Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

To this day Office Space is probably the best depiction of what life is like in corporate America. You show up after a great weekend just to face the crap from everyone you interact with – then you pass the buck on to someone else and hope that the person downstream from you doesn’t have suicidal tendencies that would loop the problem right back to your desk.

By now you’re pretty familiar with my business model – we are the big data center provider for apps and services to resellers, large corporate IT departments, etc. This means that Monday morning is when we get every complaint about everything that has popped up on other peoples networks. I know exactly how this process works:

“Ok, I could fix this in 45 minutes… or I could watch youtube and say that I’ve alerted the vendor who is working on it. Ah well, it’s Vlad’s problem now.”

So what we’ve instituted to keep entrepreneurial laziness from affecting our support flow is “Case of Mondays” blog post. Every Monday by 9 AM folks are to report the issue they are working on across product groups. Consolidate down to a single paragraph or hopefully a short bullet point list.

This way we can preempt questions and close them out on the spot as problems that are being worked on. This will hopefully optimize support time because requests will no longer be investigated individually but will be tracked by a team and notified through the blog. This also eliminates the followup questions from people that obviously didn’t read the manual. “It’s an issue, being worked on, we’ll fix it and update the NOC site.”

Then when the resolution is here we can neatly document it under our KB and NOC as well as Shockey Monkey announcements so that everyone gets to stay in the loop with us. This is just a first step of the goal to integrate our process and support flow into ConnectWise and Autotask and eliminate a lot of waste from support cycle.

I know many of you are MSPs and are accountable to your customers for the state of the network. Take a look at what we are doing, what do you do beyond that to keep the clients who want to know in the know about your activities?

Wayne started this one on his blog but his issue is more about the tighter economic times than what I’d like to address here tonight: the underlying change in the service delivery model for IT is an opportunity, not a threat. The commoditization of a portion of the IT space spells doom to the one-dimensional quzi-businesses and IT consultants who

For the rest of us this is a tremendous opportunity to expand our businesses across new markets and new client bases using the core businesses as the base for the buildout of a versatile technology business that transcends beyond computer repair and installation.

This thesis is the subject of my first newsletter that you can sign up for here.

I decided to leave the free signup ride through the weekend since new signups are still coming in fast and strong. Since I am already tipping a hat that this will not be another piece of SPAM of self-promotional gloating but actual IT content, I figure I also ought to come clean and say that my readers that already signed up will stay on the subscription for free while future subscriptions will be for pay.

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It seems that the worse things look on Wall Street, the more people start to pay attention and show their disbelief at the way the financial systems actually work. Do companies actually borrow funds in order to keep operations flowing? Are bad financial decisions actually bundled, bought and sold without regulation of any kind? You mean the SEC doesn’t regulate the quazi-markets in which banks play with funny money loans in much the same way as the people in the ghetto shoot craps at the wall of a stop-n-rob convenience store?

True.. True.. True..

So what is wrong with the markets? What is wrong with my stocks?

Most stocks carry a P/E multiple. That means that the price you pay for a stock is generally at a higher (at times much higher) multiple of the actual profit the company generates annually. For example:

Microsoft’s P/E is 12, meaning for each share you buy at $23 you are actually paying 12x the amount of their annual profit. Apple is at 18x, General Electric at 9x, and Google at 22x.

Why are you compensating a company several times their income potential? Isn’t that just insane? Yes. It is. You do it because these companies are not valued just on their income, profits, dividends and general financial health, but the hopes and dreams of the investing public that these companies will continue to grow and with growth improve your portfolio and over the long term be worth far more than you paid for them initially.

Ah, the American dream. Full of hope, promise and expectations.

Alan Greenspan coined the term “irrational exuberance” as the .com boom was just getting started, to explain how investors become irrationally excited about the prospect for stocks and investments to do better as the fundamentals of the economy (low unemployment, low interest rates, low inflation, low energy costs) concern your average investor less and less.

Stock markets, and investments, are emotional reflections of our faith in the health of our country and businesses that make up it’s economy. We buy stocks because we believe the country, and all its citizens (particularly corporate citizens) will be better off in the future than they are today..

As you can tell by the numbers, the legacy of the Bush Administration and the prospects for the next one, are signaling that most people believe the worse times are ahead of us, not behind us.

All the more reason to learn about the economics, free markets, globalization and run a business that answers to the customer demands and needs.