I’m a sucker for cheese. You know Wallace from Wallace & Grommit? “Hhmmm, cheeeese, Grommit”. That’s me. I love cheese. Especially on a Sunday evening. Glass of wine, nice cheese, and the jazz on the radio. So my darling wife picks up some nice cheese this afternoon while she’s at the shops. A nice little cheddar, one of those small round wheels sealed in wax. And we get talking about why she chose that particular cheese. Turns out it looked ‘better’. There were other options that she found first for the same price, but this one was sealed in wax. Made it look ‘better’.
Packaging matters. Really. You may have the best damn customer offering this side of where ever, but how do you package it? You may be so proud of what you offer your clients, and know without a shadow of a doubt that you have the best quality and value offering around, but what do your customers see when they’re deciding whether to buy your product or your competitors? Will they pick yours off the shelf over the others? Is your offering sealed in wax?
We’ve just started work with an existing client on a fair sized project. Essentially they have inherited a rack full of IBM servers and associated equipment from a related organisation, all a couple of years old, but still great kit. For this particular client this presents a long overdue upgrade to their existing system. This particular office has grown extremely quickly to the point that we’re now supporting over 30 users on a single HP ML110 server (that’s the reeeaal small baby server, by the way). It’s been a great test of what the ML110 can do, given that we would never put one of those in for more than 5 users. I can tell you though, we’ve been working pretty hard here at the garden shed lately to keep that poor little box running.
So in a nutshell the project is to migrate their one little SBS 2003 Standard system onto SBS 2008 Premium, splitting out various services onto different physical servers. The final system will look something like this…
Server 1) SBS 2008
Server 2) SQL Server, SharePoint, Search Server
Server 3) Terminal Server
Now running this as a project, we know how much time it should take. We know that it should take x-hours to migrate SBS off. We know it should take another x-hours to build up SharePoint, migrate their intranet across, and so on. So how’s our time going so far? Not so great to be honest. And do you know why? Because the initial resourcing for the project was outside of our control. We’re working on IBM kit here, whereas we normally work on HP. Am I worried about IBM kit? Not in the slightest, it’s good stuff. But the point is we don’t work with it every day like we do with HP. We don’t know the kit inside out, so we’re having to go through a substantial learning curve to come up to speed. Not only that, the kit is all second hand, so it’s been configured, spec’d and so on to fit together in a certain way. To a degree we’re having to reverse engineer that process to understand how and why things were spec’d the way they were, so that we can put them back together again in the right shape. And all this takes time..non-billable time.
It really does raise the question of how strict we should be in enforcing our standards on our clients. After all, we insist they have antivirus protection for their own good. Ultimately we insist on this to save them the pain and cost of an infection. So what about enforcing standards such as what hardware we’ll work with? And I’m not talking about ‘only tier one’ stuff, I’m talking about ‘only the HP xxx series’. If we work with hardware that we know inside out, we can provide much better, faster support on that kit, which should ultimately provide the client with a better, cheaper experience. Or is the fact that I’m classing our learning time as non-billable really cushioning the client from that reality, at our expense? Where do we draw the line between flexibility, and efficiency?
And I say all of that non-rhetorically. That’s a question. What do you think?
So I’m sitting in the gate lounge at the Brisbane airport waiting for my (delayed) flight. I’ve got a coffee (acceptably good), finished a bacon & egg roll (borderline dodgy) and to be honest am quite enjoying myself. It’s truly a pleasant experience to be able to sit down, relax a little, and actually be surprisingly productive (it is a work day, after all).
I think one of the greatest challenges any small business owner faces is getting themselves out of the operation. Consider that most small businesses are started by ‘technicians’ (ref: The eMyth). We’re used to getting our hands dirty. That’s the point. No small business would make it past the first week without the founder actually ‘doing the work’, so it can be tough to reach a point when you actually have to stop doing the work, and hand it over to others. It’s a huge leap of faith, but one that absolutely MUST be taken if the business is to ever grow past one or two people.
I have great faith that my team knows what to do, and that our clients will receive excellent attention in my absence (albeit with one less set of hands to do the work). That doesn’t make it any easier to step away. I think that at the end of the day I love what I do, and that creates a certain gravity that pulls me back into the operation. The challenge is that I also love security and stability for myself, my family, my staff and my clients. And that stability will depend on us growing into a larger organisation to better ride out the inevitable dips and bumps of life/business.
Growth for the sake of growth’s sake does not make sense, but given where Grassroots IT is today, growth is the best thing for us. I’ve run the numbers, looked at different scenarios (and indeed constantly continue to do so). The last 12 months has been one of internal growth. Getting our staff up to speed, our systems and processes in place, basically preparing to grow. With our currently structure, I think the ideal size is somewhere around the 10 to 15 person mark. At that point, we would need to look at adapting our internal structure slightly to accommodate the next step up. But right now, I think we’re well positioned and ready for some controlled growth.
It's Microsoft Partner Roadshow time again, when all of us little Microsoft people lose a day's productive work to sit in a hotel seminar room and bask in the warm glow of the mothership. Now the last few of these MS has copped a hiding for offering sales/marketing blurbs, and not much more. Now given that all of the attendees are MS partners, you can probably safely assume we're up to speed with that stuff, and wanting something meatier. Ie: something more technical. Thus, in exchange for paying real money to attend this time, we were promised what are called Hands-On Labs. Ie: Here's the software. Load it on your laptop, click the buttons, play. So you can imagine how unimpressed everyone was when the very first session was a 3 hour powerpoint slide deck. Groan. The presenter certainly knew his stuff, but that's not the point.
Speak to your audience, Microsoft! Especially when you've asked them to pay for the priviledge, and promised them something they really want. We are technically minded IT business people. We do not want marketing babble. We are not impressed with the glossy stuff. We're here to learn and improve our knowledge, not get sweaty over MS evangelism.