Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

It’s been a tough few weeks at OWN as I think we have become the “it girl” at the same time as the new product releases and upgrades are hitting the market. Although we are turning the corner and things are starting to improve dramatically I figured I’d write this if for no other reason than to share a failure, let it either be a reminder or mortality or graffiti for others that will run into the same issues down the road.

Just like I beat up on Microsoft for making me look bad, I have a ton of partners that beat up on me when we start to suck. I’ve always had an open door policy and people both email and call me directly even when there are issues that should be handled by the few dozen other people in the organization whose job it is to handle those issues. Why? I feel that there comes a point where an executive needs to talk to an executive in another company as the last ditch effort to make things work. So if things look bad, regardless of if they are over $100 or $100,000, I need to know. We track the crap out of the client support and purchasing behavior, but I assume there are at least 10x to 100x problems as we get reports of, which is why they are all at least considered.

So where did I lost da ball game as they say? Well, we announced and launched four products in the space of a month. Never gonna do something that stupid again, I can tell you that much. Because here is what happens – no matter how hard you work and test and plan and prepare, something always fails.

It’s not something uber-critical, it can be something that just annoys people. The problem with small mistakes is that when they annoy the user the perception of your product and service changes from positive to a negative. The worst thing you can do as a service organization is make your users unhappy with your service. Once they are unhappy they will report every issue they face, be it your fault or not, because the last time they went through their checklist something was your fault so this time they bring it to you first.

This starts a cascade effect of a flooded helpdesk. A flooded helpdesk takes support personnel, which is the frontline of all product issues, off their game and makes them the fault monkeys. Fault monkeys spend all day and night apologizing for inconveniences and falling over one another to patch the holes as soon as they are reported but they don’t have an hour or two to take the problem back to the analyst to identify the issues, forward to the programmer or ultimately me to fix them from actually storming the helpdesk.

This creates a further stress on account managers, infrastructure managers and other people in the organization whose job it is to track metrics and the behavior of the system. How? Well, the support monkey keeps track of problems which he takes to the analyst at the end of the shift. When you bring issues one by one they can be fixed one by one, consulted, peer-reviewed, etc. When you bring 20 at 5 minutes before quit time the bottleneck just shifts.

The epic failure in the entire chain of command is when the bugfix introduces more bugs because the fix had not been tested to the full extent and the loop goes back twice the intensity.

What am I doing? Well, talking to partners, making sure the process sticks even if we’re shorthanded, apologizing, even working on support tickets and trying to reach around to the programmers (yeah, believe me, the experience is just as it sounds) so that we correct the issues.

We have been doing something monumental over the past 2-3 days to fix all of this and we’re on schedule to have everything together by the end of the weekend. But that introduces yet another problem that is a little difficult to fix. First, we need to grow rapidly, but the skills of people in the marketplace just stink. This means that training can take a little longer to bring online and we get to train people during graveyard when things are a little slower.

The more important problem, which I hope every service organization reading this is taking to heart and pounding into the paper, is that you get a chance to fail the client exactly once. Yes you can make them smile for a minute with a comp or a gift card or an apology, but once you fuck up you’re fucked. Sorry about the colorful language there, truth of the mater is that once your client has an ounce of doubt into your ability to deliver the service you have promised – even if you’ve stood by your SLA and offered refunds and made the client whole – you are now on the defense and will be thought as the first point of failure because the confidence of your client has been shaken.

It’s tough, it’s ugly and this is why IT is a business and not a lifestyle. You have to be sharp, you have to be good and you have to be on it 100% of the time or you may as well not even bother. And lord help you when you fuck up, because that 40 hour week is something you won’t even be able to dream about because you’ll be working around the clock.

Love it or leave it…

Man, what a fun exhausting and adjusting few weeks it has been. Since I’ve come back to work (my little guy is almost 5 months old) we’ve completed an audit, shipped two products, put in some huge partnerships in queue that I never thought I’d ever see. Speaking of hell freezing over:

That’s Arnie Bellini, CEO of ConnectWise, hanging out in the ExchangeDefender booth at the ConnectWise conference. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we’re up to here.

I am not ready yet to talk about things in great detail but suffice to say, I am coming back from my break with a lot of objectives that will effectively take us to the next step. This past week, both leading up to ConnectWise, booth stuff, talking about my company and our solutions, slimy vendor whoring, hanging out with Dave and Erick, spending a ton of time talking to Dan from LPI, Akash from Zenith, meeting so many of my partners and really talking about what truly matters and creates for the possibility of success..

Let’s just say that the “Turbo” button has been pressed 🙂

I really appreciate it when you folks email me. My address is vlad@vladville.com. I do read all of it, if it impacts what I work in I even respond (if it doesn’t you’re more likely to get a response by posting a comment here and calling me out on it in the open and letting the world judge who the bigger fool is) – so yesterday I got called out for being unpatriotic for my previous comments:

“In this struggle the last thing we need is for people like you to be second guessing funding for people in trouble. Very unpatriotic Vlad!!!!”

Ok, so here is the difference between “funding” and “bailout” and why it’s not a good thing for anyone.

Love me or hate me, I have a fairly consistent set of what is right and wrong and bailing out the idiots for their catastrophic lack of work ethic or competence is a dangerous long term proposition. Once upon a time I wrote a blog post titled “Is the IT community a good substitute for training” where I argued that helping people bridge the gaps across their areas of incompetence is a practice that endangers the end users that are then serviced and damaged by the consultants, sometimes beyond repair. Needless to say, ’twas not a popular thing to say.

Yesterday, I pretty much said the same thing about corporate America.

I’ve been saying the same thing about people who reject the notion of taxing and expect someone else to fix their mistakes.

Here is the bottom line: When you fail, and fail big, there should be consequences. That is what keeps people in line and always calculating tradeoffs, being risk averse, responsible for their decisions.

That is what keeps companies honest and less likely to float the entire company down the tube in order to gain massive payoff at the expense of everyone losing their jobs.

That is what makes people put reasonable investments, work with others, compete on price and services.

The initial .com boom was fueled by the “do-no-wrong” Venture Capital funding that basically encouraged people to build castles on sand beaches as close to the wave because the oceans were going to freeze over real soon now. How did that turn out? Everything but the biggest telcos went under and now we have no choice and no competition. We have three telcos with effectively the same pricing.

When you eliminate risk you encourage people to be irresponsible. If you’re well taken care of and have nothing to lose and the more you fail the more likely you are going to get saved with a huge severance, you not only get encouraged to dream big but you are almost penalized if you fail little. You have to fail huuuuge.

That is not the American dream, that is not corporate America, that is not how this country was built and how the great industries and innovation we have here came about. It came from some frugal people (Ford, Walton, Gates, Jobs) who kept a tight ship and did all they could to optimize their workforce and their offering until they had their own bankroll to change the world and call the shots.

If we change the rules now, and we have, we have effectively become worse than Russia. When you take the incentive out of the markets to perform and be responsible to your clients and employees you end up with stagnating companies on one end with a totally demotivated and depressed workforce not interested in education, and megalomaniac assholes with world domination goals on the other. Russia came under fire a few years ago when they institutionalized (i.e. Government came in, claimed taxes weren’t paid and they jacked the largest oil company in the country) a successful and growing industry. Our government is buying out and covering for the failing industries who are failing due to their own overindulgence in their excesses. Who got to this point by fueling the real estate boom where credit was extended to everyone with no questions asked.

Congress is set to vote today to give the White House the blank check to buy out distressed properties. You remember what happened the last time we gave the Bush Administration a full unaccountable control over anything he wanted to do with no checks and balances? Iraq War. Patriot Act.

Folks are scared of a massive failure. They are afraid to let the system implode in a public way ahead of elections because their jobs are on the line if it starts to seem like they sat through some really bad events. America be damned and all its hundreds of thousands of employees that are about to be homeless.

All so we can save a few politicians.

One day we will return to the days of accountability and risk–reward tradeoffs and maybe at that point people will be able to start investing and creating a promise of returns for the hard work. That day certainly doesn’t look to be close.

Woke up this morning a little low on cash with a worthless I.O.U. certificate for AIG up my crack. Government lended $85 billion to a worthless insurance company that leveraged itself to the eyeballs and with a 5% market drop found itself basically becoming a part of the government and part owned by every American that is bailing it out. So this is what Communism feels like?

The biggest and richest companies that make money offering Americans financial advice and financing “the american dream” are going out of business in a blowout meltdown. If that’s not a sign of how fu*ed we are I don’t know what is.

Everyone likes to talk about the keys to success.

But what about the keys to failure?

I’m dealing with my own today. I am sitting here with two people in the the Adobe Connect conference and we’re working on the new partner guide. As we are writing, revising, second guessing and questioning the way we phrase every other word I am left with a mixture of remarkable boredom and nausea. Kind of like after the thanksgiving dinner with the inlaws you don’t like. Except I’m hungry too.

My sincerest hope is that I don’t pass out from whitepaper-induced coma before I finish writing this sales-contraceptive.

This is what we’re going to give our partners to help them sell our products? I think we should just slap our competitors logos on it and ship it to their partners and see if we can kill some competition.

Maybe I am just dead wrong and the car salesman route to selling bits is better.

I wonder how much money it would take to get Eric Ligman over here if he doesn’t own all of Microsoft SMB already 🙂

I am this || close to shooting an infomercial. Just me, camera, fake Rolex and 3 bottles of fake Viagra.

Hey there. This is our web site. Yeah, no words. Why? Because you’re probably illiterate. Congratulations on finding the f’n Play button. Now let me tell you what you need to do to give us money so you never have to see ANY of these (pointing to the fake Rolex and Viagra) again. (Buy it now action sequence) If they are still watching segway to some really disgusting pr0n that someone keeps on #@%@% clicking on or it wouldn’t keep on showing up every damn day.

Well.. I think I just regained my passion to promoting what it is I do for a living.