Friday's suggested reading and some ramblings

If you are a small biz owner and do not subscribe to Inc. Magazine you are missing a lot of valuable insight and potential opportunities. It has great stories and articles from every part of the startup and small business spectrum. Some of the stories are about success and some are about failures - and some in between. I would also suggest FastCompany.

I find it somewhat comforting to to read the trials and tribulations of other small companies like those in Inc. as sometimes it can feel a bit lonely in the small biz world - your friends and family don't understand the hours that you put in, why you would take such risks and why you miss birthday parties for kids (well, other people's children - I draw the line at my own!).

My wife is thinking about reaching out to other wives of entrepreneurs to share thoughts and experiences of the life style. At first, I was like why does she want to do that? Then I realized is its unique to rest of the social norm - its seems the industrial revolution seemed to put more than steel cogs into manufacturing machines - it put every day people (cogs) into the social machine that is home, 8-5 job, do your job and hope that some middle manager gives you a raise or recognizes your potential...

Blogging, Twittering, Networking... Time?

I pose this question to readers of the blog and other entrepreneurs - "When does everyone find time to blog, tweet, network with others and then... pay attention to family and yourself?"

I am so busy building the business and keeping clients happy by just emailing and calling that the other communication conduits seem almost like noise. My focus is about my clients's needs and not mine. I would like to think that I am on my "game" but this piece of the puzzle is escaping me - I would love to hear feedback from others!

Weeeew - Its been an interesting year!

So where do I start?

First, 2009 had a terrible start for Venturality and the country. I was considering my options and I wasn't sure if "janitor" was something that I wanted to add to the resume. So we kept at it.

With a not-so-sane determination, projects and opportunities started coming back in the May/June timeframe. While there are still economic and employment issues, Venturality is positioned to realize a rebounding economy in its early stages. (I say "positioned" because I hate to use the word "lucky" - luck is winning the lottery)

Many of our new projects are web development focused - less "managed services" needs. "Managed Services" has a very strong undertone of IT infrustructure - and less web development. I have stretched the definition to "a company that provides managed/outsourced end-to-end web technology solutions". (thats a mouthful) Venturality does great web development - scalable, performance enabled web sites. However, Venturality also knows how to host the development, testing and production environments very well.

So I pose this question - is it confusing to clients to be really good two different technology focuses? Development and hosting may seem disparate, but we provide the best client experience when control all aspects of the project.

I would love some feedback :)

With that said - I wish for 2010 to be a great year for everyone!

The 3SmallPixels.com Fable

3SmallPixels.com was to be our upcoming foray into web design and marketing. After, some hard convincing from the rest of the team I have decided that we need to stay the current course of strictly being an IT managed services provider (MSP). So our fledgling idea is now DOA... before its prime...

Its easy to get caught up in your own head with new ideas and offerings - that is - "drinking your own kool-aide". So I started on the web design effort without much feedback. It was going to be grand - I tell you "GRAND". What is that ahead? looks like? Reality?!

One of my team members approached me during one of our planning meetings and suggested we reconsider the effort. I listened to my team and felt that the input was dead-on. It was outside of our core value offering and we have partners that can do it much better than any team that I might cobble together at this point in our timeline. Creating another DBA (doing-business-as) group would require additional marketing, business plan and resources. All of these items require time and money - both of which seem to be a very very scarce lately!

So the moral of the story? It is fun to chase ideas, but you may look silly if you are the only one running after them.

BTW - another reason I like to say "We" instead of "I" :)

Watch for it....

3SmallPixels.com is coming.

February 2009

Its the little things...

Today, the new air conditioning unit for the new "cloud space" (ok, ok, its the new server facility). Why did this make me happy? I was like a kid with a new toy.

I guess its because I LOVE to build things. The new server facility has been something that I have built from the ground up - by mostly me - my two hands and a couple spare brain cells (I have to gaurd them closely). The air conditioner is one of the final pieces to make this real and complete.

Also its a nice digression from the day-to-day management stuff. If the perks weren't available - I might have taken a different path ;)

Nothing like a power drill, some screws and some vision to make it interesting.

Surprises?

Keep an eye out this week - we have a couple of announcements! (well, at least we think its exciting)

3 months later...

Argh... It has been almost 3 months since I said we would be posting our new website with our new branding. (well, I have a slight excuse - my wife and I have had our first child July 20th!). I am still hoping to launch it still this month - I will keep everyone posted.

So I have come to believe that refreshing your web presence can be a great incentive to refine your marketing message - its just a little time consuming. I have tried to have other members of the team craft this for me but without defining the message myself it is hard to tell others to do it for you!

Speaking of team members -we have added Ms Danielle Long, as "Client Services Manager" to the team. This is a key position for client interaction - project management, contract creation (did I mention she is an attorney also!), and business development.

Here is the intro that was sent out:

"As Client Services Manager, Danielle Long brings several years of business and legal experience to our team. She holds a J.D. from Loyola University of Chicago, School of Law and was most recently employed as Assistant General Counsel with a large privately held corporation. In her previous employment, Ms. Long worked as a business liaison between her employer and over thirty franchisees. In this role, she was responsible for overseeing the offering and acquisition of several new subsidiary corporations. She also implemented an accountability and training program for all corporate managers. Her previous employment law and contract management experience will be a valuable addition to the Venturality team.

In the role of Client Services Manager, Ms. Long will be responsible for client project management for all phases of client projects, from initial project quotes to final project delivery. We are excited about Ms. Long's addition to the team and furthering our ability to deliver the quality that our clients have came to expect."

Marketing items- Too little or overkill?

Venturality is in the midst of a website overhaul. We have added some services and changed our logo - so the website needs to keep up. I have contracted a professional graphics/web designer along with kicking off some SEO efforts. I feel this is at least a base line requirement.

I have had some ideas of extending the website marketing effort with some podcasts and/or videocasts - waste of my time?

Also, my wife and I have really embraced the green movement. I am trying to move our personal home off the grid - a combination of solar, wind and energy use reduction. I am also toying with the idea of bringing this effort to the company - without being labeled with green-washing. While the primary goal is saving the Earth, I felt bringing our eco-efforts to our marketing would be help grow the company which would help fund our efforts and so on... So my challenge is to incorporate my green efforts without it seeming contrived. Any ideas would be appreciated!

TowerStream gets an A-

(A- grade will get me some grief....)

Uptime:

I have been constantly monitoring our uptime (mostly manually for now). And? --- The service has NOT been down in 2 months. I am pleased.

QOS:

Again, dilligently checking bandwith, response times and up-time, TowerStream provides about 95% near max bandwidth of 8Mb/s. There has been a few times that we have dropped to 50% of the contract bandwidth for a few hours. Its hard to determine though where the bottleneck is sometimes so many pieces involved.

Customer Service:

Tech support has been good and available everytime that I have called. (I think Bob is the only guy that works in tech support)

Sales support has been really responsive and attentive. They have made it easy for Venturality, as a new managed services provider, to ramp up without selling our souls to AT&T. Their whole team seems genuine so far. (Mike P. this was for you!)

Why the A- ? 2 items -

1. The bandwidth drops have me a little concerned but I am going to monitor for the next couple of months. I am trying to determine if it was one our switches... (but I don't think so)

2. Invoicing should be online and managable/payable from a web interface.

I would suggest this service to others looking to find an inexpensive high bandwidth provider that owns the last mile. (especially if hate AT&T like I do)

Internet Autobahn next exit... (part 4 - the finale)

All I can say is FAAAAAAAAAAST.

That is for both, the speed and the install. Within 1 week of requesting the service, I have a full 8 Mb/s synchronous speed (tested via 2wire.com) and 27ms response times from pinging yahoo.

Install was simple - they put the antenna on the roof, drilled a small hole in the side of the building, ran 1 single CAT5 cable and then connected the Cisco 1800 router. I received a block of IPs 10 minutes after the tech left via email from their tech coordinator. Plugged in and we were connected. Too simple :)

Once we have it connected to the rest of our network and we have completed some real testing after 1-2 weeks, I will give a review.

Internet Autobahn next exit... (part 3)

Quick post - Wednesday the techs came out again to try to get a signal link to their wireless tower. After the "two grumpy old men" (the techs - quite funny retired guys doing this for fun) spent about 40 minutes on the roof, they came down and said they had a really strong link.

I was surprised -really. I thought after Monday that there was something in the way - game over.

So, hopefully on Friday we will be speeding along @ 8Mb/s!!!

(I hope there are only 4 parts to this series)

Internet Autobahn next exit... (part 2)

The site survey tech was way early today (usually a good thing unless you scheduled your day to be offsite in morning and no one is available to let the tech in). The tech was worried about the pending snow storm would come during the survey in the afternoon -for good reason.

Anyways, after calling our business neighbors (http://www.littlegreencube.com) to let the tech in, he finally got access to the roof. I got a phone call about 2 hours later, indicating that they were NOT able to get a signal. However, it maybe due to poor weather conditions blocking their visual line of sight from points on the roof - making it difficult to position the antenna.

They will be back on Wednesday for another try!

In parallel, I have continued to let Covad attempt to get T1s installed. Plan B...

Internet Autobahn next exit...

I got a little excited and posted that I was having the site survey for TowerStream completed on Friday, the 22nd. Well, that was wishful thinking and it will be on Monday, the 25th. After the survey TowerStream has suggested the install may happen as early as Wednesday.

Let me say my biggest concern so far is TowerStream's early termination clause. They want the remaining payments for the remaining months of the term of the agreement. This seems a bit excessive.

Also, after speaking to the sales rep and badgering him with questions, I did learn that they only have 75 current installs in Chicago. Venturality will be #76 (should I feel special? or a little concerned as we are early adopters?) TowerStream guarantees 99.99% uptime in their SLA - I hope this is the case!

From country road to Internet Autobahn

In my impatience, I went with what I knew about internet connectivity for the new office. T1s right? (for those of you that aren't techies - a T1 is the telephone company's old standard for data lines for corps )

However, we are starting to do quite abit of hosting - the Computing Cloud (V-Cloud) effort seems to have some legs. Well, our ISP of choice was Covad. Covad was offering 2 bonded T1s @ 3Mb/s for $679/month. I was excited at first - their sales rep was very knowledgeable and helpful (super great guy actually) and they seemed to get things moving quickly.

Then the sequence of events went down hill quickly. AT&T runs the line from their facility to the office location phone room. AT&T can't seem to get it right. Covad also didn't deliver the router and their service tech was less than helpful. So it has already been 3 weeks and probably another 2-3 weeks for either party to get it right.

What to do... What to do... How about some out-of-the-box thinking? Actually, one of the Venturality team members (Jitesh) said a group that he knows of just installed 10Mb/s in the loop for $900/month. So I started searching again and found a fixed wireless provider, TowerStream, that can do 8Mb/s for $999/month! The best part is that Venturality is in the coverage area. (picture me doing the "running man" for excitement). The service is scalable to 100Mb/s and can be installed in days not months.

Well before I get too excited, lets see if they deliver. They will be out for a site survey today to see if we are in the line of site with the Hancock building.

I will keep you posted!

VentureLabs - Houston, we have landed.

Quick post -

We got the keys to the new office on Friday, 15th. So I spent Friday and Saturday unpacking and building desks, chairs and servers. It was good to see my power drill get use outside of hanging pictures for the wife.

I will upload pictures when I get a few moments this week. Busy, busy, busy - we already have guests coming to the office throughout the week.

Honestly, I feel like a proud papa - getting the new office feels like seeing a child ride its bike for the first time.

VentureLabs - Our new home!

Venturality has finally decided to make the leap from virtual to real. With our server farm and bandwidth needs growing quickly - my basement was no longer going to cut it. So, I don't like to do anything in a small way - I decided that we needed plenty of space with plenty of hardware and bandwidth. (insert plenty of Tim Allen grunts of excitement here)

Our new commercial loft space is ~1500 sq ft @ 1802 W Berteau #201. It reminiscent of the .COM era startups - love it, love it, love it.

Some pre-move-in pics (not much to look at, but we move in on the 15th and that is when the furniture arrives) -

BTW - for any techie reader - we have 3Mbs of T1 connectivity for our little selves also and

3TBs of SAN RAID5 storage

multiple dual proc machines

VMWare partitioning to share the sandbox!

Growing Venturality (sound track available on CD)

2007 was a good year for Venturality. We saw financial growth, increased market awareness and the inkling of brand equity. These indicators have given me other aspirations for the company in 2008 -

• %100-%200 growth and the staff to support it


• Consider a move from a horizontal approach to vertical (industry) focus


• Grow our business development team


• Refine our marketing message and content


• Get myself further away from the daily client tasks

- there are probably more (but it is getting late)

To control any growth, is like adjusting many knobs on an large audio mixing board. Pushing them all to 100% will have terrible results (and probably painful for everyone). Leaving them at low levels isnt very interesting and even creates a distraction to the audience.

So I am staring at the mixing board, wondering where to start. This is supposed to be the fun stuff though! However, when your staff is looking to you to insure their near-term financial stability, it is often daunting and the risks involved become clear too quickly.

Then again - I don't like to fail, so I am going to turn up the bass track and hope everyone enjoys the beat.

(epiphany note: Interestingly as a small business owner, if you raise your head from the mixing board (after your many 60-70 hour weeks), you realize that your efforts are far reaching and its all real - sometimes bigger than you expected - almost surprised by the outcome. I think I have ignored some of these moments!)

Linux/.NET in ’08

Odd running mates for 2008? I don’t think so. If you are not familiar with the Mono project, check it out at http://www.mono-project.com. The project is the heavily supported port of the .NET framework for the Linux operating system. Forms, ASP.NET and DB connectivity are all there – with performance being on par with Windows. Novell has embraced and funded this project to use in conjunction with their SUSE Linux distribution.

Why on Linux? As Linux is starting to find its place in the enterprise and Windows 200X becomes ever more bloated, expensive and riddled with DRM, I find the run-in-place application approach of Linux to be the perfect running mate of the .NET framework. No more installation and registry headaches, lower resource overhead and inexpensive updates (e.g. FREE).

Supporting Microsoft’s Windows platform is starting to feel like supporting an oil industry friendly bill to tax alternative fuel companies for existing.

As we begin 2008 and look for ahead, will Venturality vote for the Linux/.NET ballot? I say YES. Look for some strong initiatives from our team.

Where have all the techies gone? doo do do doo do

As the company grows, I am encountering a product supply shortage. The product is quality technology people. We advertise, network and kidnap to find resources to be part of the Venturality team (NOT the kidnapping part - j/k). Finding Americans that have technology skills is becoming more and more challenging. Major corporations are picking up the best of the best and leaving their scraps behind.

Why is all of this?

1. Decreased emphasis on Math and Sciences - well someone else can do it right? Thinking is really overrated.

2. Little interest in engineering careers - apparently there are jobs to be had in "finding ourselves" or reality TV shows.

3. Everyone wants an MBA - because everyone has one? Sorry people, some of you couldn't manage a one-man parade - so keep you $100K and send your kids to college to get an engineering degree. Maybe then the US will not lose it's technology advantage over the global economy.


In the past I was very opposed to using offshore resources. Today, I find myself having to embrace this part of the technology resource supply chain. Plenty of willing and bright individuals from India, China and Russia are ready to work remotely to complete our client projects.

Apparently these countries see the writing on the wall and are investing to gain an edge that the US is going to lose.