2012 SMB 150

The SMB 150 is produced by SMB Technology Network (SMBTN) and SMB Nation and brought to you by BlackBerry. The SMB 150 honors individuals who have made a significant impact on the worldwide small and medium business (SMB) channel.  A three-part process determined this year's list of SMB 150 influencers. The competition began with an open nominating process, followed by the SMB IT community voting on the nominees at www.smb150.com. In addition to the community vote, a panel of industry experts judged each nominee based on a variety of relevant areas. The community vote accounted for 40% of each nominee's overall rating, with the expert panel's decision contributing the remaining 60%.

I am excited to tell you that I have been selected for this honor this year. You can find the entire list here. As you look through the list, you can see why I am so excited to be included on any list with these superstars, but really excited to be considered one of the 150 most influential people in the SMB channel worldwide with them.

What does this mean? To me it means my peers think I make a difference by helping people run their businesses in the SMB space. That is huge. Gaining the trust of vendors, partners, and users in an industry is humbling, and empowering. I hope I am able to reach and assist more people in adding to their business with my inclusion with this elite group.

A big Thank You to all who nominated and voted for me, as well as the panel for their endorsement. And no, I’m not moving to Hollywood now. I’ll still be here, writing my blog, helping the SMB community.

Monitor Yourself

For many years I have helped IT companies understand and grow their businesses. There are many people and companies out there telling you how to do this. A lot of their advice focuses on adding products or services to grow your business. What if you could measure yourself?


That is what Corelytics helps you do. Measure your own business. The exciting news is they are having a roadshow. So if you have ever wanted to check them out, they are come to you, or close anyway.

They’re hosting the 12-City Small Business Tour with Intuit, Microsoft, Constant Contact, Concur, Cisco and T-Mobile.  First city is Seattle April 12. Complete dates and venues will be published on the Tour website. Here is their official press release.


Seattle/Bellevue, April 12 
San Francisco, May 17
Los Angeles, May 24
Houston, June 14
Raleigh/Durham, TBA
Dallas, TBA
Denver, TBA
Atlanta, TBA
Boston, TBA
Philadelphia, TBA
New York, TBA
Chicago, TBA


You cannot grow your business if you don’t know your business. You need software like this to help understand your business.


I can help you go, I have some discounts and a couple of free passes.

Managing for Success 2012

I hope my blog helps people. I write my blog with the hope that my words will make people think, and help them in their business. So while this isn't a typical blob post for me to make, it does what I want my blog to do, help you. I can think of no better way to do this than to tell you about a good friend of mine and an even he is holding. 

Karl is an author, speaker, and trainer who focuses on helping computer consultants and I.T. Professionals improve their business practices. He is widely regarded as someone who provides click-by-click instructions on how to be a successful technology consultant. He is the author of nine books (available at SMBBooks.com). His blog - SmallBizThoughts.com - has more than 40,000 visitors a month and is considered a training resource for many I.T. consultants. The blog has experienced an audience growth rate of almost 600% over the last year.

Karl is hosting a 3-day online conference for computer consultants in June 2012. The conference will focus on building successful business processes and will feature some of the best business and technology speakers in the U.S.

Have you ever wanted to attend an IT conference on running your business? Have you ever wanted to go to a conference without the travel? Now you can.

Speakers include . . .

Karl W. Palachuk - Author, Blogger, Managed Service Provider

Patrick Schwerdtfeger - International Speaker, Author, Social Media Expert

Stephanie Chandler - Author, Online Marketing Expert

Bob Godgart - Industry Pioneer, Entrepreneur

Arlin Sorensen - Community Leader, Super-Successful MSP

Matt Makowicz - Author, Coach, Trainer

Ken Thoreson - Sales Trainer, Sales Management Expert

Josh Peterson - Professional Coach and Business Consultant

Stuart Selbst - Professional Coach

Bob Nitrio - Managed Service Provider, I.T. Pro Leader

Dave Sobel - Author, Trainer, Virtualization MVP

George Sierchio - Author, Coach, M&A Specialist

. . . and others we can't name yet. Stay Tuned

Go here for more information.

http://www.smbonlineconference.com/

I hope you get the chance to meet and know Karl as well as I know him. As well as these other speakers that I am proud to call Partners, vendors, and friends. 

Marketing Up With The Joneses

We all know about keeping up with the Joneses. I don’t know if you have seen the movie, The Joneses. I linked to it if you haven’t.

It is all about creating demand by selling the dream. That, and staying true to yourself, but we’ll save that part for another blog. How do you market? How do you measure it? Are you tracking all of it?

Even the “ripple” effect? The intangible marketing that your employees do every time they meet with, talk to, or interact with anyone? Believe me, this does more than any radio ad you have ever run.

Sell the dream of whatever you sell, every time, everywhere, everyone.

Big Extended Dysfunctional Family

Or I could have called this blog, connectors in your life. Or don't F people, karma works. Because I have seen an overwhelming response from the channel.

Most of you who read my blog know I lost my latest gig recently. I did what I do, I talked about it, in my blog, on Facebook, on Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, email, text, hell I may have even spoken to someone about it. And the response from everyone has been amazing.

As most of you know I am a positive person. I believe things happen for reasons and you are more likely to see your next greatest thing with your chin up. I have talked to people who told me they heard from multiple people that they should speak to me. This type of story is helping carry me through.

Where did all these great people come from? While I’m not sure I deserve them, I think I earned them by being their friend when they needed one. Connecting someone here, an idea there, passing a lead, taking a call, showing someone how, telling what I know, and generally just being one of the big extended dysfunctional family that is the SMB community.

Thank you all and keep it coming, by the way, Mom loves me best.

Brand your Marketing and Marketing your Brand

Had a great discussion with my VP of marketing today. He helped me remember a key thing. A bunch of small unimpressive voices singing the same song is a choir, even a few world class singers singing different songs just sound like noise.

What does this mean? Stay on message. Pick your go to market brand message and stick to it. If you have too many different messages all your intended audience will hear is noise.

This doesn’t mean only have one person or one voice, but have one message. You may have an official Corp blog, but you may also have several additional personalities in your company blog as well. each in their own voice, each from their own point of view, all from their heart, but also all on message.

Democratic Support

Do you treat your customers like Kim Jong Il treated North Korea? Well maybe that is harsh, but do you give them just enough to keep them happy and keep them in the dark?

I was watching the news stories showing film footage of distraught women sobbing over Kim Jong Il’s death. All I could think was if you only knew what we know you wouldn’t be shedding a tear.

If you went away from your customers lives, would they shed a tear or jump for joy when they discovered what they had been missing?

We cannot run our customers networks like a closed society. You cannot be a choke point of information. We should have the Voice of America attitude. More information. More choices. More work. Happier customers.

Democratic support works for everyone, when it is done right.

On a Personal Note

Those of you who read my blog on a regular basis know this is not a blog where I write about myself. Instead I have always written about lessons I have learned in business or life in a short easy to understand way (I hope). Today’s blog is different.

Today I want to tell you about my decision to accept a position with Bradford Networks.

Bradford Networks is a Network Access Control (NAC) provider that is transforming the market by developing and delivering a cloud based NAC solution for the MSP and SMB space. (http://www.bradfordnetworks.com/cloud)

I was fortunate enough to have a real icon in our industry, Amy Luby, ask me to join her in developing this offering for our channel, and I was honored to accept.

I see this as a huge opportunity to provide our partners a service that has been missing from their managed services offerings. It has been missing from their offerings primarily because this service has not been available in a format or price point for this market. Now it is.

I am so excited about this opportunity and I am looking forward to sharing more information about it with all of you.

Allison Hasn't Stopped...

When should you ever stop? That is a little open ended, so when should you stop growing your career and skills? OK, sounds stupid, everyone one say it together, NEVER! But for real, when is enough, enough?

I started thinking about this when I saw that Microsoft CVP Allison Watson was starting to Blog again. My first thought was cool, she will have great information. My second thought was, WTH! why would she need to write a blog? She is a VP at Microsoft. I have had the honor of watching her speak from the main stage at a Worldwide Partner Conference, what more does she want? Then it hit me, the word is need.

Why do I write my blog? I needed to. I had things to say and blogging let me do that. I haven’t spoken to Allison, but my guess is, she needs to blog as well. When it is all said and done, we keep getting better and taking on more work to challenge ourselves and to grow as people. While I don’t consider my blog work, it is a challenge to write 5-6 a week.

So while I might not reach CVP at Microsoft, I’ll keep climbing and growing, and of course blogging, because I need to.

Spotifying the Gap in Your (Social) Life

Spotify took some heat from privacy advocates for the way they were handling the interaction with Facebook. They quickly patched that by allowing you to listen privately. So if you do want to listen to, oh I don’t know, Boy George or “disco hits of the 70s”, you can do so without seeming to be uncool to your friends, real and virtual.

Got me thinking about other things you might do that you might not want a digital trail, but isn’t the lack of a digital trail going to raise a red flag? If you wanted to ditch your girlfriend and go to the football game with your friends, how you going to do that? Even if you don’t check in, tweet, post, take a picture that is geocoded, how you going to stop your friends? Even if you stop them, where did you say you were? Where are the check ins from there? Groupon? Foursquare? Even if you said you were sick, you should have checked WebMD. You my friend, have a digital gap that needs to be filled.

This reminds me of the the way the Russians used to find our quietest subs, by looking for places in the ocean that had no noise. Those areas had no noise because our subs were so quite they made no noise, and so big, they blocked the background noise. We solved that by placing mics on each side of the sub that picked up the ambient noise and broadcast it on the other side of the sub through a speaker. Effectively filling the gap with noise. That is what we need, a gap filler.

So if we, the digital social generation, ever want to do anything cool on a “sick” day again, we had better develop a way to post ambient life noise, or the lack of  a digital trail may get us in trouble.

Fast Food Sales

I’m not talking about selling fast food here, I’m talking about selling in a fast food environment. What is fast food? Cheap, easy, good, quick, convenient, in short, a commodity. What makes you drive past some fast food places and stop at others? Branding.

There are people who eat no fast food, there are people who eat fast food, but I have never met anyone who eats at all fast food places the same amount of times. They like some better than others. Maybe it is the food, but most likely, marketing.

Have you established your sales brand? Your company needs to have a brand to sell your products and so do you.  You may not be selling a product that is a commodity, but we all see to people who live in a commoditized world. You know to structure your sales to the customer, what about your marketing?

The Community Effect

I don’t care how good a sales person you are, you can’t do it alone. I’m not even talking about your coworkers and support staff. I’m talking about your community. Those people who are your competitors and peers who teach you more in a conversation that hours of sales training.

I learned this lesson more than 5 years ago when I entered the software business. Before that I worked at a small VAR that didn’t get the concept of community and leadership, so we languished, a small fish in a small pond.

Working with partners, vendors, and competitors at an uncountable number of events has made me better in every way. As much as you learn at events put on by other companies, you learn more at your own events. I learned this with our Community Live event. Even as a small company you can plan an event to help your clients, vendors, and yourself. If you want to see how one of these can be run, look here, and think about attend one of these events coming to a city near you.

It is a Fish Eat Fish World

I know the normal saying is dog eat dog world, but for all my time on the farm, I have never seen a dog actually eat another dog. I have a fish tank in my office, and it happens all the time. I also have never seen a health active fish get eaten either. So are you fish food?

If you are an active Salesperson with healthy sales habits not likely to get eaten in your tank. There are some factors that can change that though. The rule they tell me at the fish store is an inch of fish per gallon of tank. Is your tank crowded with too many fish? Are there some sharks and some minnows, or do you have a nice community tank with a happy school of fish?

If you are a happy minnow with a bunch of sharks, you better get busy growing, or you may get eaten. If there are too many fish in the tank, you better stay active and visible, or you may get flushed.