey Monkey Reloaded upgrades have been rolling out all weekend and will be completed sometime tomorrow.

Once your portal is upgraded to Reloaded you will receive an email from the system. Get on it right away, we’re offering free Phone and Email support during this stage so now is the time to get excited.

We are spending the entire week doing bugfixes and working with you directly on any issues you find. That’s the top priority – only priority.

December 12-16, Documentation week. The whole team will be working on the upgrades to the site, whitepapers, marketing and new welcome paperwork. We’ll also make time for one-on-one.

December 19-30, we hit the ExchangeDefender partner base. Everyone will have Shockey Monkey created and linked back to our infrastructure.

January 1st – we rock and roll.

Announcements, Discussions, Opinions

Note that I haven’t linked to the webinar recording, nor am I talking about anything specific that has been covered in last weeks webinar.

If you were there, you know why! Smile

What we announced is no joke, this is the biggest thing we’ve ever done and we’re going to do it right.

Thank you all for your feedback, your emails, for following this blog and chatting with me. All of those lessons, put to work, is what brought together Shockey Monkey. I look forward to 2012 being the year where it becomes the defacto platform of the SMB IT space, no lie, I expect every single one of you to use it no matter where the heck you are. And yes, in Q1 we’ll have internationalization and Monkey will speak French and Deutsch.

Update: Monday 7:58 AM EST: In case you attempted to sign up for Shockey Monkey you were greeted with the note that signups are currently closed. This is true, we will resume signups once everyone has been upgraded which we expect to be later today. The signup protocol has actually been changed as well to remove the option of signing up for Pro or providing payment, etc (unless you hate the ads or want to use your own domain).

Shockey Monkey Reloaded Tomorrow

Posted: 9:37 pm
November 30, 2011

IT Business, Shockey Monkey, SMB
Comments Off

Over the past week I have given you my assessment on the state of IT in SMB and beyond, a look to the past and to the future. I appreciate all the emails and only wish I could follow up with them all.. but I don’t just make up stuff you read on Vladville, all of it is influenced by many of you that talk, email and chat with me every day.

The theory of small business IT consumerization and how modern service providers can ride the wave to the more efficient and profitable future.

1. No future without the past
2. unRMM – What’s managed?
3. unPSA – Whose business is it anyway?
4. Derrivatives – Who does the IT work?
5. Ultimately, who pays the bill?

I’m also not putting this out for your enjoyment like some disgruntled English major that couldn’t get a real press job. I have a lot of money riding on me being right about things and the reason I’m right more often than not is because I have thousands of you offering me insight and different points of view that help me improve what I do.

But tomorrow, at noon, even more is on the line. It’s the biggest webinar I’ve ever done:

Shockey Monkey Reloaded

Thursday, December 1st, Noon EST (max 1000 seats; will be recorded)

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/812869640

It’s also a big bet on the future of IT. It’s a huge bet on the future of my company.

Right now, we (as in solution providers and their vendors) don’t have an upper hand in the marketplace. We sure as hell don’t have the marketing budgets and sales staff headcount that the big boys do. We also lack resources, economies of scale, farms and farms of slave labor in third world countries, tools and plenty of other excuses.

What we do have is flexibility and the size. There are way more of us than them and we can move faster when there is an opportunity.

Join me tomorrow, regardless of what PSA or CRM or stack of papers you use.

I promise you one thing, after you hear me out… I will be your best friend. The single greatest thing about Shockey Monkey is just one word… and I hope you like it when you hear it, I know I do!

Reloaded: Shockey Monkey: Ultimately, who pays the bill?

Posted: 6:35 pm
November 29, 2011

GTD, IT Business, IT Culture, Mobility
2 Comments

Over the past week I’ve outlined what I believe to be the future of technology management in small to medium businesses. I’ve discussed how we got here, what we need to focus on managing, how we need to involve the decision makers in the management of business aspects of technology and who will do the work in the future… which is already here.

If you would like to consider the full thesis, here are the details and factors as I see them:

1. No future without the past
2. unRMM – What’s managed?
3. unPSA – Whose business is it anyway?
4. Derrivatives – Who does the IT work?
5. Ultimately, who pays the bill?

Before we figure out who pays the bill..

Before you can send out the invoice you need to put something on it. Exactly what are you billing?

In the distant past the invoice consisted mostly of infrastructure components (networking gear, computers, printers, monitors) and majority of the profit came simply from facilitating the transaction. The hardware business is tough and the margins are almost non-existent these days even if you’re as sophisticated as Dell and HP – and almost all of their profit comes from large Fortune 500 and government contracts. In small business, hardware game has passed. Regardless of how slick and charming the hardware guy may seem, people aren’t stupid and they won’t pay $3000 for a workstation just because of your smile.

In the more recent past, majority of the revenue was service based and highly profitable as managed services providers realized high scalability – one engineer managing hundreds of endpoints remotely. But businesses are downsizing the infrastructure and the complex junk. When you remember that most of the MSP value proposition was built back in the days when spyware was a huge problem and people couldn’t keep up with their system patches and unreliable backups that were criticial to onsite infrastructure – those problems have largely been addressed by Microsoft and others over the years.

Managed services value proposition was built on the problems we had in early 2000’s – missing patches, spyware, malware, failed backup jobs, hardware instability, etc. As these issues are not prevalent today more small businesses are rightfully asking why they are paying so much to have their technology managed when most of their technology is either reliable or in the cloud where the service is managed by the provider.

Just as we learned how to build profitable and scalable businesses without the huge hardware margins, we will find a way to build profitable businesses as the MSP model starts to sunset and faces huge competition from larger (cheaper) providers.

Where is the money, Vlad?

It’s actually much simpler than it seems. However, it requires a change in the model and restructuring of how the business plan is executed.

Let’s rewind: You used to sell a ton of infrastructure and make a large margin on configuring it all to play together. You no longer do that but now you make a huge margin managing all those systems remotely as your clients become less and less dependent on them. As your clients invest more in portable devices and mobility becomes a norm dictated by their LOB apps (no, there is no software vendor on the planet, including Microsoft, that wants to support the customer with their on-premise server deployments)… well, pretty soon you won’t have much to manage on site.

This is usually where the philosophical fights start… but please keep on reading. It is normal to be scared and to resist change because it means lack of visibility and predictability. Reality is you can’t maintain the status quo because all your vendors and suppliers are teaming up against you and sooner than later they will make it impossible for you to execute your business model profitably. If you can agree to at least consider the following point I think it will make the world of difference to you:

Just as we transitioned from selling hardware to selling management services remotely for a fraction of an in-house IT persons salary, we can transition to what is next. What is next is the reality of most of these services being delivered remotely through the cloud – from voice to email to faxes to meetings – everything is becoming virtual, mobile, on demand and portable.

The bad news is you no longer get to profit from managing that technology.

The great news is that you no longer have to sink time into managing that technology.

Back in the early SBS days it took weeks to build a client network and onboard them. Then we got into Swing Migration and suddenly it was under a week. Then it went to the cloud and we no longer had to deal with Exchange at all. I can tell you first hand that many of your competitors and peers have even forgotten how much Exchange sucks, I know because I hear the outrage every time there is even a minor issue with Exchange that we host.

So no, you will no longer have to maintain an expertise in eseutil or schedule blocks of hours away from your family to defrag mail databases.

However, that time can now be reinvested and – just as it was when we moved from hardware to MSP – scaled to a more profitable venture.

You can’t profit from hoping that your clients are stupid

Read that a few more times.

Posting Facebook updates, tweets, updating iTunes and upgrading the firmware on your iPhone or your printer is no longer a geek job. Anyone can do it.

In the long long ago you had to create a system floppy disk. Copy the new ROM to the floppy along with the flashing tool. Reboot and boot off the floppy. Run the flash. Try to save the existing rom. Realizing that the backup would not fit on your current rom. Removing all the extra junk Microsoft put on the boot disks. Going at it again. Something going wrong. RTFM. Crossing fingers, etc. That era is gone.

Now everyone can patch.

Most of the time they don’t even know it’s happening. They just restart with the new version of Firefox or IE.

And that’s the scenario for the on premise gear. When it comes to online services… forget about it, you don’t even know when it’s done unless the provider bothers to email you.

You cannot continue to hope that things will remain complex because folks building all these gadgets and software solutions need to sell more of them. They can’t sell them as efficiently or as quickly if there is a shadow fee of an IT person that’s going to move in with you to deploy it. Small businesses are not buying IBM clusters to play chess or Jeopardy with. They are buying iPads and Android phones that a single-digit-per-hour retail store employee is all to happy to configure for them!

Profit from the fact that your clients are smart and get busy with more success

Now read that a few more times. Smile

You can’t profit from ignorance and people that are bad at math. It takes a lot of money to build a casino. Lottery is cornered as well. You can’t hope that there will be an unlimited amount of inept people out there because if they are inept how will they earn the revenue to pay your services.

When businesses are in the startup mode, they like to do things on their own to save money and cut corners. When they mature and grow the cost of their time exceeds the cost of your service.

Focus on creating services that are affordable enough to be delegated to you.

Deliver a solution that makes it easy for the business owners to delegate complex tasks to you.

(fact: It’s taken me over 20,000 words to get to the bottom line which is highlighted above)

There are thousands of different things that you can do better, faster and more effectively for your clients when it comes to technology.. for a fee. All that’s missing is an impulse for them to call John when they are looking at a problem they shouldn’t be dealing with.

Maybe your customer will not buy a printer from you. Maybe they won’t even ask you to set it up for group printing. They won’t even bother asking you how to connect their iPad to it. The secretary can change paper and ink cartridge on his/her own. But eventually that secretary will spend two hours troubleshooting the printer and the manager will step in to “help” – if they are smart, they will get in touch with you within the hour. That’s where you can offer to have it worked on right now for a higher fee or later tonight for a lower fee. You can come on site, have someone pick it up, listen to them tell you all the other challenges they are facing and find a way to help.

No, you won’t be able to get them to sign a management agreement for 50 times what the printer costs. Those days are coming to an end.

You will however be able to collect a multiple of their salary because it’s impacting their business.

You will have far more clients because the fact above will make most of your peers and competitors close down their shop.

The easy IT money era is over. The smart IT era is beginning.

If you’d like to see what it looks like, please join me this Thursday at noon EST:

Shockey Monkey Reloaded

Thursday, December 1st, Noon EST (max 1000 seats; will be recorded)

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/812869640

You can be the IBM they can afford and trust. And yes, people will trust you far more when you’re not screwing them with fuzzy math and stuff they don’t need.

Reloaded: Shockey Monkey Derrivatives: Who does the IT work?

Posted: 1:51 am
November 24, 2011

Cloud, GTD, IT Business, IT Culture
Comments Off

In the last few posts I have been laying out the multi-year strategy for Shockey Monkey and the changes IT Solution Providers need to come to terms with and adapt in order to survive and thrive. The core underlying concept of consumerisation of IT – technology decisions and use dictated by the users not engineers – impacts IT solution providers as the consumer electronics blend with business technology and make intermediaries unnecessary for basic tasks.

Who does the IT work?

The argument isn’t whether or not IT will continue to be a viable profession. The question is where do current IT solution providers provide value, so that value can be properly marketed today to assure for a great tomorrow. There is some background you need to consider first:

1. No future without the past
2. unRMM – What’s managed?
3. unPSA – Whose business is it anyway?
4. Derrivatives – Who does the IT work?
5. Ultimately, who pays the bill?

Some people tend to believe that they can run the same business for years without major changes. The problem is, underlying technology is changing too rapidly for any rational human being to believe that masses would remain ignorant. The only way you can charge premiums for same type of work with the same skill set is if your lack of morals combined with the ability to present bad ideas in a convincing manner meets people that are bad at math or grossly uninformed. However, even with all those conditions met, scale is difficult to accomplish as is the ability to get some sleep at night.

This is an enormous challenge. For business owners and managers of IT solution providers as well as for the engineers and technicians they employ. If your skill set is not absolutely the best you will soon only have a marginal advantage over the end user of the technology you deploy because you will not manage the majority of the technology from the ground up. If you’re antisocial, don’t like people, don’t like explaining technology and generally think you’re a genius and everyone else is an idiot – those idiots will find a way around the difficulty even if they have to sacrifice temporarily. If you exist for the sole purpose of prolonging the problem, people will get fed up. If you thrive on complexity you will find it exceedingly frustrating that everyone is trying to reduce it.

IT Magic – When people can use technology without feeling stupid about it they fall in love with it.

Back in the 90’s, Novell had a much better networking products than Microsoft. Last decade, Microsoft had much better media offerings than Apple. RIM had much better smartphones for business than Android or Apple.

What dictates users willingness to use a product is their ability to use a product.

Lot’s of stuff gets “sold” but if it’s not used, it’s worthless. See Microsoft SharePoint.

Large scale enterprise deployments of very sophisticated, very expensive, very specialized software are getting displaced by Web 2.0 sites ran by companies that haven’t even dreamed of turning a profit.

There is no arguing over the direction IT is going. There is the question of value.

What is valuable?

In order for something to be valuable, it has to be visible. Not just quantifiable in a virtual or hypothetical sense, but presentable and identifiable in day-to-day operations.

If you spend as much time as I do working with managed services providers you’d hear about sales pitches focused on things that business decision makers understand: time it takes to manage their technology. Business owners do not see blue screens, virus infections or paper jams – they deal with them – but they only see and feel the hit to the pocket book. Every minute of downtime or time a user spends dealing with an IT problem the business owner is multiplying their salary out and getting more upset.

MSPs sell on the value of saved time. But they haaaaaate it. Because time is a finite source that is not scalable. They would rather spend all day long selling hardware with huge margins but truth is that companies are not investing in infrastructure, they are trying to reduce it. MSPs would love to sell things like offsite backups, security services, patch management – stuff that they can automate, outsource, delegate and scale for huge profits.

Problem? Well, if you can’t see it you can’t put a price on it so you can try to live without it.

Part of the consolidation we’ve seen in the MSP space (and part of outright business closings) is directly related to the admission that the time (human factor) cannot be scaled so the profit becomes fixed to the headcount.

So what is valuable?

Customer service
Product recommendations
Alternative evaluations
Intelligent outsourcing
Migration services
Data interpretation
Billing consolidation
…

I can go on for days. The key is to focus on stuff they’d rather not do and stuff they can’t do.

You can build an extremely successful, extremely profitable, extremely lean business providing a lot of these services.

In order to get there you have to admit to yourself you are running less of a technology business and more of a marketing business.

Once you successfully market yourself and return to providing value you will have a greater client base and will again find more extremely lucrative project work you want in the first place.

It’s really that simple. You just don’t have the tools to do it…. yet.

Getting from gifted to employed

So the small and medium businesses are getting their technology served to them as ordinary consumers without regard for it’s use at home or a multimillion dollar business.

Is twitter a more reputable news distribution mechanism than a corporate web site? Are professional press releases better at getting serious attention than a Facebook fan page linked to a Constant Contact account?

The key to success in IT in the future isn’t in trying to establish yourself as the expert in everything the users may need. It’s in being available to deliver the service when they don’t want to do it themselves.

Your future client may purchase computers without you, smartphones without you, setup their cloud mail without you and manage all aspects of their communications without you.

But then their domain name will expire and the vice president of a mortgage brokerage will have to get to the bottom of why their business just came to a grinding halt.

Think fast: What rate do you think they’ll be willing to pay to have that problem resolved when it comes up? Would it be higher or lower than the one they are willing to pay to repair a largely disposable workstation when the employee already has an iPad, smartphone and a laptop?

I want to make something absolutely clear here: Do not underestimate the clients ability to work in unperfect environments. Much of Vladville’s success is built on stories of IT consultants, who through nearly criminal neglect, dismantled businesses faith in technology as a core business tool. Try not to think of problems small businesses would be incapable of tollerating (No such thing, remember Windows 95, 98, ME, every Exchange service pack ever built, businesses running on @yahoo.com or @aol.com addresses). Try to think about problems small businesses don’t want to deal with.

Strategy: Ignore problems that you think need to be addressed. Focus on problems small and medium business owners face and don’t want to address on their own.

For example, nobody needs an IT consultant to buy an email solution. Perfectly literate business owners that are control freaks (ie: all of us) won’t even need your help to set it all up. The ticking time bomb is in the contacts and calendars – what do you mean I can’t invite people into this meeting from my phone? Where did all of my contacts go?

Business owners love to be in control. But only on their terms, their schedule and their mood. They would all love to be the only ones who have access to all of their email. Unless that email were to go down while they are negotiating a new contract and this becomes an annoyance.

Focus on highly visible, highly annoying, highly valuable tasks and make it seem cheaper than their time. Ever wonder why there are probably hundreds of dry cleaners in a 10 mile radius yet an iron and an ironing board cost less than $50?

Be there when they want to buy, not when they want to shop

Once you’ve identified what you do, it’s time to get in between the user and the problem.

How do you do that?

Give them a tool that you can easily plug into.

Personal injury attorneys are spending millions and millions of dollars on radio commercials and billboards, that you’d only hear or see while you’re driving, to tell you to put their phone number into your cell phone so that you can call them when you have an accident… probably 20 seconds into trying to type the number in as a new contact while you should be looking at the road. Please don’t sue me for pointing that out.

You need to be there. As a fridge magnet. As a mousepad.

Or perhaps there is an easier way. Give them a free RMM that does nothing but keep them in the loop of all the IT problems they are experiencing. Give them a free CRM tool that will allow them to run their own business more efficiently while you are just a click away from being summoned. It’s better than a fridge magnet, it’s a genies lamp. You got 3 wishes and I got 3 lines on my invoice – Name, Credit card # and expiration date.

Only problem is, there is no such thing as a free RMM that a business would want to install in their company or that you can afford to deliver. It’s even worse in the CRM land, these big products cost a lot of money and nobody has an incentive to give them away so they won’t.

It’s hard to give away a product when your revenue stream depends on it’s commercial viability.

But what if.. a bunch of companies that sell more sophisticated RMM or PSA solutions.. banded together to sponsor a solution that would deliver all that to you, for free?

Would that earn your business? Would it earn your trust? If deployed, would it earn you more business?

In a time and a marketplace where most of your vendor partners are trying to figure a more effective way to get around you.. some of us are hard at work trying to get you more business. Welcome to Partnership 2.0 folks, the future looks bright even as IT looks cloudy..

unPSA – Whose business is being managed?

Posted: 4:14 pm
November 18, 2011

Boss, Cloud, ExchangeDefender, GTD, Shockey Monkey
1 Comment

Thank you for joining me in the third post in the series pondering the future of IT and how it will be utilized, at least in small business. If there is one trend line in the technical evolution over the past decade, it has to be the focus on simplicity that is making it possible for users to leverage technology without a ton of expertise. All hardware manufacturers and software developers want more users buying their solutions so everyone aims to make it as easy as possible for their good / service / product to be enjoyed.

So what is the end game of business technology as it removes a need for constant support and upkeep? Will the businesses stop caring about backups, about the security of the information stored on their users devices, access control or management of all these new vendors that they interact with?

In my opinion, the CRM side of a small business will grow a new complement: The Vendor Relationship Management.

If consumerization of IT is real and business owners and managers are the ones managing a wide portfolio of subscriptions, contractors, services and devices.. how do they track it all?

1. No future without the past
2. unRMM – What’s managed?
3. unPSA – Whose business is it anyway?
4. Derrivatives – Who does the IT work?
5. Ultimately, who pays the bill?

Where have all the IT jobs gone?

After the .com bust and subsequent automation across the IT departments, many IT Solution Providers complained about the levels of competition they were seeing. Suddenly, everyone was an IT consultant and anyone that had ever touched a PC was a techie. Smaller technology companies saw a huge influx in labor as IT departments of large companies continued downsizing.

Towards the middle of last decade, same fate awaited SMB tech workers as well – managed services providers (MSPs) solicited small businesses into letting them take over the entire IT department under the premise that the cost of the overall technology management is lower than the salary of a single skilled IT worker. It worked! Throughout the decade the pattern of eliminating complexity lead to elimination of overhead which meant fewer people working on keeping the infrastructure up and running.

Then everything changed.

Someone at Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM and virtually every other software company asked “Why do we need IT people involved anyhow?” On the hardware manufacturing side the battle of “specs” (speed, memory, storage) was already becoming irrelevant so they started focusing on user experience more than trying to sell a stat sheet to a CIO.

What really fundamentally changed in the process is the cost of doing business. Back in the 90’s it was not uncommon to work for a very large six figure salary managing technology. Computers, network routers and switches, servers – all cost thousands of dollars. Asking over a hundred dollars per hour for consulting that would help even the smallest of businesses avoid wasting thousands of dollars for something that wouldn’t fit their need became a sound investment.

But then the cost of servers went down. Cost of computers plummeted – exponentially so for components such as memory and storage. The reduced complexity of technology meant anyone with a slow weekend and a good manual would become indistinguishable from an experienced tech.

Once upon a time a skilled engineer could charge thousands of dollars for consulting, implementation and maintenance of a large mail server farm used for newsletter subscription management and distribution. But when the company outsourced it to ConstantContact or MailChimp for less than a few hundred dollars a month things changed.

What changed?

The economics of technology.

When technology cost thousands of dollars it was easy to ask for 10-25% to help broker it and still make a significant revenue.

But when the same technology got obsoleted by a more affordable, more efficient and more simplistic product – consulting fees nearly disappeared. Remember how much work was involved just four years ago when you wanted to sync your Microsoft Windows Phone with your SBS Microsoft Exchange? Same company, same technology – tons of nightmares. Enter iPhone: Now they’ll configure it for you at the point of purchase.

The line between business technology and consumer end user technology has blurred.

More importantly: The difference between a small business IT provider and a small business owner / manager continues to slim down as the technology becomes simpler to use and manage, technology developers continue to market and sell directly to the small business and technology becomes a common thing in our lives. Suddenly, updating status, content, marketing campaign or a newsletter is not a technology job.

Yet, we use more technology now than ever before. So who is actually managing the business technology?

Managing Change

Allow me to introduce you to my thesis on a consumer-centric process service automation.

The easier the technology gets the more people will use it.

The more technology dependent businesses become, the more technology they will buy.

All of a sudden we’re outsourcing our newsletter design, newsletter distribution, VoIP, cell phone plans, payroll, water delivery, Internet connectivity, email hosting, web hosting, our blog and the content on that blog, our lead generation and all our phone infrastructure is now done by someone else.

We don’t need “an IT guy” for any of it.

When something breaks though, who is going to fix it?

You want to know the really ugly answer to that question? It’s usually the very top of the company. Employees rarely take ownership or associate themselves with anything that looks like a problem. At best they will try to find someone they don’t like to point the blame.

So higher technology usage leads to higher technology dependence which ultimately increases business inefficiencies because it’s no longer technology management done by an IT guy but business management done by a business owner / manager.

Simple enough, just give folks a tool that can manage their business and vendor relationships efficiently and plug yourself in the middle as the IT outsourcing facility to help eliminate business problems at a lower cost. Simple..

The only problem is, consumer-centric service management applications are extremely expensive. Cost of Salesforce for a single user is higher than the cost of Windows, Office, Hosted Exchange and the Internet connection to get to it all.

The Shockey Monkey Trojan Horse

If there is a problem but it isn’t properly documented and reported, it cannot be efficiently escalated. The vendor, client, company and technology/business management needs to be front and center in front of all the employees in order for it to have a full resolution cycle.

But what if you gave them all that.. for virtually free.. and were just available at the right time when they face a problem that you can help them with?

Small business owner and managers have little incentive to use an RMM as I discussed earlier or a CRM – which is why everything prior to SalesForce was for the most part a complete failure. The only reason SalesForce got so much buyin is because it provided an accountability layer on top of a profession in which lying and lack of morals are marketable skills – sales. If you wanted to track relative efficiency of professional liars, there is nothing more beautiful than SalesForce.

But what if that were extended to the ordinary course of business.

What if there was a service ticket or issue category for office equipment requests. For tracking building maintenance issues. An in-office Twitter that kept the entire company in the loop (those of you using Shockey Monkey today know what I’m talking about here). Here is how one of my partners, Randy Spangler, recently explained this trojan horse to me:

So here you have a random white collar employee and the light bulb above his head dies. What does he do? Goes to his manager and tells them. What does the manager do? He calls the building or office manager. They change the light… but it’s the socket that is actually bad so they promise to call someone else. This process continues endlessly.

What if it was a computer issue? They could enter in the issue, manager could approve it and escalate to us.

There are tons of functions in every business that could benefit from process organization and escalation – not just for the sake of efficiency but for closing the loop and making sure problems are actually resolved.

In my opinion, Shockey Monkey is that trojan horse.

It is a process management tool that can be used to implement layers of management and expertise where slim profit margins can be effectively collected from a very large set of customers.

Sounds great in theory?

Except it’s not a theory.

Shockey Monkey has enabled thousands of ExchangeDefender partners to resell Exchange, SharePoint, Offsite Backups, Web Hosting and server offerings to their customers without managing any of the backend server resources. In effect, they were just transaction brokers that provided a layer of escalation between the end user and us when there are problems or us and the end users when new features are introduced.

In that whole process the partner has their own Shockey Monkey portal that they use to freely manage all the other vendor and partner relationships but our offerings are front and center as the cloud backoffice.

Who is to say that the partner shouldn’t also take Shockey Monkey and deploy it for the end users business and let them manage their own clients, vendors, invoices and issues?

Now the only challenge is tuning the monkey to be friendly to different verticals… but fundamentally, most white collar jobs have more in common than they have in terms of uniqueness.

We will likely never build a perfect information solution.

Even Starship Enterprise with all it’s iPads and Siri’s had dozen of selfdestruct sequence initializations. That means we got at least 300 more years of this business model to go and as soon as they invent the replicator that creates gold out of thin air we can call it quits.

In the meantime, this is the evolution of technology providers coexisting with the end user technology. We gotta make the management more affordable and more seamless but collect revenues on it when things break. Nobody wants to spend hundreds of dollars on top of things that cost $10 / month. But when they break and result in potential thousands of dollars in lost revenue when they are down… businesses will still part with hundreds of dollars to get back to status quo.

Stay tuned. This is what I’m doing.

Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog