Brent Ozar Unlimited

How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 4

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business
24 Comments
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…
Read

A million dollars.

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, life quest
4 Comments
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. Back in level 4 in 2013, I wrote: [Redacted] – I set a 2013 revenue goal for Brent Ozar Unlimited this year, and we made 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 2013. It’s been a few years now, so let’s un-redact that: the company hit one million dollars per year of revenue. To be specific, this wasn’t…
Read

How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 3

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, consulting, life quest, personal
10 Comments
It’s time for my annual update on the wild ride. A brief recap of what’s happened so far: 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 just finished, so I’m blogging about year three – April 2013 to April 2014. When last we met The company logo…
Read

How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 2

Brent Ozar Unlimited, consulting, life quest, personal
2 Comments
About a year ago, I shared the first post in what will hopefully be a long series about starting and growing a company. The timeline went something like this: 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’m blogging about year two now. When Last We Met As we finished up year 1, we had just brought…
Read

Consulting: Startup or Lifestyle Business?

Brent Ozar Unlimited, consulting, life quest, personal
2 Comments
In the startup world, these two terms mean very different things. A startup is a company designed for growth. It has to scale far beyond the founders’ skills and time – and that means rapidly taking on additional staff and risk. Startup founders live a compromise: they work their tails off night and day, trying to deliver value as quickly as possible, with the end goal of selling their company. To deliver on everything, they have to hire staff quickly too, and the founders ask their staff to hustle just as hard. A lifestyle business helps the founders live a…
Read

What Kind of Consulting Company Would You Build?

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, career, consulting
3 Comments
Companies are like Dungeons and Dragons characters. While it’d be awesome roll perfect 18s for all of your attributes, but the reality is that you’re not going to be strong AND wise AND charismatic. You’re going to have to make some tough decisions. You’ve only got so many hours in the day, and only so much resources at your disposal. What’s your product? When I first got started consulting, I thought the product was just me, full stop. I’m here – I’m a smart fella – what do you need done? That doesn’t scale well, though – it’s hard to…
Read

How the Company-Startup Thing is Working Out for Me

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, consulting, life quest
18 Comments
A little over two years ago, I partnered up with Jeremiah Peschka, Kendra Little, and Tim Ford to turn my blog, BrentOzar.com, from a blog into a consulting company. I didn’t want to live-blog the business-building process. As life unfolds in front of you, it’s a noisy, jumbled mess with everything happening at once. Plus, like Salman Rushdie wrote in Midnight’s Children, “Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.” To give myself better perspective and a bigger picture, I decided I’d wait at least a year before blogging about anything that happened. It’s going well,…
Read

Why sp_Blitz™ is Free

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, community, marketing, sp_Blitz
2 Comments
We give away sp_Blitz™, a totally free health check tool for Microsoft SQL Server. It looks for all kinds of common reliability and performance problems and gives you a prioritized to-do list. The number one question I get about it – by far – is, “Why do you give it away for free? Why don’t you charge for it?” Free Beer vs Free Speech We need to start by considering the word free. In the software world, there’s two ways to look at it. The Wikipedia article on Gratis versus Libre sums it up well: Gratis versus libre is the distinction…
Read

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