SMB Nation Blog

SMB Nation has been serving the Bainbridge Island area since 2001, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

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What happened to SMB Nation?

Sunday, 05 June 2016

SMB Nation Admin

Analysis/Analytics Harry's Corner

Recently a friend of SMB Nation asked what’s going on at SMB Nation? The question created an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve accomplished this past few years. And it offered insights that we need to be louder in trumpeting our accomplishments (forgive the pun).

Workshops. We host a workshop every two (2) weeks on average annually. That’s a lot of motion to roll-out approximately 26 events in 12-months. It keeps us busy. Our events average 100-attendees. The topics, typically presented by Grant Thompson are technical first, moneymakers second. Our customers have a high bar about learning something they don’t know (and how can I make money from it). I’ve yet to see Grant stumped so I think we’ve reached that goal. In the second part of the year, you can look for a “Tour de Cloud” workshop tour highlighting Azure and security topics. Anyone up for analytics? Lemme know.
Webinars. We host 30+ webinars per year. Backing out holiday weeks and fishing season, it’s a once-a-week cadence. We work closely with our community sponsors to provide insightful content and not just speeds and feeds. It’s a tough conversation to have but we’ll keep pushing for your best interests.
Content. I personally write 100+ blogs per year. It’s harder than it looks. Try it sometime.
Newsletter. We publish 48-editions of the newsletter every year. ‘Nough said.

Here is a Throw Back Thursday (TBT) pic of me in high school. I’m with Charles Wohlforth and we were entrepreneurs. We would both go by Dean Whitter (stock brokerage) and invest in options before school. I imported digital watches into Alaska. Charles had other business endeavors including writing articles.

Culture

The times are changing and so are we. We honor the geeks in our workshop and webinars. But increasingly in our digital avenues we are telling a different story about either starting up (something new) or starting over (reinventing yourself). It’s one of those times in our industry. A recent article in the New York Times had the former AT&T chairman commenting that his landline business disappeared in three years – PUFF! Few would deny time are changing. Some critics have commented that SMB Nation has lost its way. We’d prefer to say we’re headed in a new direction. Change is necessarily disturbing. But we take comfort in these comments this week from Jeff Bezos at the Code conference.
"As a public figure, the best defense to speech you don’t like is to develop a thick skin. You can’t stop it. If you’re doing anything interesting in the world, you’re going to have critics. If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting."
- Jeff Bezos

So here’s hoping you’ll pivot with us and lead the parade. See you on the other side!

PS - Here is a partial list of the workshops we delivered over the past few years. I'm not listing closed events (where we acted as a event manager) or our annual Geek Picnic, etc. :)

2016 Office 365 and Windows 10 Roadshow for MSPs/CSPs/Resellers (1H2016:http://2016roadshow.smbnation.com/cities/)