business

2018 Black Friday Sale

Building the 2018 Black Friday Sale at BrentOzar.com

black friday, business, woocommerce
2 Comments
For last year’s Black Friday sale, I set a goal of $500K in sales, then did a ton of prep work: Set up a new training class lineup with labs Added a new Live Class Season Pass so folks could attend my classes all year long Added a handful of guest instructor courses Wrote a multi-day email launch sequence To handle the doorbuster deal load, upgraded our web site hosting at WPengine to a $6k/mo plan It paid off with a big sales jump: $440K, well above 2016’s $181K but still shy of my ambitious goal. Later, after the sale…
Read
Brent Ozar Unlimited, early 2016 at Cliff Lede in Napa

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

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, sql constantcare
14 Comments
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…
Read

I’m Proud of Our Guest Instructor Partnerships.

business, teaching, training
No Comments
When I first started kicking around the idea of letting guest instructors run classes at BrentOzar.com, I did a brain dump of how I wanted to do business, and shared it with the guest instructors. It’s working out pretty well, so I’m sharing the more interesting parts here for those of you who like reading the behind-the-scenes type stuff. In here, BOU means Brent Ozar Unlimited, and “you” means the instructor. You exclusively own your material. The speaker owns the intellectual property (IP, aka slides/scripts/materials), and BOU doesn’t get any rights to it. Longer term, if we do the recorded…
Read

Some Large Businesses Like to Work with Other Large Businesses.

business, paperwork, setting the tone
6 Comments
Our human resources team Small businesses usually like working with other small businesses. Similarly, large businesses working with other large businesses. During the sales process, small businesses tell me things like, “All the decision-makers are on this call” and “Let’s move forward with this right now. What do we need to do to start tomorrow?” Large businesses are more likely to say, “Please fill out this 26-page PDF to be eligible for a bidding process that will start in three months.” I’ve long believed in this as a kinda-sorta unwritten rule, but I got an email (and a bunch of…
Read

Building the BrentOzar.com 2017 Black Friday Sale

black friday, business, life quest
1 Comment
In 2013, just for fun and with almost no forethought, I announced the company’s first Black Friday sale. I figured that I love shopping for Black Friday deals online, and maybe other SQL Server people would get a kick out of it too. The first year was mostly for fun, but it turned out people loved it. I put more and more thought into it in over time, like starting the sale earlier (because a lot of corporate folks wanted the ability to get in on it, but getting pricing approved at midnight on Black Friday wasn’t gonna happen.) Gradually,…
Read

Tools We Use for Remote Work

business
10 Comments
A reader emailed in to ask: We are in the process of trying to move to working remotely more often. I know that your team for the most part are all pretty remote and also work remotely with a lot of your customers. Just wondering if you could give me a list of what technologies you use for conferencing, team meetings, etc.  Also maybe some pros and cons and\or issues you have run into. Here’s my favorite apps: Slack for chat – we used to use Stride (formerly Hipchat), and it was alright, but Slack gained more traction WebEx for…
Read
Porsche 911 Targa that I definitely don't own

Should You Take a Salary When Starting a Consulting Company?

business, taxes
6 Comments
In the startup world, the general advice is for founders to pay themselves $50k-$100k/year until they get outside funding. Your net worth ends up higher – but only if you hustle and grow the value of your company, since your net work mostly consists of your ownership stake. When you build a consulting company, there’s an unbelievable amount of unpaid labor to be done: hiring staff, training them, managing them, improving the deliverable product, marketing, sales, contract negotiations, expenses, accounting, taxes, web site maintenance, you name it. It’s all too easy to say, “We should really pay ourselves for doing…
Read

The Freelance Calculator

business, consulting, freelancing
6 Comments
If you’re thinking about going freelance, here’s a handy Freelance Calculator by Chelsea Shaw (@chelshaw). See the Pen Freelance Calculator by Chelsea (@chelshaw) on CodePen. (Big props to Chelsea – I originally just sketched out the UI, and she knocked out all the code! You readers are amazing.) Hours per week = the number of hours you’re going to work, but work includes both billable hours as well as non-billable (paperwork, email, travel, blogging, presenting.) % billable = the percent of your work that you can actually charge for. Hourly rate = what the clients actually pay. Being an independent…
Read

So How Did the Pricing Test Work Out?

business, pricing, subscriptions
No Comments
Last month, I wrote about the pricing tests we ran in advance of our subscription training class launch. I explained why the winner was this one: Price Test #3: The Highball Going into the launch, I had a lot of questions. Here’s how they turned out. Which option was the most popular? DBAs – 29% of buyers (126) opted for this Performance – 29% (125) Enterprise – 41% (177) Wow! The dead-even split between DBAs and Performance totally shocked me. I’m not sure yet how much of the split is due to lower pricing – maybe people are buying the $39 plan…
Read

WordPress Plugins I Use to Sell Training Classes

blogging, business, woocommerce, wordpress
7 Comments
First, a few disclaimers. If I started today with a mission to build a $1mm/year e-commerce business, I probably wouldn’t start with WordPress – I’d probably go with a purpose-built e-commerce tool like Shopify. There are even folks out there who will tell you not to start a blog on it either, and that there are better static content generation tools that don’t require web hosting. However, I’ve been powering BrentOzar.com with WordPress for over a decade, and it’s grown into one heck of a consulting and training business. I’m running over $1mm/year through it, so I should probably talk about the setup…
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