Sharing the Risk

Why I Sold eMonarch

At the end of 2010, I began to look at a number of things with respect to eMonarch. I began to ask myself, how far can I take this company and what will it take to get it there. Well I quickly came to realize I had three choices:

1) Run eMonarch at a steady pace and attempt to grow organically with the skills I had and the team I had. We would add 1 or 2 clients every now and then and continue to serve our customers. This would provide a nice living for my family as well as those team members that were at eMonarch. But this is what I refer to as being a "Lifestyle Entrepreneur". This is a business owner that has a good business and it provides him/her with the lifestyle he/she wants to live. There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with being a lifestyle entrepreneur unless your name is Sean Fullerton! I did not want that as I am a very Type A person and like to push the envelope, so that leads us to option 2.

2) Aggressively hire staff with a special focus on sales team members. All small businesses need to become selling organizations to succeed. If you are not growing, you are dying. It really is that simple. But there was a number of problems with this scenario:

    a) I am not a sales manager! Sure I could hire a sales manager but not all good sales managers are good sales people and vice versa. And in a small company, you need to have sales people! 

    b) I do not understand sales people and therefore I am not good at hiring them. I have had some good sales people in the past but as they can probably attest, I did not provide them with the tools for success. I simply stuck them in an office with a phone and email and said "Go sell something!". Not really a good sales support structure for sure!

    c) Time. To begin to grow aggressively in a small company you have to commit a lot of time outside of normal hours. Well that is difficult for me as I have three small children and if success came at the price of my family then success is not worth it. 

    A number of years ago, I did an exercise with a group of fellow business owners where I ask them to write their "I AM" statement. This is a statement about who you are as a person and it really has nothing to do with business. Many of the folks came up with statements that had something to do with their work or business in it. But I told them "Nope, can not be about the business". Many of them shot back that it did! So I asked a very simple question, "If I could guarantee you business success as you define it, but it would mean you had to divorce your spouse and lose your kids, would you do it?" No one went for it. So the "I AM" statement really has nothing to do with business.

    So that long winded statement to say that the Time commitment it would take to get eMonarch to the next level was a cost I was not comfortable making.

    And there are a number of other reasons for option 2 really being difficult. Every business owner has a threshold. This threshold is just how far the owner can take the company. Some owners are able to grow beyond their threshold because they quickly realize their threshold and they go out and find that "one person" that can add enough to the business to help the owner get past their current threshold. But then that person has a threshold and the cycle continues.

    I believe I had reached my threshold as an owner. I have a lot of talents and had grown eMonarch into a wildly successful business that made a good amount of money and provided good jobs,etc. But the next level was going to be tough for me by myself. And that led to Option 3.

3) Sell eMonarch to a firm that wanted to grow Managed Services and had strong leadership that I could learn from and help grow the business with. The key there was really strong leadership that I would feel comfortable working with. You see I am convinced that I would make a horrible employee. But as I thought about selling, I came to realize that most of the companies that I had looked at as potential partners did not have the leadership that I would feel comfortable working under. It takes someone that has been there and been through the paces before I am willing to sit under them to learn from. I had to have confidence that the leadership could take me to the next level.

I found those things in Peak UpTime. I knew Gordon Martin from working with him on the Strategic Planning Committee at our church and had gotten to know him over about 1.5 years or so. It is funny as to me when I found out that Gordon was the President of Peak, I was like "he is the enemy, I cannot talk about what is going on with eMonarch or else he will get some valuable intel on us!" But nothing was farther from the truth. Gordon was a genuine guy that loves Jesus and has an amazing brain for business. Two very critical components for me. 

So as I was walking through this in my mind, I spoke with Gordon briefly one day after a committee meeting and the process began. Peak has some great talent and I really saw how eMonarch and myself could fit into the business as well as bring some of our skills with regard to managed services. And it would be a GREAT win for our customers. We would not be as resource constrained as we had in the past and would be able to really do it even better than we had. Our values matched and I knew that I could trust Gordon.

So why did I sell eMonarch?

I want to provide a stable future for my family.

I want to grow as a leader.

I want to grow as a business leader.

I want to take Managed Services to a much broader market.

I want to give eMonarch customers the best service.

I want to learn.

I want to not do sales management (yet)!

But ultimately, because I felt God place Gordon and the Peak group in my path for a very distinct purpose.

So here is to a new future and even bigger things. It has been a remarkable ride and thank you to ALL the customers, employees and friends that have made eMonarch the success it grew to be.

 

Twitter for Small Business

So today is not original content but a great article from eMyth regarding Twitter for Small Business.

http://www.e-myth.com/cs/user/print/post/twitter-for-small-businesses

Twitter has great potential and some businesses have already figured out how to really utilize it to generate REAL revenue. For example, Dell has generated $6.5 million in product sales since it has started using Twitter with respect to its Outlet sales. So essentially Dell is going to the customers instead of waiting for the customers to come to them.

For a quick lesson on how to use Twitter for business take a look at the following article from Twitter:

http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/

iPad Review

So here is my review of the iPad. I wanted to wait at least a week of using the device before I actually reviewed it so that I could give an actual review after real usage. So I am going to break this review into two parts as I see the iPad being used in a variety of places but mostly split between personal use and business use. And I am writing this post from the iPad as well to show that long things can be written on the iPad without much effort.

Overall the device gets an A in my book as I have found that I spend more time with it than i do my MacBook Air. But let me describe how I use it. First I use it to read websites followed by reading email. That is what I bought the device for but have found that after a week I use it for more than that. The absence of Flash is a tad annoying but I figure someone has to give. I doubt it will be Apple and so I except a lot of sites to begin to phase out Flash in favor of HTML5 but that will probably be a ways off.

I also find that not having tabs is a bit of a loss as I like to cross-reference sites quite a bit when browsing. But overall the browsing has been great.

For business I was a little skeptical at first because I was not sure how the iPad would fit. But I have discovered where eMonarch will be using it. Up until now when we make a call on a prospect we have never used a presentation as pulling out the laptop and a projector was just too cumbersome. Printing the slides also seemed a little low-tech for a technology company so we just did not use them. Even though I feel that a good presentation would make it a little easier to describe our services.

But here is where the iPad will shine for us. Now with Keynote for the iPad, we can open and start the presentation in less than 30 seconds and also get a little of a Wow factor for using the device. The orientation and the simple navigation will make going through a few slides a very effective tool.

Another place in business I see the iPad being a big win will be in the medical community. Up till now, battery life for laptops has been a real limiting factor as well as having this clunky laptop getting in the way. But now with a true 'slate' device, I think that medical professionals will feel more comfortable using the technology as this is no bigger than a notepad or legal pad to take notes.

One of the key things is that it will all come down to the apps though. So far the apps i have seen for business have been OK but not great as of yet. But it has been only a week. So as the apps come out, the iPad will probably become a staple in many business environments.

For personal use the iPad has lots of pluses. One the key things that gauges how successful a piece of technology will be is how it is received by my wife. If she embraces it then I know it is a winner. So I got her and iPad as well and shee took to it right away! We both took our iPads to church on Easter Sunday as our Bibles. It worked! I was a little nervous as to how it would go as I did not want the technology to get in the way of spending time worshipping God. And it didn't. My wife and I were actually able to both read from the Bible easily and even take notes.

Another very cool usage is in the kitchen. For years i have struggled trying to figure out how to have all the recipes we have in cookbooks readily available and use an electronic version while actually cooking. Having a laptop in kitchen could work but the iPad ended up being a much more elegant solution. We found a great app, Epicurious, that has a lot of great recipes and when in landscape mode makes it a viable electronic cookbook.

Watching movies on the iPad works as promised and provides a great experience using Netflix. I watched two separate movies and am going to watch another tonight after I finish this post.

So overall is the ipad worth it, I think so. I have decided to stick with just the wifi version and not get the 3G version. I figure any place that I am going to be at will have wifi. I am considering getting one of those mifi type devices to use with my existing data card. I just could not see paying for yet another data plan. This is where tethering would have been a great feature to have.

An often asked question so far has been will the iPad replace a laptop. I do not think so just as I do not think it was ever intended to do that. There are probably folks that could replace their laptops with the device but not me.

Battery life has been right on. I use it everyday and have had to charge it once. And I charged it when it had 30% left so I could have gone much farther.

A thing I do dislike is having to clean the screen every other day! I am looking forward to the OS upgrade that the iPad will get this fall with the addition of multitasking and a consolidated inbox. Those will be nice features for sure.

But back to to business use. So far - yeah apps are not there yet or if they are I have not seen them. So far I think we will end up sticking with the "presentation mode" for the iPad at work. However I do expect this to change in the near term as developers get going with creating rich business applications for the iPad.

Oh forgot, I have had NO issues with the wireless connection issues that others have commented on. Does not mean those issues do not exist but with the wireless routers I use, no issues here.

So go out take a look at one or if you are in Tulsa and want to have some coffee and discuss what it can do, give me a buzz and I will be more than happy to meet you and show you how I use it. You just have to buy the coffee!

Outsource v2

Just read an articlefrom David Bellini, the President of Connectwise, that discussed outsourcing the help desk if you are an IT provider. He mentioned some benefits and also outlined the reasons why he keeps it internal.

I agree with the internal point of view for eMonarch. We staff our own help desk, we offer our own backup service, we provide hosted Exchange,Sharepoint, OCS, and even soon MS CRM. Why? Because I do not want to be like every other IT provider out there just reselling other peoples stuff. eMonarch is an IT Provider not an IT Reseller.

Could eMonarch make more money in the short term if we just resold all these other services? Oh you bet! But I think they are just short term gains. Instead I believe the long term strategy for eMonarch is to innovate our own solutions for customers and to be the provider of those services where we can.

But perhaps one of the most important part of what David mentioned in the article is the discussion around relationship. Small Business customers want to talk to someone they know. They want to be able and come see your team if they wanted to. Even with our remote backup service, I can say to my clients "You are more than welcome to come see where your data is being kept safe at". Now to be honest are they likely to take me up on that offer, no. But often times it is the fact that the option exists.

So in the end, outsourcing makes sense for some things. But I go back to an earlier post on this topic and I feel that outsourcing your core business is a bad idea.

But the real question many should ask is "What is your core business". Find that out and it makes determining what to keep internal vs. external a lot easier discussion.

The Cloud Continues . . .

Could not sleep so was reading some news and came across a piece that IBM has now signed the largest cloud deployment with the move by Panasonic with 100,000 users initially and then moving to 300,000. Panasonic will be replacing MS Exchange with IBM's LotusLive.

So the Cloud continues to get adoption as more and more companies realize there is a better way to manage the technology instead of deploying it internally and managing it internally. What I find fascinating about this is that technology is finally becoming just a tool as it was originally intended. 

No one goes out and makes their own hammers or saws these days. We just go to Home Depot and pick up hammer so we can do whatever job we are doing. And the same will continue to happen with technology. Instead of making or managing our own infrastructure, business will continue to look for ways to outsource those tools and reduce their costs by not having huge teams to manage the environment.

The Coming Cloud ‘Catastrophe’ – FUD Alert!

Mark Anderson is the CEO of Strategic News Service and he provides annual predictions with respect to technology. To be honest, I have never even heard of this guy until three days ago when someone sent me a link to an article in BusinessWeek with respect to his prediction with regard to a "Coming Cloud 'Catastrophe'". So I read the article and I had to find out more.

In a nutshell, Mark Anderson predicts as the #6 item on his top ten list for 2010 that there will be a "Cloud Catastrophe" where "something" will happen in the Cloud that will erode the trust of CIO's with respect to the Cloud. Mark has NO idea what this will be and even says so in his speech which you can listen to here. But he believes it will be something along the lines of an outage or a security breach that will slow down the adoption of the Cloud.

Ok and your point is . . .

I am calling this Hog Wash!!! I do not doubt there will be some event that someone will be able to point to that will say "See, Mark was right!!!" But this kind of thing has already happened without the dire results that many are trying to push. This very year (2009) T-Mobile lost a LOT of customers data when they LOST data for users of the SideKick. But crazy thing happened, people still keep using SmartPhones and T-Mobile even resumed selling the Sidekick with a month!

Google had an outage on February 2, 2009 and then again on September 1, 2009 but another crazy thing happened also – The City of Los Angeles moved their email platform to Google in December to the tune of 30,000 users! Another company MWV moved 12,000 users to Google Apps as has Delta Hotels and Resorts and MANY other companies all since the outages have occurred. Hmmm, does not sound like a "Catastrophe" to me!

But there is more . . . In the US there were 34,017 FATAL car crashes for the year 2008 (around 93 a day!) but we all keep driving our cars to work every day and making cross country trips during the summer. AT&T is DEAD LAST in customer service but people are still buying the iPhone.

So while I will agree that there will be an "event" that occurs in 2010, I strongly disagree with all the coverage this prediction is getting. In fact it is the typical FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) that many like to spread around so that they can continue to operate in the status quo. The concept of Cloud Computing/Utility Computing is a fundamental shift in the implementation of technology that will require a significant portion of the IT community to rethink how they do business. I have a question that I have been rolling around for most of 2009 - "What will we manage when there is nothing left to manage?". As an IT provider, I better be thinking about that change in the IT space or else I am going to be out of business. It will not be enough to be "the trusted advisor", we will have to be the provider.

IT providers will not be safe enough to just "resell" other people's stuff under their own brand or outsource their core offering to someone else. Instead IT providers will have to change how they do business. We will have to "provide" something of tangible value to the customer.

We must adapt and change!

FUD will only keep us around long enough to go bankrupt!

Outsourcing your core business

Would you do that?

If you are a legal firm, would you outsource litigation?
What about a medical doctor, would you outsource your patient care?

Probably not but this is quickly becoming the trend in IT service firms. I am seeing what I perceive to be a troubling trend amongst my peers to outsource the very thing they are supposed to be doing for their clients, managing the IT environment of their customers.

I can understand the desire as most IT providers are small companies that the biggest cost is payroll and when someone says you can lower that cost, then they jump all over it. But is this the best thing for the customer?

I tend to think not! I believe that you should NOT outsource your core business. Some may make the argument that "Our core business is being the trusted adviser to our customers with respect to technology." But I would challenge those folks to go ask their customers what they believe the core business of the IT provider is. I bet they would hear something very different.

Providing IT support is not a glamorous business on the surface but with technology becoming such a vital part of the business landscape, it is an important business.

There are lots of examples of successful outsourcing for sure. If your firm is a marketing company, then outsource the coffee, the IT support, the cleaning of the office and probably even accounting functions. But I bet they won't outsource their marketing! Doctors typical outsource transcription and billing services and this has proven to be successful.

Outsourcing can provide a lot of benefits to a company (it better as that is what we do!) but be careful of what you outsource.

Motivate Employees - Can it be done?

For those that have read my blog before, you know that I am a member of a peer group that meets to discuss different issues that affect us business owners. Well on of the regular topics that comes up is how to motivate employees.

This time our group really got into a great discuss or else I am just paying closer attention due to it being a big issue at our office. When you start to have to motivate employee discussion, the "more money" is often the default answer. This can come in the form of bonuses, raises, etc. But I have a default stance that I should not have to pay employees more just to do their job. But I also typically have led with a stick and not with a carrot as many of my employees will attest to.

But I really struggle with trying how to motivate employees to go the extra mile. And it appears I am not the only one as many in our group this week had the same question.

There are a thousand different ideas on how to motivate employees floating around on the Internet. Just google "how to motivate employees" and you will get lots of articles on how to do that very thing.

One of the often concepts is to pay more, give more bonuses or something else that involves more money. I think those things should be as a result of already seeing a motivated employee. When the extra effort has ALREADY been done, then reward the behavior. Not the other way around of "Here I am going to give you more money in hopes of them doing a great job". That I think is a bad idea.

But in our discussions it is often brought up that money is NOT a great motivator. I found a good article on line that said the same thing and had some other great ideas as well here at the Free Management Library. The article was written by Carter McNamara, PhD of Authenticity Consulting.

One the key points that stood out to me was the concept that we the employer cannot really motivate the employee but rather the employee has to motivate themselves. Wow! I think this is a key concept that we as employers often miss.

One of the most important strategies is getting the right people on the bus and Forbes had an article where Dr. Lynda Dahlke said "First, you try to avoid bad employees by hiring carefully". You cannot make a good apple pie with bad apples! That has been a hard lesson to learn of the course of the years.

When I queried my staff about what motivates them, it was all over the board. Some did say money, some said time off and others want to know they are doing a good job. But also I think it is important to make sure that the employee knows what is expected of them and to understand that the expectations are not negotiables.

I often hear people say to get employees to think like owners. Well I tend to disagree with that because if they thought like owners they would be owners! I know there is probably a lot of heated commentary that could be said about this last statement.

Trying to find out how to motivate is still hard though. How honest is your staff going to be? If they do not answer money then are they really being honest or just trying to not appear greedy? And even if you do all the things that they have said motivates them, are they going to go the extra mile or just come to expect that as what is "due" them.

So can we as employers truly motivate employees? Can it be done? Someone has to get it because I see evidence of great employee loyalty and employees going way above the call of duty and so something has to be driving that.

So what are we going to do about it? Great question! We are working on it and look for ways to evaluate employees and reward good behavior. I do not think we will be able to create one system for all but rather have to take a look at our staff and figure out what each one wants and develop a single system with various rewards that are more personalized for each individual.

Because I think that most employers want to treat their employees well and I know that is true in my case. Being an employer is a HUGE responsibility and many feel like their staff is just an extension of their families. 

So can we as employers truly motivate employees? Can it be done? Someone has to get it because I see evidence of great employee loyalty and employees going way above the call of duty and so something has to be driving that.

I will keep you posted with what we come up with and hopeful some feedback from our team as to its effectiveness but for now just remember use the carrot!

A Vision Transformed to Reality

Ten years ago, I wrote a vision document for eMonarch that outlined my vision for eMonarch and what I believed the future of technology would hold for small business. It revolved around a concept/business model called Application Service Provider (ASP), whereby  a small business would no longer buy servers, software, and other applications but would rather "rent" them from an ASP.

The first attempt at this vision is what got eMonarch going and I still remember sitting in my living room with a lot of HP servers with my little brother trying to get it all put together so we could make it real. But eMonarch was not ready nor was the market. So eMonarch ventured down other paths but I strove to keep the vision going in my mind as I developed our offerings.

This vision became a reality this month at eMonarch with the signing of our first hosting infrastructure client and the actual turn-up of that customer. It was a big day for me to see a vision that I had outlined 10 years ago to finally come to fruition. And nice to know that I was not crazy but just a little early.

Our offering is based on a business being able to get almost all of the software they need to run their business (MS Office, Email, IM, CRM, etc) all without buying the hardware or even the software to run it. Instead, we host the infrastructure in our data center and the customer accesses everything via a remote terminal session.

What makes this really exciting for me is that our transition to a managed service model was a step along the way to the hosted infrastructure that we are know offering.  We package it all together to create a rich environment for our customers.

Another great part about this solution, is that when a customer tells us they want to go hosted, we can typically have them up and running in under 2 hours. Everything ready to go!

But to be honest, the major story here is that for every business to not give up! As a business owner, we are often thought to be crazy with our ideas and visions. But sometimes you just may be early or the market you are in has not caught on to the idea. Stick with it and look at ways to take baby steps to lead to the realization of your dream. In my case, it took many years to watch the market change and to carefully plot the course along the way to make sure I never lost sight of my vision.

Sure there were weeks,months and even a year or so when I thought "That vision is dead, need to come up with a new one" but I worked to kick that thought out of my head and drive forward always looking to see if the technology and the market was ready.

It has and exciting times are ahead as eMonarch drives this vision into the market and also looks at how to further develop the solution.

Evolution - New Service

Background

eMonarch is a managed service provider that has made its mark in the flat-fee managed IT space for small business. Our services differ greatly from the typical break-fix IT provider as we assume the majority of the risk associated with managing the IT infrastructure of a company. We are the IT department!

Here is how I typically have looked at the break-fix model:

The only person that wins is the IT provider. When a server is down, the customer is loosing money on both fronts. The customer is paying the IT provider an hourly rate and the customer is also loosing productivity (aka money) during the down time.

In a flat-rate model, the person that is losing is the IT provider but really this is the opportunity for the managed service provider to shine by preventing the downtime to begin with. You see in a flat-fee model, the managed service provider is paid to keep things running smoothly.

Roadblock

In our model, we have run across businesses that are not quite ready for managed services as we define it. They really wanted to do business with us as they liked our philosophy and talent but could not afford the full services that we provide.

These businesses were typically under 10 desktops and had only 1 server.

Solution

So we developed - Evolution! Evolution is a cross between a fully managed IT environment and a on-demand IT service. We realized that some businesses need to ease into managed services and so we developed that solution for just those customers. As the name implies, Evolution will provide a path to managed services that all small businesses can work with as they transform their business.

For $299 per month, Evolution provides a small business with a program that will enable their systems to be monitored and a number of maintenance tasks to be taken care of without additional fees. This program will be for 10 desktops and 1 server initially and available for an 18 month term. 

The business will have access to our help desk, CIO services, On-site services, and all other aspects of eMonarch services at an hourly rate.

Each month eMonarch will monitor the usage and work with the business to determine if moving to our fully managed suite, Chrysalis IT, is right for them.

I am excited about this new opportunity to add to our customer base but also to be able to provide an offering that provides some great value to the small business community.