When last we met, dear reader, I was super excited that I’d broken $500K in Black Friday sales – a goal that I’d been working on for a while. I was really proud of that.
That moment triggered a lot of introspection, though.
In my post about year 6 of the company, I wrote about how the business was a stool with 4 legs: training, consulting, online services, and community. At that time, I didn’t have the skills to make the consulting leg of the business consistently profitable, so I laid off Angie, Doug, and Jessica. However, I kept Erik & Tara on board because we had enough business to keep them pretty consistently busy.
However, that also ended up keeping me busier, too: dealing with sales, contracts, customer relationship management, it all added up. It took up Erika’s time, too: herding clients to get their homework and checks paid, dealing with insurance, taxes, etc. I’d never formally tracked how much of my time was spent on each part of the business, but I had a pretty good feeling of where the stress was coming from. It wasn’t Erik and Tara, mind you – they have always been completely awesome – but the surrounding business involves a lot of stress and gotta-handle-it-right-now issues.
Taken from the iPad as I started writing this (on holiday, naturally)
I’m not a fan of stress.
I don’t live to work – I work to live vacation.
Erika and I frequently sing each other the lyrics of Franz Ferdinand’s Jacqueline:
It’s always better on holiday
So much better on holiday
That’s why we only work when
We need the money
So after Black Friday finished, I asked myself a lot of tough questions.
I use Dr. Walling’s framework for decisions like this.
Every year, I get away at least once to do a planning retreat with Dr. Walling’s book. Each time, I learn a lot about myself, re-evaluate things I’m doing, and ask tough questions about why and how I’m doing them. For me, one of the most powerful techniques from the book has been to come up with 10-20 alternatives for each thing I’m doing. It helps me step back and think about whether what I’m doing still makes sense, or whether I should do a wildly different approach.
For example, I thought about GroupBy.org and came up with 10 ways I could approach it. Here are my exact notes from the retreat:
- Keep it as-is
- Hire a virtual assistant to manage it:
- Write posts & Mailchimps for call for speakers, call for speakers ending, voting starting, voting closing, speaker thank you and denied, cohost invites
- Edit posts, put in screenshots, headers
- Republish posts with date/time that the podcast goes out
- Put the content into the Mailchimp newsletter
- Train Erika to manage it (doing those same above tasks – she doesn’t have the free time to do it now, but maybe I could clear out other things on her calendar to make room for it)
- Open source it – hire a web developer to write WordPress plugins to manage processes, like count down to voting starting, run the voting, close the voting and do announcements, push the right content to MailChimp, etc.
- Discontinue it – pick my battles and my expenses. I’m already investing ~$3K/quarter, and I’m looking at investing more. At the end of the day, I’m not sure I’m providing a really valuable service that user groups and virtual chapters couldn’t provide if they wanted to.
- Do it more often (monthly?)
- Do it less often (2x/year?)
- Give it to a vendor
- Give it to PASS
- Make it a standalone entity – start a non-profit corporation, invite a round of board members, recruit the first round of sponsors, and then let it fly on its own
The first 4 ideas came right out of me in the first few minutes, but the rest came hours later as I was considering other projects, or when I came back to the questions after sleeping on ‘em, or reading additional books.
I looked at everything I do – SQLServerUpdates.com, the blog, the First Responder Kit, SQL ConstantCare®, the Office Hours podcast, you name it – even the consulting business – with a fresh set of eyes. I think about scaling each thing up, scaling it down, tackling it differently, merging it with something else, or abandoning it entirely. I always have more ideas than I have time or money, so I have to figure out where to place my bets.
I used Tim Ferriss’s priorities to figure out where to cut back.
As part of the retreats, I also read business books. This year, I’ve been reading (and re-reading) Tim Ferriss’s classic, The Four Hour Work Week. It’s every bit as spammy as the title suggests, but at the core, it’s about work-life balance. It’s about figuring out how to stop doing the busy work that doesn’t pay off so that you can either do more of the work that DOES pay off, or split – and go spend time with the ones you love. For the remaining work that you gotta do, it’s about automating as much of that as possible to reduce the time it consumes.
Ferriss talks a lot about the 80/20 rule, saying things like:
- Focus on the 20% of your customers/products that produce 80% of your income.
- Ditch the 20% of your customers/products that produce 80% of the problems.
- With the time you free up, invest it more wisely.
I read a lot of management books this year, but that one really resonated with me and challenged some assumptions I’d made.
So what if I didn’t have consultant employees? What if I still offered consulting if people really wanted it, but I took the tools we’d built for consulting, and I used those in the training business instead?
There’s a saying in business: in a gold rush, sell shovels. For years, I’ve been trying to do both: have gold miners (data consultants) on staff, plus sell shovels (training and SQL ConstantCare) to other miners. I wasn’t losing money mining gold, mind you, but…I wasn’t making all that much, either, and I could be building even better shovels. And what if I took our shovels and started selling them to you as part of our training?
That was it – I realized I had to close the consulting line of business. I had to stop thinking about the business as a multi-legged stool. It was the wrong analogy. I had found a successful strategy in the online services business, and I needed to focus on that.
So is it bad to build consulting companies, or am I bad?
Does that mean consulting is a bad business? Not at all! Any business can be a good business – that just doesn’t mean it’s the right business for me. I want to get out of the trading-money-for-time business, and get into more scalable forms of income. I did consulting for a long time to pay the bills, but…it’s not the only way to pay the bills. I used to do web site development, too. Times just come in your life when you need to hit F5 and get a fresh set of results.
Does this mean I failed at consulting? Yeah, I think so, in the same way I failed at web development – it’s something I did for a while for money, and I enjoyed it, but over time, I found other sources of income that I liked more, and paid better. I still bust out the PHP and MySQL from time to time, but it’s not where I focus my personal growth.
Like I wrote in the post a couple of years ago about the first round of layoffs – I really admire folks who can grow a consulting company to 10-15 employees. It’s one hell of a lot of work, stress, and risk. It pays off when you get there, but the journey is Herculean, and I just found a different route to success that feels like it fits better with my Jacqueline mentality.
Time to edit and re-focus for 2019.
For 2019, I’m making several course corrections:
- I gave Erik & Tara great severance packages and let them go yesterday. They’re fantastic employees and coworkers, and it’s not their fault, but I need to focus and do things differently.
- Getting rid of consulting employees meant I didn’t need Erika full time anymore, either. (There are still time-sensitive admin tasks in the business for sure, like customer login support, but I’m going to transition those over to a virtual assistant firm.)
- I’m going to take some of our consulting tools and sell them as part of our training. For example, we’ve got a data gathering utility that makes life way easier for independent consultants.
- I’m going to pivot SQL ConstantCare® to being an entry-level monitoring tool. I’m going to remove the mentoring component entirely, and just give you a low-cost way to know if your servers are doing alright.
- I’m pausing GroupBy.org and the weekly Office Hours podcasts for now. I love both of these, but in 2019, I want to find more ways to give back that don’t involve me being connected to the Internet at specific dates/times. I want to get more creative with my calendar and taking longer periods off.
These changes will give me more time to focus on the training and SQL ConstantCare®, hopefully working less while simultaneously doing more profitable work.
I’m really excited about these changes. Years ago, when I laid off Angie, Doug, and Jessica, I was mentally exhausted and burned out, frustrated that I couldn’t make the business work in the exact way I wanted. Today, I’m in a much better place, happy and content. I’m not happy to let go of Erik and Tara, mind you – they’re phenomenal people that I loved working with – but I’ve found my calling in a way that I can’t afford to ignore. I wanna spend less time working, more time with my family, and I think I’m going to be able to do it.
Let’s see how it goes.
93 Comments. Leave new
Fascinating reading Brent! I always admire your thoughtful approach to life & business decisions. Thanks for sharing so much insight on how you’re guiding your organization and ultimately yourself. Best wishes for a joyful 2019!
Peter – thanks sir! And congrats on the new gig with Denny!
Best of luck to you, Erik and Tara!
Kevin – thanks, sir.
This blog has paused my life too. I have been thinking about which direction I want to take my business and life. After a long discussion, I have reached to a point and this blog comes our way. Thank you for giving me more help in thinking and taking my life a direction. Forever obliged.
Pinal – you’re welcome, sir!
Best of Luck Brent! Your whole analysis of situation is worth reading.I hope you can make some money with ads on your site too.
I am curious to know how you do day to day time management
Anup – sure, at the top of the site, click Topics, Productivity and I’ve got a bunch of posts on it.
I love the “peeking behind the curtain” posts Brent. Your honesty and transparency is why you have been, will be successful in your endeavors. Best of luck and cannot wait to read about your journey. As Kevin said, best of luck to Erik and Tara!
Michael – thanks sir! Fingers crossed.
Thanks for sharing, I get just as much out of these posts as I do the techie – sql posts.
Kevin – thanks sir!
Richie still on board?
Greg – yes, I’m still moving forward with SQL ConstantCare, and heaven forbid I try to develop anything in serverless myself!
Good to hear and I wish you all the best! You have guts!! That was a “tough” decision! Here’s to a great 2019 for you!
Greg – thanks, sir.
Good luck, Brent! I’ve been thinking about this, too. Yesterday I did the Year Compass activity you mentioned (it really did take four hours) and it was pretty enlightening.
Emre – thanks sir! Yeah, Year Compass is a wonderful tool.
Best of the best to you Brent. I hope 2019 is an amazing year for you and your family. I cannot agree more with “Times just come in your life when you need to hit F5 and get a fresh set of results.”
Angela – hahaha, thanks, ma’am! I love that F5 line.
Thanks for sharing Brent; these posts can’t be easy to write but they are always informative and thought provoking. Cheers!
Chris – thanks, I appreciate the kind words.
Congrats sir!
Pete – thanks sir!
All the best with your adventures Brent. You guys have really done a lot for me, in terms of becoming a better DBA, for that I’m very thankful.
Selfishly, I’m going to really miss the online content you guys have produced.
All the best to Tara and Erik, both have inspired me so many times.
Lee – awww, thanks! Hey, we’re not going away – I’ll still be blogging a ton, and I’m sure Erik will too. You can’t stop that fella from writing, hahaha.
Brent, where does this leave others like Richie?
Others, hahaha – it’s just Richie. He’s still here, working with me on SQL ConstantCare.
Good luck in 2019! I’m interested to see the tools that come into the training.
Thanks for starting and running GroupBy for so long, whatever form it takes in the future.
Arthur – my pleasure, sir!
Brent, thanks for your transparency. It’s a refreshing look into the decisions that affect your life and others.
Paul – thanks, sir. That’s my big driver, writing the kinds of stuff that I’d want to read about how other companies work.
Interesting blog post! When you let someone go who has worked with you for many years, how do you value their part in creating your company? How did Erik and Tara feel about this?
Andomar – great question! Employee compensation can take many forms: pay, benefits, stock, etc. I’m a believer that you have to be paid for each day you work, as you work. You can’t toil away for years hoping and wishing for a payoff that might never come. As a result, we pay our employees fairly and do great benefits (6 weeks paid vacation from the start, a week off for a conference every year, $3k hardware & software benefits, the best health insurance available, etc.)
It’s not like they’ve been volunteering. 😉
Thanks for answering that! It sounds like you see work as a one-month one-payment deal with no residual obligations. Where I live, an employer has an obligation to care for his employees when they get sick or old, so there are residual obligations. Very interesting.
Andomar – oh sure, sounds like you might not be in the US. In the US, employees are responsible for their own pensions. We match employee contributions to their retirement accounts.
Brent, I’m also grateful that you’re so transparent and willing to put yourself and your thought processes out there for everyone to see. I found this to be a a great motivator for me to rethink a few things, too. Work/life balance is the constant stressor, and most of the time I feel like the pinball bouncing from one bumper, or hole, to another. Lots here for me to chew on and consider. Thanks very much, sir! Best of luck to all of you.
Don – thanks, sir! You’re absolutely right – and years of our lives can go by without rethinking those work/life balances. I’d strongly recommend https://yearcompass.com/ as a free starting point to evaluate how you’re doing.
Brent, thanks for the transparency into your mind and business plans. Excited to see where it will take you!
Nicky – thanks, me too!
Brent: Nice to see some real honesty from someone as admired as you. I wish I had your philosophy when I started in IT 30 years ago. Keep it up!
Btw..Go Blue!
Joe – awww, thanks! Yeah, I really try to write the same blog posts that I’d want to read about other companies.
Best of luck, Brent! I would not be where I am today without you and the people who have worked for you. For that, I am truly grateful.
Brandon – thanks, sir! Hopefully I can keep moving things forward in the community in 2019.
Who wouldn’t do this if they could?
Ian – I’ve got friends who are in the midst of growing their consulting firms, and they don’t like the training business. I totally get it – it’s just different kinds of work. If I graduated from college today, I’d probably go straight into app development (as opposed to training.) It’s just about timing and circumstances.
But yeah, in my shoes, with the training specialty I have, and my love of seeing the light go on in students’ eyes, it was a pretty straightforward choice.
Thanks for your response. I meant more generally the opportunity to stop trading time for money.
Ian – oh, gotcha, yeah, absolutely! Ideally, it’s best to get out of that business if you can, yeah.
We all need to reevaluate why we do what we do, and glad you can shed some stress. Good luck with the change, and I look forward to reading about it.
Thanks Brent, for the valueble blogs posts and the tools provided for the community.
Kotharv – my pleasure!
Brent! Thank you for another “under the hood” view of your work/life/vacation planning 🙂
With the UK having Brexit and other global economy issues to consider it’s giving me pause for thought on what I’m going to do in the coming year. Moving into ideas more aligned with the Four Hour Work Week is a direction I’m looking to take as well.
Often people that are looked up to in industries (like yourself!) are seen (or written about) as having had a plan from the start and have “worked their way up the ladder” in an almost perfect sequence.
Posts like this are a great reminder that even the best people – in times of success – might need to pivot, rather than head down a path that might prove to be frustrating or disappointing in the future.
We shouldn’t be afraid to make bold moves. I wish you every success in 2019 🙂
Greg – hahaha, yeah, I think I’ve jumped from one ladder to another a couple of times. I think career planning is less about having a great 5-10-15 year plan, and more about swinging from vine to vine in the right general direction, positioning yourself to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. It’s so hard to predict what opportunities are going to come up.
Thank you for this Brent, as always, your work/life balance stories are inspiring.
Carla – you’re welcome! Thanks for the kind words.
I echo a lot of people in the comments how much you and your team have helped me become a better DBA. It must have been a tough decision to make but I am sure everyone will do great in 2019.
Will you update us when / if / where Tara and Erik end up, blogs etc as I like many people always enjoyed and benefited from their knowledge.
Dave – absolutely, will do! Erik’s working on setting up his blog as we speak.
Thanks mate, and again good luck with the changes!
I’ve only read through this once so still processing/thinking about it. All I have to say is as always thank you for being candid and sharing these things with all of us. Putting yourself out there and discussing these topics is hard and I for one appreciate every word!
Pat – thanks sir, and good to hear from you! Hope things are going well with you.
As always, you inspire and educate us.
TJay – awww, thanks sir!
You have made me a better person and SQL professional. What you have given to the community is invaluable. I thank you for everything. May God bless you in your journey, I know you will do great things. Best to Erik and Tara.
Tom – thanks, sir, I appreciate it.
‘…less time working, more time with my family, and I think I’m going to be able to do it.’
Family first, Brent. Kudos to you for finding that point, and good luck to you as you’re pulling it together. I, too, work for vacation, and eliminating the stress points definitely makes it a smoother ride. Echoing your other posters, you’ve helped me become a stronger professional, and have been an incredible resource to me for years. I am staying on board for wherever this takes us. Good luck!!
Rebecca – thanks, ma’am, and keep up the great work you’ve been doing on blogging! You’re doing great stuff.
You have inspired me Brent to take some steps, and as always it is amazing to catch up with you wherever I can. Good luck in your journey and hope to see you around.
Ben – thanks sir, glad I could help! That’s a big part of the writing goals for me – there are blogs/sites I find really inspirational to me as I read through stuff, and I go, “Whoa, there’s not a lot in our database circles that shares this kind of thing,” so I figure if I can motivate a few folks, I’ve done well.
Brent, I’m super curious about one thing: in the past you’ve stressed that BOU’s training (including PASS sessions and pre-cons, etc) “doesn’t just come from reading BOL”. The real-world experience your team has had from consulting engagements fuels a lot of the content you present. I’m wondering if that principle has been diminishing in more recent releases? Or can you get what you need from the ConstantCare feeds? Or maybe we’re all just still on SQL 2008 R2? 🙂
Cheers,
Aaron
Aaron – great question. Adoption rates are way, way slower than Microsoft makes it sound. This version adoption chart tells the story pretty well:
https://app.spotlightcloud.io/public/collectiveiq
So when it comes to newer version features, you can’t wait around for customers to adopt it – you have to get ahead of the curve by working with it even before the release, then working with customers as they first adopt it for the first time at RTM. For example, I’m working with a customer right now who’s itching to get onto 2019 for Froid, and we’ve restored their databases into a 2019 test environment so they can see what the improvements will look like.
But nobody has asked the important question –
DBA reactions will still be active, won’t it?
Steve – hahaha, no, that’s been let go back in 2015: https://ozar.me/2015/12/three-years-of-dbareactions/
Brent,
I think you cause me to evaluate my career paths as much as you have taught me tips in tricks related to SQL. I greatly admire your introspective look at life. I love the saying, “I work to live, not live to work”
Scott – thanks sir! That’s definitely a big goal for me, helping other folks live a more thoughtful life.
All the very best Brent!
One definitely cannot trade time for money! 🙂 Looks very thought out decision.
Great post, Brent! I’m going to commit some time to recentering and recalibrating a few things myself.. these kinds of posts are always a fun read, but you rarely, if ever, see something similar for someone with a family.. I’ll see if I can make a similar dent..
Great goal to spend more time with your family.
Sad to hear this about GroupBy. In my opinion, GroupBy was one of the best things to come out of this company in awhile. I was excited about it and learned a lot.
I almost went to my boss to ask about paying for the SQLConstantCare that was on sale around Black Friday. What was especially attractive about it was the mentoring/advice component. To me, that set it apart from every other monitoring software I could buy. Sad to see that the mentoring part of it is gone and wondering how people who purchased it this year feel about losing that advertised aspect of the product.
Lee – thanks! I’m still doing the mentoring part for existing customers, but sales have been shut off for it. When their plan expires, they’ll be given the choice between canceling, or dropping down to the new lower version of the product.
I absolutely get why you’ve made the decisions you have, but I’m absolutely gutted to see Erik and Tara go all the same. Wishing all of you all the best in 2019.
Interesting.
How do you feel about losing the bleeding edge / edge case experience that consulting gives you and you then feed into creating training and tools? How do you keep that up without having the consulting arm?
Mark – great question. I’m still going to do consulting, just going to be way pickier about the clients I take on. I’m just cutting the work level by not having consulting employees, and dramatically cutting our workload. I’ll still take on the same fun bleeding edge & edge case stuff. For example, this week I’m working with a fun client hitting some CPU issues in Azure VMs.
I’ve recently gone through the same thought process myself and found it quite liberating. Wishing you all the best in all you do! You are an incredible human and I admire your ability to prioritize those things that truly matter. My hope is that you always find “significance” in those small moments… Life is short on moments my friend… enjoy every one.
Claudia – awww, thanks ma’am! I appreciate the kind words. The book is in on my desk, too!
Good luck on your new adventure! You are an amazing presenter and a talented marketer. You are going to be great at whatever you desire to do with your life.
Thanks ma’am!
The ending of this surprised me for sure but it’s great you found your calling and can prioritise what matters 🙂
Brent,
A courageous move. As a former consultant myself I get it. Thanks for sharing your story and always giving back. Best of luck!
As always, a great and thought provoking post!
That’s a brave move but I know you would have done your homework on what’s best for you 😉
I look forward to following you in whichever form you choose to present yourself. Throughout the years, you (and your team members) have always been a great source of knowledge, inspiration and not forgetting humour, so I for one will always be thankful for that.
The best of luck to you all
Thank you so much for sharing and providing some insight to your thought process. I think this post will be helpful for many others that are doing right things but feel that something is just not 100% that should be.
Last year the passing of Robert Davis hit me hard. Even though we only met in person a couple times I knew so much about him through the SQLFamily. The tribute Kendra did about fulfilling Robert’s goals for him is printed out and something that I look at a few times a week.
I really like your comment about working to live and not living to work.
Blessings to you and yours for the new year.
Michael
Hy there, What we have here is , an amazingoffer
Are you in?
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[…] a prompt from Brent Ozar I thought it would be interesting to post semi regular updates on how our business is going, what […]
Best of luck to you all! (Will miss the office hours banter though!) You guys provided a lot of insight and help. I’m sure all will go well in everyone’s new career path.
LOL!
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