Do you have an attitude of gratitude?

Yesterday we wrapped up our HTG3 meeting here in Raleigh at the Microsoft offices. It was a great couple days of sharing life and business together. We traded great ideas, cool technology hints, little known secrets of the web - but most of all we spend a couple days living life together. One of our agenda items this meeting was some "thank you time" where the folks could express gratitude to others in the group for impact that had been made on them and their businesses over the last three years of meeting together. We don't do that nearly enough. Not in our business life, and certainly not in our personal lives.

None of us becomes successful on our own. We are helped by mentors, vendors, distribution partners, other small business IT owners - we get help from all over the place. It may come from reading an article in a magazine or listening to a podcast. This meeting we had Cecelia Galvin, editor of ChannelPro magazine, sitting in as an observer for a bit. ChannelPro is one of the places I get ideas for my business. But how often do I take time to say thanks to the folks who make it happen. HTS would fail without the investments made in us by our key vendor partners. We would have no products to sell, no message to market, no future. Without our distribution partner - Ingram Micro and their team - we would never survive. They not only pick, pack and ship the things we need to have work to do, but their services and interaction with our team make it possible to succeed. The members of HTG, VTN and other peers share so many great ideas that we SWIPE (steal with integrity and pride everyday) that if we stripped the things we have learned from others HTS would be a pretty lonely place for me to work because it would be back to that one man shop I started 23 years ago. We didn't figure out success on our own. We did it by learning from others and imitating what they were doing our own way.

So I want to take time to thank the many who have helped me personally become what I am today and for the investments made that have allowed HTS to become the company it is today. More than that, I want to encourage you as fellow IT professionals to take time to write an email or place a phone call to at least one person who has made a difference in your life and your business. Don't let the opportunity to bless another with a heartfelt thank you slip any longer. Develop an attitude of gratitude and be one of those unique few that say thank you to people every day. It will set you apart. The world is great at taking and expecting. We need to become great at sharing, giving and being grateful. Do it TODAY!

Working with Vendors

We had a great day yesterday in our HTG peer meeting sharing about business and life. One thing keeps coming up over and over the more time I spend with partners - the frustration of trying to work with vendors. I had numerous conversations with partners yesterday and most every day for that matter, about how they struggle to be connected to the vendors their very business depends on for success. It is a strange phenomenon. Vendors are very dependent upon us as partners to sell and support their products for success as well. So it really is a situation where both parties need the other to succeed. But somehow there are so many breakdowns in that relationship it just seems to be a mess for many most of the time. Partners get frustrated and jump to the next vendor thinking the grass has to be greener over there only to find the same end result. The reality is that a partner-vendor relationship is about people and that is a very complicated affair. It is really not all that different than being in a deep friendship or marriage - you have to work at it and not give up. Marriages fail because people decide it is not worth working through the problems to get to the other side. There has to be something better. Partner - vendor relationships fail for the same reasons. They consist of imperfect people who don't always do what is expected (even though those expectations are not clearly defined by either party). They consist of change in personnel and programs and direction by both companies. They are a moving target that require a lot of determination and hard work. But if I was going to sum it up in one word - success in building a vendor relationship requires one thing - COMMITMENT. From both sides - moment by moment and day by day. It is not always going to be pleasant or fun. It will be frustrating. But as partners we need to make wise choices on who we will go to market with, select a handful of go to market partners, and then make a deep commitment to get connected and stay committed to them. We can't move with every change in the wind. We have to be honest when we are frustrated and work with them to resolve it. We also need to be grateful when things are good and thankful when their products and programs have a positive impact. I hear a lot more whining than I do gratitude from the partner community. It is like vendors "owe us" or something. They don't owe us any more than we owe our customers. Certainly we don't like to think of that relationship that way. I treat my vendors like a customer, as that is what they truly are. We are blessed to have deep relationships with our key vendors - Microsoft, HP, Sonicwall, Ingram and a few others. Building those has taken many years and a lot of work, and the process never ends. People change and it is a continual process of going deeper and wider in each of those companies. But it is well worth it. We are blessed to have great vendor partners. It is a win win for both of us. It can happen. But it starts with a commitment and then rolling up your sleeves and getting to work.