The original article is located here: http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/02/punching-above-your-weight-tips-for-small-startups-taking-on-the-big-guys

Here’s the re-post:

Boxing, mixed martial arts and wrestling employ weight classes to ensure the competition is fair and you’re tested on skill, not size. In business, weight classes don’t exist, so if your company is a young, skinny 95-pounder, while your industry is filled with 300lb giants, you’re going to need to tighten up your laces and punch way above your weight. If you want to survive these mis-matched fights in today’s saturated marketplace, you need to get comfortable.

Here are tips to help you, the little guy, use your small size and agility to your advantage.

SPEED

Your competition is juggling thousands of employees, sweating quarterly shareholder expectations, and managing disconnected systems from acquisitions. They are simultaneously watching out for the challengers next to them, in front of them, and behind them. They are moving at a slower speed.

All you need to worry about is building a product or service that drives revenue.

To be fast, and to stay agile as you grow, you have to hire great people and then get out of their way. When we’re hiring new employees I respect experience, but it’s one of the least important traits on our list. Our hiring priorities are, in order: person (character and enthusiasm), skills, and then experience. This isn’t an industry-specific mantra, it can be successful in all types of companies. In his famous book Setting the Table, restaurateur Danny Myer explains how he went from opening one little café in New York City in the 80s (with little previous restaurant experience) to becoming one of the best-known entrepreneurs in the industry. His secret? Hire great people.

After reading a competitors’ quarterly shareholder update recently, I noticed that they hired 400 people in three months. It’s not hard to imagine that their priorities are in the exact opposite order as ours, making their beefiness a lot less scary. Your heavyweight competition is hiring at a scale to “fill seats.” If you attempt to follow them and hire only for experience, a whole multitude of potential issues will arise, like silo’d thinking and an entitled work ethic, which result in higher turnover.

The larger your competitor is, the more red tape and “processes” they have, and the slower they move. Here’s where your pace can work a little to your benefit. Because you’re hiring on a much smaller scale, every single person on your team can really move the needle up and down and affect the company. Take the extra time during the interview process to find people who fit, not just people with skill-sets that fit. Then get the heck out of their way.  A great example of an enterprise that has grown smart and avoided this common pitfall is Zappo’s. Why? It’s a people-centric business.

Hire well and empower your team to get in the fight, then they’ll move as fast as you need them to in order to get the job done. They won’t be hamstrung by reviews, memos, and layers upon layers of approvals. While you’re competitors are going through the motions, your people are throwing punches at them they didn’t expect and are too slow to block.

POWER

There’s an immense amount of material on how the Internet and social media have brought the “share of voice” cost down to pennies on the dollar. Meaning, a small company can captivate an audience just as well as a goliath when it comes to the social sphere. Regardless of what it costs to be heard in the market, what’s important is what happens when once you get prospects off of your Twitter page and onto your website, or better, in a room with you.

Social media hype has companies hyper-focused on being heard, but they are disregarding the importance of when they’re seen. Positioning is the single most important aspect to your company’s success. In other words, your power lies very heavily in your brand.

Presumably, if you’re fighting in a class above your weight you’ve taken the steps to properly identify your market, and this has to be crystal clear to your audience.

For example, the hosting market is highly competitive. We have so many rivals, including several very large companies, that our market is safely what one would call “saturated.” When FireHost entered the hosting market, we offered security and secure hosting in many forms. As we continued to grow, we recognized that cloud hosting was the next important step and security was the biggest issue within the cloud. We decided to invest and focus tighter on security and offer only cloud hosting.

This required us to shed all of our other hosting offerings (dedicated servers, email hosting, file backup, etc.). We then re-built our technology stack and systems from the ground up around this sole focus. Our choice to position against our rivals on one strong, focused, and specific type of hosting has left them vulnerable.

Our company lives and breathes Secure Cloud Hosting. When we are head to head on a deal against the competition, our product offering is deeper on cloud, our sales staff is better educated on security, and our prospects can see this. Our close rate is over 50 percent.

Your bigger competition is likely fighting with the power of a multitude of product offerings. They have to in order to stay big. If you focus on one front with a strong core (service or product) and give it everything you’ve got, you can beat them by simply exposing a vulnerability.

STAMINA

Your competition quite possibly has weekly marketing budgets that exceed your yearly revenue, but they’re advertising in areas you don’t need to be in. As a smaller company you cannot afford to educate everyone that your category is needed and important. Your competition is spending millions a week educating the market already – let them.

Spend your marketing dollars on differentiating your offering to the buyers your competition educated. This has tremendous effects on your customer acquisition costs because your marketing team’s energy is focused on tighter campaigns and your sales staff is engaged with educated buyers. While competitors are burning a huge amount of energy just to keep the lights on, you’ll be burning it slow and steady and have energy to spare. It won’t take a whole lot to give your small company a burst of extra stamina when you need it (cash), but it takes a lot more juice for a heavyweight just to maintain a certain level of energy.

Once your core includes great talent who can quickly innovate (speed), a focused position in the market (power) and an attractive customer acquisition cost (stamina); you will be ready to head into the ring with a winning fighter. With this package, a small burst of stamina could position you for a knock out. There are plenty of companies out there that will place bets and invest in you for the long haul once you’ve proven you’re a worthy opponent. You know what they say, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight…

Entrepreneurs, you know what I mean. We’ve all faced a never-ending pile of simple, repetitive, but necessary tasks that must be completed routinely and on time to ensure “the machine” runs and continues to grow as smoothly as possible. The pile starts small and manageable, then the list of required tasks gets longer and harder as you win more customers, foster more vendor relationships, and plug more into your business.

Inevitably, one day you’ll look up from a mundane task and cry, “Help!” The way you answer the call will determine the fate for you, and everyone working within your four walls. Even the “outsiders” like investors, partners, and service providers will be impacted by the culture you build to sustain your existence. It’s your responsibility to ensure all parties’ best interests are upheld. No pressure, eh?

When I reached that point with my company, we couldn’t afford to bring more people in to help just for the sake a doing so. We had limited space, limited time, limited funds, and a damn good idea that was starting to catch on. That’s it. The scope of resources available to make it come to fruition was limited to our wits and decision-making skills.

Knowing the way we chose to tackle our growth would severely impact the future and value of our company, I evaluated three options:

1. Continue to do this work ourselves at the sacrifice and delay of tackling our bigger objectives,
2. Invest in Capuchin monkeys, or
3. Automate

There were no successful animal trainers on staff, so we chose automation.

When we sat down as a group (yes, we were small enough to still do this) to decide what to automate, EVERYONE had a request. We faced about fifty individual projects just to plow through the initial list. Obviously, we didn’t have the manpower to complete them all at once, so we set out to eradicate them in priority order based on how closely they matched our concise and over simplified definition of monkey work.

We prioritized all the automation project requests around that simple definition as mentioned above, and set out to tackle the most time consuming, frequent, and costly ones first. Here are a couple examples of how how we did it.

Automate Quotes for New Customers

In sales, you gotta strike while the iron is hot, and we found that between live chats, phone calls, and questions from existing opportunities, our sales personnel weren’t taking the time to send quotes for new services to every single prospect. This wasn’t because they don’t “care” or because they enjoy closing less deals, they simply didn’t have enough time in the day to prepare a hand-crafted, Word-based quote for services every time a prospective customer inquired.

The process of creating the quotes was so arduous, our sales manager HAD TO CHOOSE which prospects were worthy of the time commitment it took to put together and send over a simple quote.

As the CEO of FireHost, I would like to see growth very quickly (sound familiar?), I care about getting as many customers in the door as possible. Learning that many interested, prospective clients weren’t receiving adequate follow up was a huge punch in the gut. I was confident that automating this process would make our sales people more affable, keep them charged up for doing the right things, and ultimately lead to more customers.

We scoped, built, and launched the system, then revised and launched it again over the course of sixty days. Without going into all of the gory details, we essentially created a turnkey process that allows sales people (or anyone in the company) to very quickly customize and send quotes to potential customers. Along the way, we synced up this process with our website, so customers could get quotes online, and then integrated it with our billing software.

The system is now fully adopted and operational, and we’re experiencing real, positive payoffs.

• Sales personnel are saving 25-45 minutes per quote, per prospect.
• Billing personnel are saving up to 60 minutes of reconciliation and validation time per completed order.
• Clients are ordering services 20 percent more frequently than before.

Automating the rest of the systems, one by one

Once we tackled automation for delivering quotes to prospective customers, we set out to make provisioning new customer services faster and more accurate.

When a customer orders online through our shopping cart or via our online quote, all items the customer purchased are immediately brought into our provisioning system. No more lost time on attention to details and we’ve eliminated the communication gap between sales and support.

Building on the success of these two endeavors, we’ve introduced automation to customer service, customer support, and marketing. In every case, investing in technology as well as smart humans to manage it has helped us reduce errors, increase productivity, and achieve optimal return on investment.

Did it cost us money up front? Yes. Did it cost us a lot of time? Sort of. Did our lofty ambitions feel like a huge undertaking for a small company? Definitely. Today however, we can’t imagine doing business any other way.

The process continues to evolve, and I can honestly say that removing monkey work from the hands of homo sapiens has resulted in more quality time being spent on tasks that matter and less mistakes overall. We now take the time to call customers and make sure all is well because we have those precious few minutes in the day. What a concept. Can’t do that when you’re knee high in monkey work.

Creating something that makes people say, “I’ve never seen that before” takes courage and instinct. It also takes foresight and planning. It might not sound as though this boldness is a good bed-fellow for checklists, but the old adage is true – failing to plan is planning to fail, even for rebel rousers.

This is especially true for entrepreneurs that move forward with a somewhat controversial program to draw attention to their product or service. They must understand that “daring” and “impetuous” are not mutually exclusive and that inviting the world in to meet your business means that some might try to tackle it.

This sense of daring and a willingness to create a rub in the marketplace has transformed many an entrepreneur into a legend (Steve Jobs, Thomas Jefferson). Taking risks has also caused a fair share of crash and burn moments. Here are some good and bad examples that come to mind, and what we can all learn from them.

Oops – We Didn’t Think of That

We’ve all seen the ads that showcase a certain CEO’s face and personal social security number. You couldn’t miss it. They were plastered all over billboards, TV promos and the company website. By showing the CEO’s personal social security number, consumers were to feel comfortable that the company was able to protect their identity and their banks accounts regardless of how much personal data was made public.

It’s reasonable to assume that the company planned this marketing program to be a free invitation for bad guys to try to steal the CEO’s identity (or the identities of their customers for that matter). They might have even planned for his actual identity to be compromised at some point. I can almost guarantee that it was not in the plan for his identity to be compromised 13 different times and for the Federal Trade Commission to fine them $12 million for false advertising. Bold idea, yes. Fully thought out, perhaps not. (Lack of preparation tarnished this brassy idea.)

How about the case of the chicken and Oprah? When KFC launched their grilled chicken they thought – Oprah, of course! On the launch day they had Oprah herself, the holy grail of endorsements, announce free chicken for all viewers through a special promo. What they didn’t do was think through the onslaught of customers who would flood their franchisees, who didn’t have enough product to fulfill the demand. What they ended up with was annoyed customers and a public relations nightmare on their hands.

Before putting any bold plan into action, sit down with your team and run through all of the worst-case scenarios. Don’t be afraid to be far-fetched either. If you want to avoid a pitfall, you have to have foresight. This is remarkably hard for many people (especially visionaries) because they don’t want to fathom that their idea could fail. Or worse, they believe that even if they fail they’ve still “won” because they made an impression. The idea that “all press is good press” is bunk. In reality, bad impressions (especially first ones) are hard to overcome.

Fast-Thinking Brass

On the flip side, there are those rock star entrepreneurs who have mastered the one-two punch of “great idea” with all their ducks in a row. One that comes to mind is the founder of a yoga studio in New York City who had an idea, identified and teamed with the right partners and had the quick-moving entrepreneur mentality to capitalize on a golden opportunity.

The founder understood far ahead of the press that yoga burns lots calories and enlisted the help of a large and well known university to conduct a study to prove as much. He pitched the fitness press with the idea and promised an exclusive on the study to the first editor that agreed to write the story. When Self Magazine accepted the pitch and wrote the story he was thrilled. He had planned that the combo of a top tier media outlet with research from a respected academic source would equal credibility for his studio, which proved to be true.

As icing on the cake, when the editor suggested a video to accompany the story would be useful, the CEO made an on-the-fly decision to produce one and have it ready by the print date. The result? Huge reach through the Self readership and a video that sold out after the magazine hit store shelves, increasing profits and building a new, unexpected revenue stream. (This business owner’s quick feet and will keep his brass shining for decades).

When we have a big, hairy, fantastic idea our instincts tell us to publicize it. That’s a good instinct, but before making a big splash where you promise something fantastic, take the time to make sure you do have something fantastic/unique/worth talking about. Many a startup has jumped the gun on PR, mistakenly believing that if they could just get the mass public attention everything else (including customers) will follow. In reality the opposite is true. Do something impressive with your business first, then offer it up to the press.

The Net-Net

Marketplaces are crowded, and for smaller businesses to get noticed they often need to inject some brass into their business planning, smartly. The boldness can’t be at the expense of the business itself.

Here’s something to consider: most of your crazy ideas are just that, crazy. Take the time to weed through the wild hairs that make you look bad so you can spend more productive time on the opportunities that will make you look great.

Clever entrepreneurs must consider all aspects of their strategic plans and make smart decisions about tactical execution for them. Some questions to ask yourself before letting it all hang out:

• Have I discussed the idea with trusted advisors that will actually tell me ‘no’?
• What are the implications to future funding rounds and my acquisition strategy?
• How does this affect my brand long term?
• Do I have enough product or money to support the promotion?
• Will this hurt or help my recruitment efforts?
• Does it invite attacks that I realistically can’t ward off?

The best advice for entrepreneurs that feel their internal brass trying to escape is to plan, think and plan some more. Then, and only then, grab your polishing cloth and rejuvenate your business.

My “a-ha moment” came when I was running TargetScope, an interactive marketing and web development company. We were successful (by our own measures), and the company had a growing customer base and profit margin. I thought I would continue down this path, then the website of one of our biggest clients (a very large, very well known turkey company) was hacked… the day before Thanksgiving 2007.

It was a critical time for our client, and we (the development team) were scrambling to help get their site back online. We realized instantly the potential for a vastly larger business opportunity – secure web hosting. Even though we’d made the decision to head down this new path, we didn’t stop TargetScope (as you know it) in the weeks or even months that followed.

More than two years passed before we turned on the faucet and publicly entered the web hosting scene. How did we know the time was right? How do you know when to open the floodgates?

Typical, type-A entrepreneurs will move as fast as possible, and your team will require that energy and drive to make it to the finish line. My warning, however, is not to throw caution to the wind and put the cart before the horse. There are some conscious checkpoints that must be addressed along the way to help ensure your success.

Get the Product in Shape

We made the decision to become a secure managed hosting company in 2007 and spent almost every minute of the next full year questioning what it takes to get there. Quibbling over the “grand scheme of things” bought us the time required to physically and technically build a secure hosting infrastructure – the backbone, the technology, the network, the guts.

During that year, we didn’t launch our website. We didn’t deploy a complex search marketing strategy or ad campaign. We just focused on the hosting solution to ensure it could fulfill the needs of websites in peril.

Start Pounding the Pavement

Every entrepreneur convinces him(or her)self that launching a business is a chicken and egg game. “We need marketing to get customers!” you cry, and when the media budget runs out or doesn’t come in, you wave the white flag of defeat. Game over.

That’s sad and lazy when you can get customers the old fashioned way. By pounding the pavement and <gasp> talking to people about their business needs. It’s a great test, and it’s one you need to do first hand. If you the CEO personally call on several prospects and can’t close a deal after coating them in passion, confidence, your spiel and a fair price, then your product isn’t ready, or your product is not in fact the greatest thing since sliced bread. Thank goodness you found this out before pouring seven figures into a marketing campaign!

I will admit that pounding the pavement is not the easy route; it’s the effective route. When we were confident our secure hosting configuration was a viable, marketable business solution, we started pounding the pavement.

We won several clients and learned a metric ton about what we were doing wrong, and the latter is why it’s necessary to be in business before you launch the business. I’m serious. Don’t issue a press release; don’t sign up for a tradeshow; don’t commit a penny to media coverage until you have a proven solution with happy customers to back you up.

Set Your Sights

Version one of our secure hosting brand focused on one customer profile – companies whose websites have been (or are being) hacked. We knew we had a premium, secure hosting solution that was affordable for a wide array of businesses, but we ignored them. We didn’t call them. We never once tried positioning our hosting service as a preventative solution. We had anointed ourselves the “white knights,” “the good guys” and searched for companies who have experienced the devastation of cybercrime so we could swoop in to save the day.

It took six months to realize we’d set our sights on the wrong target and another six months “getting it right.” This is an important lesson. Take some time to iron out the kinks on a smattering of clients’ valuable feedback. Define your target market. Conquer it. Then expand your horizons. You may be surprised by where you find your most lucrative clientele.

Prepare for Liftoff

Clients are signing up. You’re discovering the most lucrative target market. The “system” is working smoothly. It’s time to launch. Not quite.

Ask yourself, “If we received 100 orders in 24 hours, could we handle it?” Answer honestly because this could make or break your future. Make sure you have sufficient levels of automation in place to receive, process, fulfill, and sustain orders and serve customers with as little manual intervention as possible.

Make a Splash (or a belly flop)

Two years after the great turkey hack or 2007, we had a few hundred customers and a new name for our business venture. FireHost became the secure hosting solution for companies of all sizes who are seeking shelter from malicious hacker networks before their website or web application is compromised.

We were ready to turn on the faucet, but we could only afford a trickle. To really launch our company, we needed marketing dollars. Big marketing dollars.

We raised $2MM in series A funding and spent it as conservatively and “smartly” as we could. So should you. My advice? Only make commitments you can fulfill, and market with money you can afford to lose. In reality, if you have a great product, you won’t need to spend much in the beginning. And if your product or service isn’t absolutely awesome, you should really go back to the drawing board before making a splash.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat, and Be Open to Try New Shampoo

Moving the spigot from a trickle to a torrential downpour really means communicating the problem and educating the market with everything in your power. Wild, thriving success may not happen right away, and that’s okay. In my opinion, it’s best to start slowly. It buys you some extra time to unmask the enigma by proving the concept of your marketing plan, physical presence, and brand image.

At the end of the day, knowing when to turn on the faucet can be just as risky as anything else in business. Plan the best you can, hedge your bets, and remember: The quickest way to kill a startup is to market a bad product. Make sure you have a proven model first and turn on the faucet second.

A version of this article appeared in VentureBeat on 08/24/2010.

At FireHost, we do not negotiate pricing with prospective clients, and here are a few reasons that I strongly believe you should not either.

Negotiation Kills Precious Time
During a sale, I want every minute, every word, and every thought to foster value for the buyer and seller. When the conversation turns to price, attention is redirected to a detail that doesn’t really matter. Now, I’m not suggesting money grows on trees or that you should spend recklessly, however if all eyes are on price, it’s easy to lose sight of the business need. When the conversation is derailed, services are misconfigured, requirements are shortchanged, and that’s just the beginning of the downward spiral to disaster.

Negotiation Degrades Your Unique Qualities
If you’re good at what you do, defend it. Don’t degrade it. When a prospective client’s decision is based largely on price, give the client one more minute of your time (but not a second more). In that minute, adopt a very deliberate dialogue. Try something like, “Our pricing is $____, and here is what’s included… ______. Any questions?”At the end, you’ll know if the relationship can move forward, or if you can move on to more lucrative endeavors.

It’s easy to forget that money IS time, and that’s exactly why you won’t catch anyone who works for me saying, “What are you looking to spend?”, or “If I lowered our pricing to ___ would you buy today?”, or the classic “Let me run that up to my boss for approval.” It’s just a bunch of run-around, time-wasting crap. If a prospective client doesn’t “get it” when you elaborate on your unique features and benefits, reallocate your time to one who does.

Negotiation Convolutes the Financial Model
Revenue forecasting is obviously based on sales numbers. Flexibly negotiating each deal can cause huge price swings. Your team constantly struggles with calculations to determine how many more deals must be closed, and by month’s end you could have to make hard choices about who will get overcharged to make up a shortfall. Inaccurate financial plans hurt your business and create unnecessary anxiety at all levels of the food chain.

It’s difficult to accurately forecast with that model, and the entire organization will waste time explaining and justifying the variances.

Negotiation Makes You Look Stupid
Take a few minutes, pick a solution-based service (like managed hosting), and call around with zero intention to buy. Waste the sales person’s time and negotiate with them just to see what kind of “amazing” discount you can get.

You will quickly forget who you were talking to and even what is unique about what you are buying. The entire conversation will focus on price. Is this the best light in which to portray your business to prospective clients? Probably not. Why? Because negotiating parties just sound dumb. Here’s a weird, one-minute video that clearly represents what I mean.

Instead, Practice Transparency
I’ve spoken at length with sales staff from other companies, and you wouldn’t believe the games they’ve designed to close deals. Some companies even want customers to think, “I really got a great deal! They’re losing money on me.” Yeah. Right. If you believe that, come see me about some ocean front property in Arizona.

FireHost offers secure, managed hosting. For every product we offer, our team knows exactly what price is required to sustain a healthy company. And guess what? That’s the price we charge.

We’ve taken great efforts to simplify our entire offering and publish our pricing online. I’ve yet to find another company in our space to publicly show their pricing this way. This is a HUGE competitive advantage for us. Sure, we may lose a few (unqualified) leads because we allow prospects to configure a hosting solution online, but I’ll take organic “weed out” over a huge staff of sales engineers preparing obscure custom quotes that will never get by the bottom line.

Transparent, fair pricing has allowed our staff to spend quality time with qualified prospects and increased our team’s productivity over 10x. I strongly suggest you stop negotiating now, and reap the benefits by year end.

NO.

My superhuman abilities come by way of being able to withstand continual, hard knocks (or kicks in this case) from opportunity… Pretty impressive eh?

It was thru this series of blows to the head that the idea of “my opportunity” (FireHost) manged to break through my thick skull and become the up and coming secure hosting company it is today.

After several years at an absolutely fun job with a fast-growing agency (where I was building large websites for large clients during the dot-com hay day), I set sail and started my own interactive marketing agency. Soon after, the dot-come bubble burst <pop>, and all the large clients with large agencies pulled back on spending. Good thing for me because I was now an agency of one and could undercut any Gucci wearing group that had monstrous overhead to feed.

Building websites and doing online marketing for the next couple of years, I was building a solid portfolio, working with fun people, and growing a reputation as a so-so marketing guy. I was happy and comfortable. Then, an email came in from an associate saying we have an opportunity to do a website for Qualcomm. A couple of dog and pony shows later, we landed the account.

We were to build an eCommerce website for CDMA Technology training DVDs, and each DVD would have several minutes of preview footage, and I knew my current development environment wasn’t going to cut it. I politely asked Qualcomm IT to set me up with a development server. DENIED. Luckily, my project contact (Jim) understood the requirement and agreed to pay me for buying a server on which to develop their new web application.

<Donkey Kick One – my thought at the time, “Cool, I’m going to have a development server that I didn’t pay for.”>

So I went to Dell.com and bought the biggest server my credit limit allowed – one whose price I hoped wouldn’t cause Jim to choke. I threw the server in my office, and it was connected to my newly purchased (fast at the time) T1 line. Three months later, I’m presenting the finished site to Jim, and the user experience is horrible. The T1 connection was too slow to adequately test the site under “normal usage conditions”. Jim demanded we put the web application on a fast network immediately because the project was at a standstill.

<Donkey Kick Two – my thought at the time, “Dang, what the heck is this going to cost? and Now I have to FTP to make site updates.”>

Quicker than you can imagine, I was collocating space in a newly built data center. Thinking that I’d be pulling the server back to my office after the site launches, I contracted for a month-to-month agreement with the DC… crisis averted, for now.

A month later, it’s time to launch the site. I deliver all files to Jim and the Qualcomm IT staff deploys the site on their network. VERY shortly after, Qualcomm’s marketing team sends an email announcement to over 50,000 of their partners. The site brings the network to its knees.

In an emergency conference call, IT says, “we were not expecting this kind of traffic, and we’re not capable of handling video content!”

Someone on the other side of the phone says, “Where’s the development server hosted? Can we use that and see if it helps?”

I reply, “It’s in a datacenter, and we can give it a shot.”

They re-point the site to the development server, and it handles the traffic like a champ. Voila! I’m in the hosting business, and my next biggest challenge is determining an equitable fee for the new service offering – on the spot. <gulp> I throw out a price, and Jim approves – without hesitation.

<Donkey Kick Three – my thought at the time, “I left money on the table!”>

That remorse was quickly replaced by frustration because my new powerful development server was long gone, sitting in some data center. Yeah, I know. Our first hosting client was Qualcomm, and I was pissed for losing my development server. #dumb

My very next client was in a hurry to get his site launched, and the hosting company (who shall remain nameless) failed to install some critical components. So fed up with the hosting company’s lackluster skill set and customer service, I offered to throw him on my server for $50 per month until his hosting company could figure it out.

Without hesitation, the client answered, “yes”! The hosting income was just a fraction of what I was already charging them for their site. The extra money was great but the real value came in time savings and trust.

<Donkey Kick Four – my thought at the time, “There really is a market here.”>

I continued to offer website hosting as a supplemental service in the interactive agency, and over several years we built our client base from agency customers. Things were going great and then…

RING RING – The CTO and CIO from one of our larger clients, Butterball Turkey, called (with their legal team). This conversation went like this, “Chris, one of our websites was hacked.”

Me – “Oh No!”

Them – “We need it fixed ASAP. We need to know why it happened, and we need assurances it will not happen again.”

Me – “I’m on it.”

My stomach was in knots. I began to worry that the agency would lose one of our largest web development accounts because of a hosting problem. Ugh! As application developers, we quickly diagnosed that the site was SQL-Injected and was delivering “drive-by downloads” to all their site visitors. It was a pretty serious problem.

In a panic, I called all the largest hosting companies and explained what happened to my client’s website. ALL of their responses were basic and unacceptable – “We can install Antivirus.” “We can restart your server.” They weren’t any help at all, so I turned my sights to another option – enterprise technology.

After intense research, I found that web application firewalls (WAFs) could help protect Butterball from this kind of attack. Without hesitation, I bought the equipment, read all the documentation and installed it to protect the site. Right in front of my eyes, I watched the WAF block all sorts of bad activity. It was working!

<Donkey Kick Five – my thought at the time, “What about all our other clients? They need protection! And why aren’t other hosting companies protecting websites?”>

Bingo. Combine a huge problem with a very large marketplace. Add in hosting companies who are unwilling to step up and respond, and you’ve got a (growing) niche. From that moment on, we reinvented ourselves, rebuilt our entire network, and devoted our business to protecting websites who need protection.

So to wrap up, I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who are killing themselves to come up with the next idea. That’s all good, but I must say. If you’re like me, you may be getting kicked in the head with an incredible opportunity everyday.

It was the final game of the regular season and we were playing for the district championship and of course it was the final inning, bases loaded, two outs and a home game so was packed with friends and family. Kenny Black (head coach’s son) was next up to bat and I was on my feet ready to watch. Coach Bobby Black yelled “UMP! Batter Change!” and then Coach Black looked at me and said “Win the game Chris.” Before I knew it I had my helmet on, bat in hand and took two strikes swinging in two pitches. If you know anything about baseball, that’s not a good start.

I called timeout and jogged over to Coach Black. I really didn’t have anything to say to him to be honest – I just wanted to get as far from the batter’s box as possible. When I got to Coach Black, he looked at me dead in the eyes and said “Chris – just go up there and hit the ball.” You have to know Coach Black to appreciate that simple statement but the impact was in his delivery. There was not a doubt in his mind that I could do it. There wasn’t a spec of nervousness in his eyes. He had 100% trust in me even when I did not.

It would be fun to write that on the next pitch I ripped a 375 yard home run and have my own The Natural moment but I didn’t. Not that it matters but after a long at bat comprised of nine pitches of fouling and taking balls, I walked in the winning run on an inside curve ball that missed the plate by an inch.

A week later I asked Coach Black, “Why did you take Kenny (his son) out of the game and put me in?” His response, “I trusted my gut.” Another classic simple Coach Black response.

Would you have the conviction to “trust your gut” to pull your own son out of the game to put someone else (especially in a slump) in?

How many times have you said “&$!@ I should have listened to myself” after you were wrong?

Thank you Coach Black for trusting your gut and trusting me. This experience changed my life.

If you haven’t read about me please go there first. It could shed some light on why I’m intense (crazy) and motivated (hyper) about life.

I care about you… so much in fact, I don’t want to waste your time. So do NOT read this blog if you answer Yes to any of the following questions:

• Do you go to work on Monday still wishing it was the weekend?
• Do you believe that 15 years of experience outweighs passion?
• Do you have big dreams but you’re too lazy to go after them?
• Do you have zero interest in engaging with me either positively or negatively?

I’m not looking for traffic, I’m looking for engagement. If you’re looking for a motivation blog, Gary Vaynerchuk sure does a great job telling it like it is.

If you answered No to all, please contact me so I can get to know you better and I can also be contacted via Twitter: @chrisdrake.