Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

I’ve been out for the past two weeks and today is my first full day back at work. Feel great, got tons of ideas and full of drive to close up 2008 on a high note and make sure our prep for 2009 is to make it the greatest year ever!

I know some of you have been waiting to speak to me, waiting on some paperwork, waiting on callbacks. I have been pretty good about email while out but you are unlikely to get a call back today. Just wanted to let you know in case you’re stalking this blog to check if I’m alive 😉

UF played for the SEC championship this weekend and I had the seats in the opponents section 😉  If you’ve met me you can probably fill in the blanks, needless to say it might take a day or two until I have regained my voice.

Ten pages, 3,779 words and no pictures later, the first Vladville “V…” newsletter has been sent to over 6,000 subscribers. Thank you for your attention and the feedback you choose to share with everyone. Please do me a favor and forward it around to your friends. I’ve committed to doing at least 12 of these over the next year as we sail down some troubled waters. Grab a paddle 😉

As for demographics, everyone is on it. I have CIOs, IT underlings, IT service providers, one man shops, vendors and even guys who didn’t want to admit they were vendors. I’m looking at you Bob!

If you are curious you can download the Word document here, but that will just get you my point of view. The real prize is the feedback that subscribers that provide feedback will get. Think of it as the quilt, I start the story and you get to complete it. I will publish the extended directors cut with the audience participation in approximately two weeks so start talking back! 🙂

What is the catch? Well, one of the sure-fire keys to failure is the inability to pay attention and see the big picture. I am fully aware that 90% of the people will not read what I had to say. I’m confident that 95% of those people will not provide any feedback. In a single cycle I will have at best 1/10th the audience. Those are the people I really want to talk to. Newsletter is designed to be long enough that most people who don’t actually run a business will in fact ignore it. The language is plain and pointy, so that the reactionary skimmers will not even bother to fill out the feedback.. and you know what, the catch is that this is not about them! Yes, that is the catch. Most people will look at this stuff and see it as being something that is either far over their head or lacking any actionable items or fill in the blank plans. This is perfect because it instantly eliminates people who don’t work, think and research the industry to be able to lead it! It doesn’t put up a monetary border where they could still get in if they put down a few bucks. It doesn’t treat business leaders like children by giving them homework and assignments. It simply asks people to think and speak their mind. Which, when you really think about it, is what separates winners from losers. People in this business fail because they can’t see the big picture, spend all their time in a fruitless pursuit of the perfect tool or process without ever making a decision because decisions void of direction, certainty and confidence is frightening. Just looking for the people that will be here 12 months from now.

Just closed an IM window with one of my guys telling him to put up a little bit longer with the volume as things are going to die down very soon. Then I told him that things typically die down a week or two before Thanksgiving and the poor guy had been putting in extra hours (along with a LOT of others on the staff) this quarter.

So what gives?

Well, we’re doing good as a proxy of our partners. If we’re doing good, they are doing great because we only see a small subset of their sales and services. At the same time, we’re seeing a near record number of partners going out of business, asking to transfer services to another provider, record # of credit card transaction declines.

It’s quite simple:

Nothing happens just because, nothing will just come to you and land on your lap, nothing happens unless you really put in the effort.

The good news is, you’re likely competing against a bunch of lazy bastards that are feeling too sorry for themselves. The best news is, it’s Monday after Thanksgiving and you’ve got 5 business days to kick some serious ass.

I’m on a vacation…. but just watch what I do.

As the story goes, Queen Marie-Antoinette – the 18th century version of Paris Hilton, showed very little compassion for the starving French people and arguably with the quote above lead to the French Revolution (and a subsequent one-way ticket to the guillotine). Don’t you just miss the days when people properly disposed of failed leaders?

If history teaches us anything it’s that we do not learn from it.

Every Black Friday Americans take time off their work in an incessant search of great deals. In what is usually a great display of declining humanity, Walmart tends to showcase the finest – this year one associate got murdered in a stampede when nearly 200 people bum rushed the store and just had to get that 1080i LCD screen or the GPS receiver.

I had the lack of pleasure of spending a part of my childhood in Europe (stick with me, I’ll connect the dots in a minute) where many families practiced the epic fail of religious ignorance, fraud and arrogance in a little thing called “slava” – the religious aspect involved the actual cause for the celebration, as each family offered prayers to the Saint of their choosing for watching over them and blessing them (with the lifestyle status two inches beyond starvation)  followed by a big party, reception and a feast. In reality, this was an exercise in self-delusion and fraud, as the regions known throughout centuries for their destitute means and survivalist lifestyles would have one evening a year where they would go out and showcase themselves as the royalty among their peers. People that had nothing and barely scraped by would go all out to show how good it was to be them, even if it was total charade.

Sound familiar?

Today we are encouraged to spend, to go all out, to single-handedly bring our economy back through the consumerism and living above our means during the season where we should be with our families content with what we have we indulge in the crystal clear 1080i resolution of our brand new LCD TV.

Vlad’s quick guide to making it through a tough economic cycle:

1. Save more money than you spend. If you cannot make it through a full year without a job living on the savings in your bank you should not be spending, you should be looking for a second job.
2. Defer big purchases until you can either pay it off immediately or obtain credit and incentives that far undervalue the asset (so you can sell it if you suddenly need to liquidate assets to cover other debts).
3. Haggle for everything that has a sales person. Sales people keep their jobs and receive bonuses based on their ability to fill the pipeline and meet their quota – not on the bottom line profit they realize on each and every sale. To them it’s more important to land a $500 purchase than to earn a 3% profit on a fictional sale.
4. Realize that social status is not a competition. People who go all out eventually end up out of luck. As you watch the commercials for Mercedes Benz, Lexus, Jewelry and gadget of the month remember that only a fool and his money are soon parted.

Remember, a great deal on crap you don’t really need is not a great deal, it’s a waste.

Wishing you the best this season,

Vlad Mazek, who hopes he’ll be able to find his office without a GPS.

Today is Thanksgiving, to those of you in United States I wish you a happy turkey day. I hope you eat so much that the tryptophan-induced high moves your appreciation for arguably one of the highest white people to ever walk the earth – Bob Ross, painting happy little clouds.

We are in an era where a lot of us are building happy little clouds. There is money in them there clouds I tells ya! And sure enough, when I checked our KPI on Monday before heading out for a break we were already in the record books for growth/revenue for November and when you hear what we’re going to arm our ExchangeDefender MSPs with in Dec for enterprise storage you’re going to flip!

But wait, didn’t Vlad say yesterday that this IT business stuff is going to die? The news tells me that the economy sucks! Vlad’s newsletter is going to talk about the bad trends in the IT space. But he is launching new products, hitting record revenues and hiring people. His competitors are going out of business but he just raised prices.

What the heck man, I am so thoroughly confused!

I’ve had so many people do the above with me on the phone that I’ve nearly lost count. And most of them lately (fans of the blog) seemed nearly disappointed that I wasn’t gloomy and doomy in person. And nearly every person asks: But what if you’re wrong?

There are no ifs ands or buts about being wrong in business, it’s a business certainty that most or at best some of your decisions are not going to be good or great.

Here is a little secret: Most businesses fail. You are statistically more likely to fail than succeed.

I call it a secret because most people are either not aware of that or choose to run their business in a way that it’s a one-trick pony that is built to implode upon failure. You know, Bob the OEM that used to build computers in the mid-90’s that bought a big store and got killed by Dell. And who can forget Bob the Webmaster that bought thousands of dollars in Photoshop licensing but couldn’t even figure out Paintbrush. Or my favorite, Bob the Y2K expert that went around with a witch stick and a skull and blessed bank computers in 1999 and found himself homeless in 2000. But Bob bounced back with the SEO business plan which worked for about 25 minutes. Not to worry, after a brief stint as the antiterrorism insurance salesman Bob was back as Bob the SBSer, then Bob the VAR. Currently Bob the MSP is one credit card payment short of losing his 5,000 seats of Kaseya watching over the 80 seats across his client base and he’s pawning it on eBay to buy an Exchange server and become a cloud services provider.

Bob… Bob… Bob…

Do you ever wonder how certain people, regardless of time and condition, seem to talk a lot yet year after year they are no better than the year before? Or even worse do you ever notice how some people seem to know it all and then you see them again a while later to realize they are not doing any of the stuff they were such experts at last year?

Love that paradox. But here is the real kicker – forget about the guys that are flunking or that are constantly going nowhere. Seriously, forget about them. Try to explain this one: How is it that there are still profitable OEMs out there that make a ton of money? How is it that people still manage to make a ton of money designing web sites? How in the world does a one man MSP shop in England become more profitable than an entire two dozen employee company in Miami?

That’s what you need to focus on.

And there is no book, no magazine, no mentor, no Yoda that will teach you how to think, observe, research and react in the right way at the right time.

Today, I am most thankful for the people in my life, personal and professional, that have given me the opportunity to learn. I’m glad to put it out there, popular or not, and I thank you all for reading. Speaking of giving, the 1st Vladville newsletter comes in tomorrow.