SMB Summit is over - success

SMB Summit 2008 has come and gone. It is all over except the clean up. We had over 470 people that were registered and with the day passes over 500 that were involved. What a show! There was a lot of very hard work by the SMBTN leadership led by Jim Locke, our conference director Mike Iem from Ziem Group, and the HTS team. Of course, HTG and SMBTN members jumped in and did a multitude of tasks and presented content and engaged vendors and just made it happen. It took a village to make this event a success - and the great news is - the community responded.

I had a chance to talk to a few more vendors today - and they are still very pleased. "Best show we have ever been too" was my favorite line. I heard the same from many of the attendees. We had a strong half day of great content again today. I have the privilege to moderate a great panel of four partners on growing your business. We never got past the first slide. The questions started and kept coming for an hour and a half. But it was spot on and exactly what they wanted - answers to their questions. You can never go wrong with that.

The MS - HTG online graduation was great. We had 65 graduate and Lane Sorgen, central region VP presented a very compelling commencement speech on the partner of the future. Aanal Bhatt from the WESS team in Redmond presented the graduates with their copy of SBS2003 R2 and Scott Scrogin who led the program presented their certificate of graduation. We can be very proud of these companies that effectively worked their behinds off to pass.

The town hall meeting closed the event. We heard a lot of very good suggestions to make a pretty darn good conference even better in 2009. Thanks for all the positive comments and suggestions, and the accolades to the team for a job well done. I pass mine along as well. It went well, we were blessed, and everyone left happy and ready to get after it.

I was able to hold prayer meeting in my room each morning from 7-7:30 and over 40 different partners came and prayed at some time during the week. It was a great way to begin each day and something I intend to continue doing in coming events.

Thanks for your support and participation. The next event I will attend where many of you may participate is Microsoft's WPC in Houston in July. I look forward to seeing you there!

Remember, vision without execution is hallucination. Go back and take your learnings and put them to work. Do it now!