Exile From the Herd - Taking care of business

The Low Returns Of High Volume / High Expectations / Thin Margin Customers

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:16:41 -0400

There is an old expression among geeks and hackers: "fast, good, cheap: pick any two" and anybody who is a client of my company knows which two we strive for. So it has always amused me when I see any of the following:

companies who pick ONE of the three: cheap, and think that's enough
customers who think three of three is a realistic thing to ask for
companies who claim to be all three

Over the lifespan of easyDNS, people have admonished me, some politely, some adamantly, that I was "playing it all wrong". I remember a chance meeting with an old friend in the KOS Diner on Toronto's College Street back in 2000: "You've only got one chance, one chance at all to make this work: YOU MUST position yourself to be bought out by Network Solutions, like do what you're doing for free and just get a whole bunch of customers, fast"

I remember some of the calls I took when I was still answering the front line support phones that went something like this:

Continue reading "The Low Returns Of High Volume / High Expectations / Thin Margin Customers"

On divorcing your partners while protecting your customers' interests.

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 15:01:49 -0500

The RegisterFly debacle has reached new heights in a cyber-age parallel to the Great Western Schism which saw Papal succession bifurcate into Pope vs. Antipope in the 14th century. The ICANN accreditted registrar seems to be operating under a similar disassociation with one side running the operation under registerfly.com (which actually wound up here on our nameservers this week) while the other runs a conflicting operation by the same name on the registerfly.net domain. No doubt, this is further exacerbates the problems for Registryfly customers, and seeing as one of the parties is now a customer, I'll leave it at that.

But what is clear to me is that there is a right way and a wrong way to have irreconcilable differences with your partners and if it leads to a dissolution of the association, it can and should be done in a way that is transparent to the customers and the business as a whole.

When it came time for the partners at easyDNS to go our separate ways, we did it with maturity and professionalism. Our customers were unaware anything had transpired until the deal was done, the papers signed, handshakes were exchanged and I posted it to the company blog later that day.

From the time the situation came to the fore to the time the agreements were signed was over a year, roughly the same amount of time this Registerfly trainwreck has been unraveling. In that time, no injunctions were filed, no lawsuits launched, no criminal charges were laid and no animals were harmed in the breakup of our partnership. Our own lawyers never even had communications with each other until closing day when we all showed up at the corporate law firm's offices to sign the papers.

What we did do was engage a third party mediator and held all of our meetings at their offices, on neutral ground. Tempers flared, patience was tried, opinions clashed. But all in all it was a very civil process and as a result, we're still on cordial terms. You can put us in a room together and we won't go at each other like Siamese Fighting Fish.

This all seemed very normal to us. I think we all knew it could have gone a lot uglier, but I doubt it crossed anybody's mind that it could have gotten downright nasty the way this registerfly situation has.

Knowing my former partners the way I do, I can attest to their ethical standards. I know had things gone differently, we still would have all worked together to ensure the interests of our customers. For that, I am grateful to have been in business with person's of such high ethics, because this other situation has shown me that not everyone is as fortunate.

One man's minor bug is another man's tipping point

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:17:16 -0500

I've been on the fence about dumping once of my outsourced solutions providers and bringing the functionality they provide in-house. We've been with them a long time, I have regular lunches with some of their VPs and trade phone calls with the CEO on a semi-regular basis. They're good guys, we like each other. It's all very friendly.

But business is business. I can save a nice sum of cash each year if I ditch them and bring the functionality in-house. But I didn't pull the trigger on this during a round of cost cutting last year because the service was good and it was one less thing to worry about.

Lately tho, we've had some issues and we end up having to worry about some of the stuff anyway. Looking at the future roadmap, we want to go into a market they don't service and we'd have to come up with the toolset to service those functions in that market from somewhere else anyway.

Then last week, a bug rears it's head. A seemingly minor bug over there is causing daily doses of grief over here. We finally isolate it complete with process id's and transaction numbers from their side and open a ticket last night. "Hi, your system has recently started doing X twice every night instead of just once. This causes problems over here because we key off of process-X".

The response came in today:



"The Developers have looked at this and say that it is a very rare occurrence. We are not able to guarantee that [process-X never fires twice] as that would slow down the .... process significantly."

Okie then. We'll muddle through on our own with that. And while we're at it we may as well develop the entire toolkit over the next couple months and then we can send you our notice of termination.

Case closed and thanks for helping me with that decision.