Brent Ozar Unlimited

Epic Life Quest: Another million dollars.

March 28, 2017

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, life quest, training

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

April 19, 2016

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business

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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A million dollars.

January 19, 2016

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, life quest

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…

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

April 28, 2015

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, consulting, life quest, personal

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…

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

April 22, 2014

Brent Ozar Unlimited, consulting, life quest, personal

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…

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Consulting: Startup or Lifestyle Business?

April 15, 2014

Brent Ozar Unlimited, consulting, life quest, personal

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…

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What Kind of Consulting Company Would You Build?

September 24, 2013

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, career, consulting

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…

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How the Company-Startup Thing is Working Out for Me

June 25, 2013

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, consulting, life quest

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,…

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Why sp_Blitz™ is Free

May 6, 2013

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, community, marketing, sp_Blitz

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…

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Brent Ozar Unlimited

Hi. I’m Brent.