Fail.

Vladville
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I saw this at the book store yesterday and it damn near brought a tear to my eye:

photo

That bull is the symbol of the American pride: confidence and hope in the American financial enterprise. It stands on West side of the New York Stock Exchange and is frequently surrounded by tourists, tapping it and taking pictures from every angle imaginable. That is the spirit of America, what all of us sacrifice hours of each day to contribute to: by working, by saving, by investing and by building this great nation.

Yet, for the second time in the history of United States of America, massive fraud and borderline criminal behavior has compromised the faith we, and the rest of the world, hold in the economy and the those at the very top of the commerce regulatory chain. Everyone from the crooked CEOs now in jail to secretary Paulson to Bernake to congress and sleepy W have smashed the American dream to pieces.

How do we rebuild the promise of America?

By doing our job, doing it as well as we can and not making the mistakes we’ve made in the past. Tomorrow many of us will go back to work after a long and well deserved holiday break, let’s remember what brought us to the leadership role and what will keep us at the top: AMBITION.

Vladcast is Back!!! #13

Vladcast
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Welcome to 2009! Ok, so doom and gloom up front: It’s going to be a tough year. We’ll still move forward, we’ll still make a lot of money, it’s just going to be tougher all around.

In this podcast I describe the practice I’ve put myself through during the past 4 months since coming back to work @ OWN full time. It runs about 17 minutes and really good stuff starts at 5:20 mark.

But is that such a bad thing? No. It’s when we are tried the hardest that we perform at our very best. It’s also the judgement time for those who spent their more fortunate times without regard for how to design a business that performs. I have been talking to people all over the world and the response is unanimous: It’s getting tougher but we’re doing well.

I believe we’re very lucky. Yes, lucky. This is the time to take a hard look at ourselves, punishing look at those that are no longer with us, and gain some strength from the whole affair. What can we do today to be stronger tomorrow so we can rock out in 2010 and beyond? Opportunity knocks every day.

Play VladCast: [audio:http://www.vladville.com/media/Vladcast13.mp3]

Listen to my attempt. For some reason, people love this format. As Susan likes to remind me: I love your sensual voice Vlad! I’m going to say what’s on my mind, and much like V… I hope you talk back and give me ideas. I would love to be fortunate enough to have enough time to talk and argue with each and every one of you. No such time, for any of us, I’m afraid. But hey, shoot back from your office chair and let’s see if we all can’t help one another out.

I’m taking the first step. Hear it out, tell me what’s next: vlad@vladville.com

Add feed to iTunes  / File Attachment: Vladcast13.mp3

And now something new…

Podcast
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One of my most critical failures of 2008 has been my role in the perpetual growing pain that is Own Web Now. The moment we had enough servers, we were again over capacity. The second we finally finished training the new staff, the new stack of resumes showed up. The moment everything worked just remarkably we added more hardware or added new features that caused new issues.

Thats life, thats business.

But it takes a toll on a man. So about two months ago I decided not to allow my business to run me an my agenda. There are weeks of my life in 2008 where I can honestly say I did absolutely nothing but keep the machine up and running, or as we say around the office: “I have been holding Internet together all day and my arms are tired.” When I did get the little meandering tasks in check I was so disoriented or had so little time before the next meeting that I never even got back to my agenda. So I made a lot of changes and the productivity went up. Took about two months to perfect it but now I’m ready to talk about it.

Tune in (really, it’s a podcast baby!) tomorrow on vladville.com and hear all about it.

P.S. Going to come back to the Mic in 2009 😉 Most of my close friends have told me that I don’t come off as great on the blog as I do in person so let’s see if I can throw in some extra entertainment value your way.

Welcome to 2009!

OwnWebNow
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Happy New Year, may all you’ve wished for come true.

If you want it, today is the first day to work on it. None of that “Oh, I’m tired” or “It’s a holiday” or “I’ll start it tomorrow, strong!” lazy talk. Success takes hard work and near compulsive dedication to it. It doesn’t matter what day or time it is, or what other plans you had.

Instead of beer during today’s SEC humiliation of some other team grab a Netbook and crank out some plans during commercials.

What works, works…

Awesome, OwnWebNow
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Last day of the month, last day of the quarter, last day of the year.

On behalf of my family and my Own Web Now family I would like to thank all of you for making OWN products a part of your business. I absolutely love my job and considering it’s primary objective is to make you money… I’m thankful for you putting in so much into mine. 2008 was off the charts, literally, beyond all expectations. Thank you!

Today we were sitting around doing cleanup, looking over reports, charts and straightening out the automated billing and reporting systems. Two things seemed very interesting:

1) The strong got stronger. Much stronger.

2) The weak got smaller and quite often disappeared.

Now this is normal because the small fish is always the first to disappear. No need to explain that one, mostly because nobody cares.

The strong getting stronger is actually very interesting. When we plot the numbers we clearly see our large account and mixed account growth spike as the year goes on and take particular bursts – when the political runoff in US seemed to favor more moderate candidates, when the primaries were held, when the election started to look in Obama’s favor, when Obama was actually elected, when we lost 500,000 jobs..

Partners that bought different services and used our product mix and our support kicked it up a notch the worse the world appeared to get. This is because people with the mix and an assortment of tools are in business for one thing – to collect the money for serving the need.

Partners that only bought one line of services, or seemed to trial but never get beyond 30 days or even sign up a customer nearly disappeared. This is your typical analysis-paralysis, where they perhaps spent too much time trying to figure out the best of breed and in the process ran out of business or even talked their prospects out of things with tier own doom and gloom. Techies have a nack for talking way past the sale or finding ways to break it instead of closing it. Se la vi.

The only way we can explain the economic downturn of 2008 is in our ability to effectively guide our partners towards a business plan that capitalized on the new business fears and lack of desire for commitment. Lot’s of our clients clients didn’t want to build their own vaults, servers or security appliances.

I think this is what 2009 and onward will prove even more conclusively – that people who are in business of technology will continue to prosper because business responds to business demand. Geek Squadders of the world that are in technology business stuck in how broken technology and every aspect of it is – well, they’ll hopefully end up employed by someone who can use grunt monkeys.. as I say, we’re always hiring 🙂

Partners that realized that when prospects aren’t buying new servers there is money in the current infrastructure or in hosting made a killing.

If you were in that pile, congratulations on an awesome 2008.

Thank you for all your money!

Plans, Plans, Plans

OwnWebNow
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The past week and really the bulk of my inbound mail activity since the first V… newsletter has concerned one topic: planning for the new year.

I have tried my best to respond to all of those messages (by the way, if you want to email me I’m at vlad@vladville.com and actually do enjoy the feedback) because most of them seemed both cautious about the economy and curious as to where I’m thinking.

Let me start off by saying that at OWN we operate on business plans. And when it comes to business plans, we look at the very least a commitment of 24 months. This takes into account the time to plan, build, deliver, support and think of the next stage of the product. Some stuff makes it, some doesn’t. But each has a clear agenda: 1) Make money 2) Build audience for future projects and business plans. One feeds the other.

Now business plans are what you make of them. And you can execute multiple business plans at the same time. As a matter of fact, you better have more than one. In the IT space, where careers disappear on a dime, being a one trick pony is a recipe for disaster. It also makes failure easier to deal with and ultimately survivable.

So what is going to work in 2009? 😉 Yeah, sure….

For us, the entire Q1 of 2009 is all about firming up what we are doing. Just about everything we’re currently involved in is firing on all cylinders and I’m really not looking forward to doing anything “new” at all. Not everyone has received their marching orders but we’re basically revisiting all our ducks and making sure all the bugs and kinks are worked out. Most of the Q1 is going to be about the doom and gloom of 2008, then about the new administration and finally towards some clarity about what the markets are thinking about the financial stimulus. I think the next quarter really clears up a lot of the holding pattern games we’ve seen.

Once that’s done, I want to be ready to fire on all cylinders.

New Years Resolution

IT Business
1 Comment

Lose weight. Be less ugly. Change underware daily. Be realistic Vlad!

pessimistsbanner

I’ve always seen New Years resolutions as these big optimistic goals, only to be crushed into reality somewhere mid-January.

I really love what I do. I know it sounds crazy. My wife has a running joke with me where she repeats one of C. Mongomery Burns’ lines (on his deathbed): “My only regret is that I didn’t spend more time at the office!”

And when I look at what we are doing today, it is really setting up the company to be a continued success years down the road.

So with the look to 2009, I’m not making a huge ambitious goal of a new resolution.

I am instead looking at the biggest disappointments of 2008.

If anything, I think I’ve been too negative in 2008. Though it turned out to be right, it still seems like dancing at a funeral.

So here is to 2009, looking forward to it being a good one. Where is my Obama check!

What’s on sale?

IT Business
1 Comment

So here we are at the end of 2008, facing an ugly report from the retail sector and it all seems like a neverending car commercial. You know the kind, “It has never been a better time to buy a Toyota, you will not see discounts like this soon” followed by the “Surprise Factory Overstock” and “End-year model clearance” and “Toyotathon” and..

whatsonsale

What can we learn from these fools who have finally either run out of consumerist steam or finally convinced their entire audience they are blatant liars?

First, our marketing has to change in the field of technology. Specifically, in a way that demonstrates the real value of services that are clear, objective, comparable and measurable. You can’t take “trusted advisor” to the bank, nor can you sign someone up with “Over 10 years of experience”

What are you selling? What will it cost me? What will I make out of it?

What about the comments

Vladville
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Feedback on the last series of blog posts is coming in fast and furious. Everything from “I’m so proud of you it brings a tear to my eye…” to “I’d like to pick your brain about XYZ now that you mention it…” but by far folks are asking why there aren’t any comments?

Here is the bottom line: This is my drive. You should be able to form your own on your own time based on your own experience for your own business and your own market.

The other part of it is that the comments have been down since I blew up the comment system on Vladville a few months back and never noticed. But I always appreciate comments at vlad@vladville.com 😉 Who knows, if they are interesting they’ll get into “V…” newsletter.

Endgame: Part 6: The Wishful Thinking

IT Business, OwnWebNow
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This space intentionally left blank.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those that dwell on it never make any progress.

The arbitrary, synchronized change of calendars is the opportunity to evaluate 2008, see what went right and how to pursue it further, see what went wrong and focus on improving it.

The point of these posts is to clue you in on the fact that for the most part you are in control of most things. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you just get the unexpected – but you continue to deal and work towards your goals.

If you don’t have 2009 mapped out, right now is a great time to start.