Brent Ozar Unlimited

How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 11: Massive Changes

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Every year, I post a retrospective about what it’s been like to start up a company. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. This post covers year 11 of the company: May 2021 to April 2022. Normally I do a blog post that weaves a few things together into a story, but this year, let’s just dump the rollercoaster into a bullet point list: June: Stack Overflow got acquired, and Erika and I had a financial windfall thanks to Jeff & Joel’s very generous stock option grants. We almost built a house…
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How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 10: Isolation and Adaptation

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Every year, I post a retrospective about what it’s been like to start up a company. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. This post covers year 10 of the company: May 2020 to April 2021. Boy, did that year suck or what? What a rollercoaster. COVID raged, we weren’t supposed to wear masks, then we were, then we got vaccines, then a lot of people did their own research, then the Delta variant hit. During Year 10, a lot of good things happened to me while a lot of bad…
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Black Friday 2019 sales goal

How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 9

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It’s time for my annual update on the wild ride. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. This post covers year 9 of the company: May 2019 to April 2020. As a quick reminder, COVID-19 reared its ugly head late in year 9. I started year 9 with a new toy. In year 8, I made tough decisions and worked my ass off to secure the future of the company. I’d laid off the consulting employees, then worked a lot of weekends and late nights to build up a financial safety…
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San Diego home office

How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 8

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It’s time for my annual update on the wild ride. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. This post covers year 8 of the company: May 2018 to April 2019. Erika and I moved to San Diego. San Diego home office We’d lived in Chicago for years, but I was tired of the winters. Ever since my first trip to California, I’d felt like I belonged there. It took years to make the financial numbers and personal timeline make sense, but we finally pulled it off in August 2018. I loved…
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Ernie

How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 7

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It’s time for my annual update on the wild ride. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. This post covers year 7 of the company – April 2017 to April 2018. This year was about making financial sacrifices. One way (certainly not the only one) to build an app is to work through these phases: Start by solving a pain manually with hourly rate consulting Gradually turn it into a productized service: a standard, fixed-rate consulting package Build tools so you can deliver the finished product faster (thereby increasing your profit),…
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Brent Ozar in Mazatlan

Refocusing My 2019 Plans: Letting Go of Consulting Employees

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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…
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Brent Ozar Unlimited, early 2016 at Cliff Lede in Napa

How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 6

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It’s time for my annual update on the wild ride. A brief recap of what’s happened so far: April 2011 – we started the company. April 2012 – year one finished, but I didn’t blog about it right away. I wanted to get it into the rear view mirror for perspective before blogging. April 2013 – year two finished, so I blogged about year one. April 2014 – year three finished, so I blogged about year two. April 2015 – year four finished, so I blogged about year three. April 2016 – year five finished, so I blogged about year four. April 2017 – year…
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How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 5

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Every year, I stop to look back at what happened a couple of years ago. This post covers April 2015-April 2016. My cofounders and I were all ready to try something new. Jeremiah, Kendra, and I had the same vision for where the business was going next (on-premises software), what the next steps were, and the speed at which we’d make the journey. We didn’t want to kill consulting and training, mind you, just wanted to build up a third profitable leg for the business. At the company retreat in Oregon, mid-2015 But in year five, both Jeremiah and I had the…
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Epic Life Quest: Another million dollars.

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Teaching in Portland, 2016 In my Epic Life Quest, sometimes I post [Redacted] achievements. It’s stuff that I’m really proud of, but I’m not quite ready to talk about publicly yet. The last one was hitting the $1mm/year total revenue mark. A while back in Level 7, I wrote: [Redacted] – I set a revenue goal for our company’s online sales (training classes & videos), and we crossed it. I’m not sharing the goal publicly yet, but I’ll circle back in a couple/few years and blog about it in my Life Quest category. Completed September 2015. It’s been a while now, so let’s un-redact that and…
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How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 4

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It’s time for my annual update on the wild ride. A brief recap of what’s happened so far: Typical partner meeting in year four, Vegas April 2011 – started the company. April 2012 – year one finished, but I didn’t blog about it right away. I wanted to get it into the rear view mirror for perspective before blogging. April 2013 – year two finished, so I blogged about year one. April 2014 – year three finished, so I blogged about year two. April 2015 – year four finished, so I blogged about year three. April 2016 – year five…
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Hi. I’m Brent.

That's me, Brent.

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm on an epic life quest to have fun and make a difference.

I co-founded Brent Ozar Unlimited to help make your SQL Server go faster. I also maintain sp_Blitz® and the open source First Responder Kit repo.

My current car collection includes a 1986 Ferrari 328 GTS, a 1964 Porsche 356, a 1971 VW Type 3 Squareback, and more.

profile for Brent Ozar on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites