Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Last week I launched the series of ExchangeDefender Lunch & Learn webcasts. Basically I get together with a marketing person and we launch a live presentation covering 30 minutes on how to setup / configure / sell / support ExchangeDefender and then follow it with another 30 minutes of Q&A with up to 5 partner organizations.

My primary goal in doing this, aside from being nice to the people that fund my car collection, is to figure out how we can better support our partners and offer great training.

One of the initiatives that came from last weeks lunch & learn was a need for a partner university. Here are overall requests:

1. Present information in an easy to understand, easy to follow, low attention span way (3 minutes at most) as a video.
2. Allow company owners to assign these videos to their staff and be informed when the video is viewed.
3. Offer a brief comprehension quiz at the end of the video to give business owner an idea if their staff actually learned something or if they were browsing eBay while they were being paid to learn.
4. Give partners the ability to post these training videos on their own web site so that end users an learn how to use the product.

So I have two questions here.

1. Is there anything else you’d like? We’re putting in some overtime tomorrow evening at 6 PM to design this and outline the videos we’d like to record.
2. Does anyone know of a way to determine when a video has been played from beginning to the end? Maybe embedding something into the control at the end of the video so that it requires a click that is not obvious to the user (without viewing the source?).

Let me know. I’m vlad@ownwebnow.com or 407-536-VLAD. If you can’t reach me you can also discuss this with Stephanie Hoffman, I believe at x737?

My company has grown remarkably over the past few years, at times unfortunately way ahead of its capacity, and I am always asked about how our ideas come to fruition. “Do you just pull it out your a$$ Vlad?”

Truth is, every concept we have is drawn out. Out of all the brilliant ideas we have, all are either born or killed on the 25 feet of whiteboard space in an awkwardly large conference room we didn’t know what to do with. The entire team is encouraged to doodle and we all have our own whiteboards in our offices (some more than one) on which we draw out our proposals and bring to one another for review / ideas / suggestions.

At times these drawings sit on the wall for days or weeks. We keep on adding to them. Everyone significantly contributes to them at times because it’s sometimes hard to visualize and beat down everything until you see it.

We approach business this way.

We draw out business concepts and ideas this way. Not just software. The screen above is of our onboarding process. The screen below is for our marketing workflows that we’re arming our clients with so they can demonstrate how the service functions:

Once we’ve agreed on what we’re doing, we let creative people have a crack at it. In marketing, this is done by Stephanie Hoffman. In web and design, this is done by Judy Scmidt. We go through the doodles and they make it beautiful and consumable. Here is an end result:

Own Web Now Onboarding Process

Check it out live at: http://go.ownwebnow.com

One thing that is very hard to convey to the young staff is how to deal with failure. Not all ideas are winners and sometimes even great things get killed by the most unlikely and unforeseen of circumstances.

The biggest challenge in business is picking yourself up when you’ve lost and moving on. The 25’ monster board is the test of resolve, consistency and ability to see beyond the problems. The goal is to constantly be drawing and focusing on the progression – dealing with what we’ve got now, what we’ll have 6 months from now and what won’t see the light of day in a year or longer. Nothing breeds creativity like giving yourself time to look at the same problem over and over.

As you’ve read here, and heard from me on the road, 2009 was hard for me personally. I had to deal with a product that wasn’t quite 100% because we spent so much time developing ExchangeDefender 5. All the while I got beaten, bruised, cursed out and called names but I didn’t sit home and let it crush me, I beat up the board hard and now we are where we are. Kicking a$$.

I am the most optimistic about our future than I’ve ever been. Even when I had big dreams, $0 money and no idea just how dumb I was 🙂

And now to 2010…

The board is blank. We finished clean and strong and now…..

Our goal in 2010 is triple digit growth. 100%.

My goal for you is the same – if you aren’t already a partner and haven’t spoken to me, I encourage you to do it today. Right… now. In 2010, we will push our partners like we have never even pushed ourselves and it’s a challenge I am looking forward to like a fat kid looks at desert in a buffet line. Game… ON!

Last week I recorded a SPAM Show podcast with my buddies Erick and Karl about the exciting stuff that 2010 will bring. This has become a tradition of sorts, and we’ve generally been right (hey, we’re still in business) about what’s coming down the pipe. If you aren’t following the SPAM Show, you should – it’s available in the OWN Partner Portal and from our Facebook fan page (you must be a fan in order to download it).

But on to 2010, right? For the first time ever, my prediction is not just something I’m making up and hoping I’m right: I’m actually betting a significant amount of money and 2009 efforts on it. I also believe that the big change we’ve started to see in 2009 is not a short term economic factor but just the start of the extinction event I’ve privately called “Vladville 2012” – hey even if you don’t like what I’m saying the Mayans predicted it centuries ago 🙂

2 0 1 0 – Beginning of The End

In 2009 we saw people sink expensive projects, shelf long term licensing agreements and outright refuse to commit to anything complex or drawn out.

Several factors played a role in this: recession, cash flow challenges, global competition, alternatives and substitutes, aggressive cost cutting, etc. Which factor was the biggest or most prevalent is a discussion of it’s own, the bottom line is that the client expectations have changed and you won’t get 2007 conditions back again.

What this means for the MSP industry is that we’re now at the beginning of the end of businesses that were built on delivering an SLA on top of the on-premise infrastructure alone because value is harder to justify in light of the availability of alternatives and lowered costs.

One question has been asked more than any other in 2009: Can we live without it?

For many, particularly large, companies the answer has been a resounding yes and the tangled web of licensing, infrastructure and legacy solutions got cut. This extended beyond just computer solutions and applied to everything corporate: including human resources.

As the fat get’s trimmed, the realization that fat is actually your margins (what keeps you profitable) was a painful sight for many businesses in 2009. Time will tell if this was a learning lesson or just a part of my hypothesis.

Meanwhile, in 2010..

We will see massive consolidation, from the bottom up. Typically, consolidation is from bigger fish eating smaller fish. In 2010, I see it going the other way.

In 2009, we saw the extinction of the shady businesses I’ve spotlighted for years. No need to speak about them anymore because they no longer exist. People that never were a solid business to begin with are now gone.

So now we’re looking at solid businesses. Speaking from experience here too. Trying to hit a million dollar revenue with a handful of employees is difficult. When at the end of the year you look at your low six or even five figure take, after all the hassle and sacrifices, the 9-5 life at $50,000 with benefits starts to look like a pretty good deal.

Don’t lie to yourself, we’ve all been there. And truth is, we feel that pain no matter how much higher revenue goals may be.

In 2010, I believe many of the larger MSPs will be taking up smaller MSPs for the benefit of having a seasoned veteran on their staff.

It is an inversion of the MSP pyramid (extremely business savvy personnel at the thin top with a wide base of lower cost technicians and helpdesk staff at the bottom) – changing to a wider assortment of business people on the top with very few or completely nonexistent technical staff (mostly outsourced) on the bottom.

As for my other predictions, all you’ve got to look at is our roadmap with ExchangeDefender and Own Web Now. The future is very bright but one thing remains: you have to fight for success, it won’t just happen.