business – Page 5 – Brent Ozar

The Problems with Remote DBA Companies Today

January 21, 2014

First things first, I don’t want to be your remote DBA. No thank you, unsubscribe. I never want to be on call again. From 1993 until 2008, I had an electronic tether – first in the hotel & restaurant industry, then IT. When I went to work for Quest Software as an evangelist in 2008, one of the biggest job benefits was being able to not answer the phone on weekends and holidays. Oh, sweet personal life, how I missed thee.

But I get tempting emails from companies that usually go like this:

“We’ve got a few database servers that are mission-critical. We don’t have enough work to keep a full time DBA busy, so we’d like to save money by hiring a part-time remote DBA. We just want them to remote in for several hours a week, make sure the trains are running on time, and then when things break, they can jump in and troubleshoot it.”

It all sounds so easy, right? Just set up the servers with a few good scripts, and you can just keep cashing checks. After all, DBAs don’t work that hard, right? (It always looks that way from the outside.)

Those last few words are the killer: “when things break, they can jump in and troubleshoot it.” Remember, the company’s database server is mission-critical, and when it’s down, they want someone quick, fast, and in a hurry.

That only works if the consultant isn’t tending to anyone else’s emergency.

So you end up with a few kinds of remote DBA firms:

Remote DBA Option 1: The Lone Gunman

A DBA quits his job and starts doing contracting full time. He wasn’t that busy at his old company anyway, so he makes them an offer they can’t refuse: he’ll keep the lights on for them, and he’ll remote in for emergencies. He’s desperate to get his first client in, so he lowballs them on a retainer and hourly fee. He’s now managing a few servers for a single client.

From my remote DBA days

Over time, he adds more clients with more servers, but because his rates are really low, it takes him quite a while to build up enough momentum to keep the bills paid reliably. Emergencies don’t strike all that often, and he’s able to keep juggling these balls in the air to keep everybody happy. Clients love him because he’s way cheaper than a full time DBA, he’s smart, he knows their servers well, and he always answers the phone when there’s a problem.

Until that one day when he can’t.

Maybe he’s on the phone with someone else, or he’s at a ball game with a dead phone, or he’s on vacation out of the country, or his block has a power outage. He’s only human, and he’s only one human.

It doesn’t happen often, and some companies are okay taking that gamble.

Remote DBA Option 2: The Global Team

A company specializes in remote DBA work, and they hire a team of people. You can’t make the financial numbers work on this business with just senior people, because senior people want to get out of the on-call game. You have to pay senior people serious money if you want them to do on-call full time without burning out. Instead, they hire a few tiers of different skills from junior DBA to senior DBA. They set up on-call rotations, plus escalations so that if a junior person can’t solve a problem, they can bring in a senior person.

To make the juniors’ jobs easier, they build standardized runbooks that lay out formal procedures on how to handle a failed backup, a stopped SQL Server service, a drive that’s out of space. When the firm brings in a new client, they have a process for that too, vetting the server and getting the client to approve the runbook.

The remote DBA company’s entire business is based around standardizing processes so that any member of their DBA teams can step in and handle a call.

And that’s exactly what happens.

When you call a remote DBA firm, ideally you’ll get your primary contact – just as you get the Lone Gunman when you call him – but that’s not going to happen when the server breaks after hours, on weekends, or on holidays. The bigger the DBA firm – the more successful they get – the more likely you are to talk to someone who’s only seen your systems once or twice, if ever. It’s a qualified voice (hopefully), but it’s not a familiar one.

It’s also more expensive – because building this kind of around-the-clock support team, training them, managing them – it all costs money. This firm will be more expensive than the Lone Gunman, and I’ve seen cases where it’s been more expensive than just hiring a full time DBA. However, you could argue that it’s better than a full time DBA because it includes around-the-clock support at all times, even when your own Lone Gunman FTE is off on vacation.

Remote DBA Option 3: Cloud Services

The marketing behind cloud services – and I mean things like Windows Azure SQL Database and Amazon RDS, not virtual machines running plain old SQL Server – says that the cloud vendor does the lights-on support for you.

They do this by simply controlling the platform entirely. You don’t get the option to remote desktop into your WASD instance and apply patches. You don’t get involved in HA or DR failovers. When things break, the vendor fixes them.

In theory, it’s way cheaper and much more flexible. You solve multiple problems at once – not only did you have too little work to keep a full time DBA busy, but honestly, you probably had too little work to keep a properly configured SQL Server busy full time, too. With well-designed resource sharing and the economies of scale, you can get the right amount of database power and people that you need.

Except today, companies don’t want to move their databases to the cloud just to solve the part-time-remote-DBA problem. Today, they’re still too focused on keeping the rest of their infrastructure in-house, so moving everything to the cloud just because they can’t keep a DBA busy seems bass-ackwards. Instead, they compare the pros and cons of the Lone Gunman, the Global Team, and just going without DBA attention altogether.

As a DBA in the 2000s, I was worried that outsourcing & remote DBA firms would take over conventional DBA jobs. They didn’t. In the early 2010s, DBAs were similarly concerned about cloud services taking over DBA jobs. That hasn’t happened yet either, and based on what I’m hearing from companies, I don’t think it’s going to happen in the near term (3-5 years).

Today’s Options are Bad, but the Problem Still Exists

I know a lot of my clients would love to get this problem solved – but I just don’t have a good answer for them. Relational databases aren’t getting easier to manage. In fact, with every new release of SQL Server, I see new ways for customers to shoot themselves in the foot with ever more powerful weaponry. (Don’t get me wrong – I love new features, but they don’t manage or configure themselves.)

Part of tomorrow’s answer will be software. For companies with SQL Server and sysadmins, I like where Idera’s going with SQL Elements. For shops where the developers manage SQL Server, I love Stack Exchange’s open source Opserver. Both tools still require meat popsicles to interpret the dashboard and take action, but they’re bringing insight to users without formal DBA training.

I love watching this market as it grows and changes over time. I don’t have a horse in this race – I’m never going on call again, and we don’t want to hire employees to put them on call – but I get excited every time I see a new solution.

Because I don’t want you to be on call either.

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Working with the Best Developers

December 17, 2013

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Developers, stop reading this now. This post isn’t for you. This post is for the sysadmins and database admins, the people who have to keep the digital pipes unclogged.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg had a brilliant interview at the Lean Startup Conference. It’s chock full of good stuff and you should totally watch the whole thing, but this one-minute exchange is one of my favorites:

Interviewer: “So you mentioned accountability and I was curious about that… Almost all the metrics [you monitor] were about how customers use the site, but not how employees are working, and I wondered if there are other metrics that you look at, or how you think about accountability. Is accountability that someone has unplugged for two hours in the day and that we assume that they’re working during that time?”

Matt: “What does it mean to be working? We have sort of this factory model where we think someone’s working if they show up in the morning and they’re not drunk or they don’t sleep at their desk and they leave at the right time and they’re dressed nicely or whatever that is, but that has so little to do with what you create. I’m sure we all know people who create a lot without fitting in those norms.”

The key word is create.

I have a client in a gritty big-city downtown mid-rise with a lot of other software shops. At around 10AM, some of the sysadmins go down to the coffee shop across the street, have a seat with a good view of the street leading up to the building, and play “Hobo Or Developer?” As people walk up to the building – well, you can guess the rest of it.

It’s easy to think that the sloppy, late, and seemingly lazy people in your company don’t know what they’re doing. For some of them, it’s probably even true. But the rules really are different for true creators, and you can’t judge a book by its shabby cover – just as you know that some of the sharp-dressed and early-riser executives are probably wildly incompetent too.

Even if you think you’re creating something, that’s not what the company is really paying you for. They’re paying you to keep the pipes clean for the artists and to safeguard their work. The more you get to know them and appreciate their talents, the more you can help them build amazing stuff, and everybody wins.

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My Favorite Consulting Startup Resources

December 3, 2013

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A friend of mine was asking for advice about starting up a consulting company, and I realized I’ve got a lot of good links piled away. Here’s some of my favorites:

Me and my wonderful cofounders

Designing the Business

So You Want to Be a Consultant – explains the different kinds of consultants, how they manage money, how to build customer relationships, and more.

Your Crappy Little Services Business – there’s nothing wrong with building a consulting company instead of an aggressively growth-focused dot-com startup.

The Hacking Business Model – we wanted to run a really different consulting company, and we wrote up a whole manifesto that wasn’t too far off from this one.

Failure Is Not The Worst Outcome, Mediocrity Is – we didn’t want to build just another consulting company.

Ten Rules for Web Startups – these are relevant for blogs and service businesses, too.

Legalities

If I Launched a Startup by The Startup Lawyer – quick bullet list of really important issues I never would have thought about. My favorite: when you start a company, you gradually get 25% of your stock each year.

What Startups Should Know About Hiring a Lawyer – we interviewed several law firms before we found the right fit for our business goals and our personalities. Totally worth the initial up-front time.

Finance and Accounting

Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator – it’s intimidating. It’s long. It’s probably incorrect. But it’s a start.

Questions VCs Will Ask You – venture capitalists want to know that you understand the risks in your market. You shouldn’t take investments as a consulting startup – but you should think like a company that desperately needs a cash infusion from an experienced VC.

The Unfortunate Math Behind Consulting Companies – the profit margin is a lot thinner than it looks at first. The author recommends techniques that we chose not to implement (like using subcontractors instead of employees) but it opens your eyes to the costs.

Living Self-Employed: The Manual They Forgot to Give You – whether you start a company or just go freelance, the money lessons in here are so important.

Management

How to Be a Startup CEO – splitting equity, keeping costs low, what you have to do in the first year, building an advisory board, and more.

12 Things to Tell Your Spouse – starting up a company is going to suck really bad if you don’t lay out ground rules and work on your work/life balance.

Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail – gleaned from case studies and post-mortems. #1: being inflexible and not actively seeking or using customer feedback.

Most Important Business Lessons – my favorite: after the first year or two, your success is determined by the people you hire, not by you.

Inspiration

Three Roads to the Top of the Mountain – he defines success, 3 ways to get there, and talks about the road he chose.

If You Build It, They Won’t Come – customer acquisition is harder than it looks.

How Not to Go Broke On Your Idea – can you explain your idea to someone using a single sheet of paper and a crayon? Do you know your 6 best potential customeres twice as well as they know themselves?

How to Build Your Business Before You Quit – you already need a product, customers, and money in the bank.

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What Kind of Consulting Company Would You Build?

September 24, 2013

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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 describe yourself to new customers over and over, and it’s hard to know when a product is “done.” Businesses like finish lines and milestones because they don’t like to pay until after they cross one.

What pains does your product solve? People buy things to make pains go away. For example, someone might be struggling to make a query go fast, and their business users are beating them about the head. They want the pain to stop as quickly as possible. This helps define the product – your product starts when they hand you the query, and stops when the query runs X% faster, and the business users raise their hands in joy.

Who’s signing on the dotted line? The more you know your customer, the more specific you can get with their pain points. “A manager” or “a developer” isn’t going to cut it. One of my customer profiles is a software vendor that uses SQL Server as a repository. I can tell you all about ISV developer architects – what pains they face, what business pressures they’re under, what their developers are complaining about, you name it. When one of them calls me, the deal is done by the end of the call because I know them so well already. However, there’s not a lot of them, which leads to the next question.

How many do you need to sell to break even? In consulting, I consider “breaking even” to be making the same as you’d make as a full time employee somewhere. Do you need to sign one client per week, per month, or per quarter?

Is your product small or large? When someone signs on the dotted line, is the average bill $50, $500, $5k, $50k, or $500k? For any given transaction, there’s a certain amount of bookkeeping overhead, so small products absolutely require automation. You can’t deal with manual contracts, invoices, and payments at the $50-$500 level. As the transactions get larger, people expect more personal hand-holding, and the sales cycle also gets longer. $50-$500 purchases are impulse buys, but $50k-$500k purchases require multiple in-person meetings leading up to the sale, and they’re not going to be billable.

How are you going to get people to contact you? Whether you’re dealing with a lot of small product sales or one big sale per quarter, you’re going to need leads. This is by far the toughest thing in independent consulting.

In the beginning, you can reach out to your network – everyone you’ve ever worked for or with – and drum up enough business to pay the rent. (If you can’t name at least five people in your network who would hire you as a consultant, then independent consulting isn’t for you.)

While you’re working with them on projects, though, you have to be generating leads for your next round of gigs. This is where blogging, presenting, and marketing come in. You can subcontract that stuff out, but you can never ever stop.

Well, rather, you CAN stop marketing yourself, and you’ll be okay short term – but you’ll be screwed in a year, and you’ll be right back to taking a full time employment gig with a company.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a full time employee. Every day, Jeremiah, Kendra, and I put in a ton of unpaid hours, juggling a bunch of balls in the air, trying to keep the business flying along. If we juggle hard enough, we’ll do well financially later – but there’s a ton of risk, and there’s no guarantees.

If you don’t like this kind of juggling, find the kind of company that will let you stay technical, and keep doing the things you love. We see that as the biggest service we can provide our employees – I don’t ever want Jes to have to deal with closing a sale or negotiating a customer contract. We want her to be able to show up, slap her hands together, and say, “Alright, where’s this boisterous SQL Server?” And then when her day is done, we want her to close the computer down, walk away, and not answer emails or worry about anything until the next morning.

We know we make less money doing that. We’d make more if we worked our employees like horses, whipping them on faster and faster to bill more hours. That’s a conscious decision we made while building the company, and it’s what keeps us excited. We’ll keep playing with the other business knobs, but we won’t touch the one marked “Employee Hours Per Week.” There’s too many other fun variables to play with.

Oh, and by the way – we’re hiring again.

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Charging People to Find Free Stuff? Are You Crazy?

August 5, 2013

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Last week I launched a video course called The Best Free SQL Server Downloads. It costs $29, and I gave out coupon codes to drop it to $19 for the launch.

I expected to get a few questions:

How Can You Charge People for a List of Free Stuff?

If you’ve ever watched TV late at night, you’ve probably stumbled across one of Matthew Lesko’s informercials. He wears a suit covered in question marks, and he sells information about how to get free money from the government.

Matthew Lesko
Photo by 88Slide.com

I have never bought one of Lesko’s books. The cynic in me says, “Yeah, right – there’s no free money anywhere.” On the other hand, my relatives in the medical and social work industries tell me that there is indeed plenty of government help out there through various programs, free for the taking. Well, not exactly free – obviously there’s fierce competition for it, and it only gets worse as more people buy Lesko’s book. Government money is a zero-sum game – there’s only so much of it to go around.

But somebody’s buying them. A lot of somebodies.

When I worked at Quest Software, we hired an SEO company to tell us what SQL Server topics were the hottest in demand. Because I worked with customers who wanted to make their SQL Servers faster, I expected SQL Server performance tuning to be #1 on the list.

Not even close.

The #1 term on the list: free SQL Server downloads.

It got more specific after that, like people looking for free scripts, free tools, free books, etc, but the dominant thing they all had in common was “free”.

And it starts to make sense when you put yourself in the frame of mind of the typical DBA. They’re alone in their organization, with no support staff, nobody else who understands what they do, and no budget for tools or training. They know there’s gotta be good stuff out there, but when you search for free SQL Server downloads, the results are actually pretty crappy.

I’ve been using SQL Server for over a decade, and I’ve got one heck of a list of good free tools. I’ve spent a ton of time sifting through a bunch of shady, bogus, non-maintained stuff, and gotten it down to just a core set that I use on a daily basis.

I gambled that people would be willing to pay $19-$29 for my list of tools, and video demos of how to use them. After all, a lot of the good free stuff out there comes with no instructions whatsoever, and it can take you quite a while to figure it out. (Just last month, Jeremiah taught me about the @get_task_info parameter for sp_WhoIsActive, and I never would have known how useful it was if he hadn’t taught me.)

How Can You Make Money Off the Work of Others?

I actually expected this question, and it never came. I bet it just got mumbled quietly or behind closed doors.

All bloggers, presenters, and book authors piggyback off Microsoft’s work on SQL Server. We’re building the missing training documentation for somebody else’s product. Some of it’s available for free, and some costs money, and the market seems to be okay with that.

I could have totally built these training videos and uploaded them to YouTube. They’d be massively popular. But…I do that already. We have an incredibly active YouTube channel where we give away dozens of hours of video training. Every week, we write new material, pay WebEx so we can host free training sessions, encode the uploads, and maintain our video archive pages. Each of us spends probably 1-3 hours per week working on this free video stuff.

People love it, and we’ll absolutely keep doing that for free as a service to the community.

But sometimes, if I’m going to do something that has a tremendous bang for the buck, I’ll spend extra time working on it. I’ll set up my green screen, lights, and videocamera rig in my office. I’ll record it in high definition, produce it to make it look better, and then upload it in 720p or 1080p. It takes me about two days of work to write and record 90 minutes worth of really good videos. The resulting product is fantastic, and it’s totally worth the $29. Heck, in the first five minutes of the first video, I show how to get $200-$300 of training for free – it pays for itself several times over – and I know the buyer would never find that content if they were just searching the web for free SQL Server downloads.

If I’m doing my job right, this video will lead to more people working with these free tools, linking to them, and training others on how to use ’em. Everybody wins.

Do You Really Think Anybody Will Buy It?

I knew from working with my consulting clients that the vast, vast majority of them don’t know about this free stuff. They might know one or two, but not all of them.

You, dear reader, are not my target market. You’re already smarter than the average bear. If you’ve been subscribing to my SQL Server blog, watching our webcasts, attending our user group sessions, and so on, then you’re different. You have a relatively large amount of spare time that you can use to sharpen your knives, and you’ll pick up on a lot of stuff over time.

Most SQL Server users don’t have that kind of time. They are overwhelmed with their day job, and when a problem strikes, they Google it. They want a complete answer, start to finish, in a single, easy-to-digest web page. That’s why Pinal Dave is so successful – he really understands what most SQL Server users are looking for. My downloads video is aimed at people who are struggling with problems, don’t have much time, and don’t have a corporate budget. At $29, they can just buy the video themselves and become a sharper DBA. It’s not so expensive that they have to worry about getting the company to pay for it.

So I took a gamble – that’s the fun part of working for yourself. You get to act on a hunch. My hunch paid off – we sold over 100 in the first week. That amazed me, because I really didn’t build it for most of our blog readers – I built it for the long term. I think it’s going to sit well in search results and have a long future ahead of it.

What If Someone Else Builds a List of Free SQL Server Scripts and Stuff?

I sincerely hope they do, and I hope every free project works harder on their documentation to make it easier for new users. At one point or another, I’ve talked to every community project person (Adam Machanic about sp_WhoIsActive, Ola Hallengren about his maintenance scripts, etc) trying to get them to sell a $19-$29 training course on how to use their product. Would you buy a 90-minute, $29 course from Adam Machanic showing how he uses sp_WhoIsActive to solve SQL Server problems? I sure as hell would.

It amazes me to write this, but even sp_Blitz™ has gotten complex enough that I could probably sell a $29, 90-minute in-depth video on how to use the advanced features like plan cache analysis and logging to a table. I’d love to do it for free and give it away, too, but if I don’t put a price tag on it, I’m probably never going to get motivated enough to take the two days off, write the demos, write the decks, and record it all. I’m sure other free tool authors are in the same boat.

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How to Negotiate Your Consulting Rates

July 29, 2013

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It’s really hard to find good DBAs these days, so some of my friends have started doing part-time consulting after hours and on weekends. They often ask me how to set their rate, and there’s a lot of interesting questions around that.

Cooperation Options

Working Together – You and the client staff must both be online together, sharing screens, and talking through a problem. This is what clients usually want by default.

Solo – You get access to the client’s systems via VPN, and you can do the work on your own without having the client involved. Examples of this include improving a stored procedure in their development environment, configuring backups, or troubleshooting an error.

Disconnected – I like to call this Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, because this kind of work can be done without access to the client’s server or the client. It’s highly unusual to find work like this, but here’s an example: “Here’s a copy of our database schema. Rewrite this stored procedure from row-by-row processing to set-oriented processing.”

Scheduling Options

Time of your choice with 4-6 weeks notice of deliverables – The client tells you what they need done, with plenty of advance notice. This is really easy to fit in with your schedule and to work around vacations. This is the hardest work to find, and as a consultant, you should give high discounts for this type of rate.

Time of your choice with 1-3 weeks notice of deliverables – Less notice here, so there should be less of a discount. This is probably your default rate when you first get started with part-time consulting, working after hours when you still have a day job.

Time chosen entirely by the client with 1-3 weeks notice – Again, less discount here, and this might also be your default rate when you first get started with consulting and only have a couple/few clients.

Time chosen by the client, on demand – This should not be your default rate. In fact, there should be a (possibly huge) surcharge for this type of work because when the client calls, you have to drop what you’re doing. This means dropping work with another client, and possibly losing that other client for life. You’ve just told that other client, “Sorry, someone else is more important than you, and I have to go.” Clients never forget that kind of thing.

First responder – You get automated email alerts from the client’s system, and you have to be the first person to respond, often with a service level agreement dictating how fast you have to react. At this point, you’re really more of an employee than an outsider. You simply can’t have any other clients unless you’re willing to gamble that you’ll miss one of their SLAs. Sooner or later, several of your clients will have simultaneous outages – especially in today’s world of connected services.

Publicity Options

No discussion allowed – By default, companies don’t usually want you talking to anyone about what you’re doing.

Private testimonials OK – You’re allowed to use them as a reference.

Public testimonials OK – At the end of the project, you’ll both work together to write up a reference that you can use on your web site along with the company’s name and logo. Big consulting and software companies go so far as to write up the reference themselves and hand it off to the client for editing and approval. Believe it or not, clients often like this approach because it means less work for them, so everybody wins.

Public presentations OK – You can use the company’s name, logo, infrastructure basics, and project basics as part of user group and conference presentations.

Communicating the Discounted Price

“My regular daily rate is $X, but as long as I get 1-3 weeks notice, I can do it disconnected, and I can use your name & logo as a public reference, I’ll do it for $Y.”

In that one sentence, I’ve communicated:

I work by the day, not by the hour. (If you’re doing part-time work after hours from your day job, consider half-day units.)
I have a regular rate, but this rate is negotiable based on other parameters.
These other parameters are what we’re going to negotiate.

Clients will usually negotiate your prices – everybody wants a discount. If you don’t tell the client about the scheduling and cooperation parameters, they’re going to assume that price is the only variable, and they’ll just try to haggle you down on price. (“We really only budgeted $Z for this – will that work?”)

Learning More About Setting Your Rate

I can’t even begin to do justice to pricing options in a blog post, so for more details, here’s my two favorite resources:

The Secrets of Consulting (Paperback – Kindle) – this easy-to-read, storytelling-style book is chock full of good advice like the Principle of Least Regret. When I first got started, I set my prices low enough that I’d make sure the client said yes – but then I’d kick myself afterwards for doing work at such a low rate.

Getting to Yes (Paperback – Kindle) – this book teaches you that price isn’t the only negotiation option. You have to listen to what your client needs, understand what you personally need, and then make the best package to satisfy everybody. Some clients will just aggressively negotiate rates alone, and this book helps you use that to your own advantage to get other things you want (like publicity and scheduling).

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How the Company-Startup Thing is Working Out for Me

June 25, 2013

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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, and I guess it’s time to look back at what’s happened so far.

How We Started the Company

In February 2011, I was a consultant at SQLskills, Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal’s company. We got along famously – I love Paul & Kim still to this day – but if you know us, we’ve all got strong personalities. I had really firm convictions about how I wanted marketing to work, and it didn’t mesh well with how they’d done it. Neither side was wrong or right – their approach works fabulously for them, but I wanted to take a different approach that worked better for me. We agreed that it’d be best if I went out on my own. I’d always had my own clients, so it was an easy and amicable separation with no business problems.

Before going public, I told Jeremiah because he was a great friend of mine. At the time, he was working at Quest Software as an evangelist in my old department (that’s where I’d worked before I went into consulting). It turned out that he wasn’t really happy in the evangelist role, and he was thinking about becoming a consultant too. For so many awesome reasons, I jumped at the chance to partner with him to build a consulting company. He’s one of the sharpest, funniest guys I’ve ever met. We’d failed together at an earlier attempt to build a little startup, but even the failure experience was great, so this was a no-brainer. Even if our consulting company was doomed to fail, Jeremiah would make it a fun experience, and between the two of us we’d be able to learn enough to make the next one a success.

Brent Ozar PLF, by Crys Manson

One of our mutual friends, Kendra Little, had recently left Microsoft to be a DBA at a much smaller company. It wasn’t her thing either, and she was looking for something new. I originally didn’t want her to quit her job, though – after all, Jeremiah and I had enough of a risk just trying to bring in enough consulting business to keep ourselves fed. I didn’t think we should try to land enough business to keep three people busy, but Kendra really wanted to be a partner (not a paid employee), and I’d be damned if I’d let that opportunity pass by. Out of the three of us, Jeremiah and I will instantly tell you that Kendra is the smartest. I’d also seen her in action in some really politically challenging environments, and I was dumbstruck by her people skills.

Tim Ford and I started SQLcruise.com together, and I asked him if he wanted to bring that company into just one company that did both consulting and training events. It was fraught with risk for him – if the consulting company failed, it could drag down the cruise events. He was totally up for it, though, as long as he could keep his day job rather than go into consulting immediately. (I was sure we’d be able to bring in enough consulting revenue later to get him off the ground gradually.)

In April 2011, the four of us launched publicly as Brent Ozar PLF, LLC.

Yeah, About That PLF Thing

The original PLF logo by Kendra

Let’s make one thing clear: I never wanted my name on the company. I was an absolutely equal partner with Jeremiah, Kendra, and Tim – each of us owned 25% of the company. Thing is, I was already keeping busy with consulting revenue coming in through the BrentOzar.com contact form, and the site had a lot of good SEO. After talking to branding consultants, we decided to keep using BrentOzar.com as the company’s home base.

We wanted to make it clear that the company was bigger than me, though, so we originally named it Brent Ozar PLF, LLC. The PLF stood for Peschka Little Ford, the last names of my cofounders. We hoped that by including the PLF in the company name, people would have no problem signing up for consulting work with Jeremiah and Kendra, even though they didn’t have big web presences as consultants.

Nobody got it. I mean, nobody. Some thought it was some kind of play on Page Life Expectancy (PLE), a common SQL Server monitoring metric. Others thought it was some kind of legal thing like an LLC. Every time we did a webcast, somebody would ask what the PLF stood for.

The Sales Process in the First Year

The PLF naming didn’t have the desired effect right away. BrentOzar.com had been my own personal web presence for a decade, and when prospective customers filled out the contact form, they would often start with “Brent,”. We tried a lot of different approaches:

Rotating duty for the initial contact emails, for example, so clients would get accustomed to someone else right from the start
Publishing less of my blog posts & webcasts, and more of Jeremiah and Kendra’s
Futzing with rates and availability dates (like I wouldn’t take work less than a month in advance, which is my preference anyway because I hate context switching)
Multi-person gigs – for example, I would show up for the first hour of the remote sessions, and then gracefully exit if my skills weren’t required. (And they never were – somehow, no one needs an instant memorized recital of Lady Gaga lyrics.)

We also experimented with our product list. We originally launched with a few different services products around SQL Server health checks, cloud migrations, VMware management, and SAN tuning. The products made sense given our skill sets – they were all perfectly tailored to us – but they weren’t really tailored to what customers needed. Nobody says, “Man, I wish I could find a boutique consulting firm that does SQL Server, VMware, SANs, and Amazon Web Services.” We kept iterating on our products, figuring out which ones worked best, and polishing those.

We never ate ramen noodles to survive (although I certainly love them by choice), but we had some frustrating months. Incoming client requests simply died in the summer, and we had challenges getting existing customers to sign for more work.

Tim Left, We Took Stock of Everything

Our last SQLCruise together – Alaska 2012

Even though the paying work slowed down, the unpaid work kept piling up – legal, accounting, sales, writing, meetings, you name it. There’s so much work in getting the basic plumbing in place, and it all happens in the dark, in the evenings, on weekends, when we’d much rather be spending time with our loved ones.

Eventually, Tim grew tired of the grind, the risk, and the lack of a light at the end of the tunnel. He’d learned that he didn’t really want to segue out of the comfort of his full time DBA job, and I don’t blame him. With two kids approaching college, stability is a huge concern, and a father shouldn’t be stuck in his home office after hours doing weekly company partner meetings. To make matters worse, Tim’s wife Amy had volunteered to do the accounting work to save the company money, so that was even less quality time they had as a family. The end result is that none of us were happy when we got together, and that’s the opposite of what we wanted in founding a company together. The whole purpose of this thing was to make our lives more enjoyable, not less.

We agreed to split the company up. Tim got complete ownership of SQLcruise, and he could walk away from the risk and work of the consulting business of Brent Ozar PLF, LLC. We paid Tim for the rights to use his face in the Brent Ozar PLF logo for a while longer so we could go through a rebranding exercise.

Even though times were tough, Jeremiah, Kendra, and I took a deep breath, and we made some big investments. We came up with a list of four-to-five-figure initiatives like reimagining our brand without the PLF, redesigning our web site, becoming an Amazon partner, implementing SalesForce.com, and hiring our first employee. Only one of those really finished in the first year, so I’ll cover that one.

Hiring Employee #1, Jes Schultz Borland

When we’d first started the company, we wrote a big manifesto about how we wanted to treat each other, our customers, and down the road, our employees. We boiled down the employee parts into a blog post announcing we were hiring, where we covered what we wanted in an employee and how we’d take care of them.

We were utterly flabbergasted and humbled by the response. I seriously wish I could have hired a dozen people that very first day. It was amazing. I’d get an email or a Twitter direct message and say out loud, “Wow!”

It wasn’t all cheesecake and pie and ice cream. Well, mostly.

We hired Jes Schultz Borland, and suddenly things got really real for me. I really like Jes, not just as an employee, not just as a member of the SQL Server community, but as a person. She’s good people. Now, my actions had a direct impact on her. Before, with Jeremiah, Kendra, and Tim as my partners, I didn’t feel that much pressure because we all had equal risk. If each of us didn’t bring in business, we didn’t get paid, but that was just our own fault. Now, we had a mouth to feed, and it wasn’t her responsibility to bring in her own business – it was our responsibility to give her things to do. We wanted to make damn sure she was taken care of, no matter what.

That was a big deal for me because several years ago, I had a company that couldn’t take care of me. I worked for a small software vendor that had to skip a couple of paychecks because they didn’t have enough cash in the bank. One of those skips happened in the week I was trying to close on the Houston house Erika and I built, and I’ll never forget the crazy stress of that week. I resolved then and there that I’d never let that happen to me again, and I sure as hell didn’t want to put anybody else through that same level of stress. We wanted six months of salary in the bank at all times so that if we hit another 9/11, we wouldn’t have to worry. We could work on building tools and training materials so that we’d be even sharper when the economy picked back up.

How Starting the Company Affected My Life

Dad and I in Alaska

We had enough client work that none of us had tapped into savings – the company bank balance kept growing, and work kept coming in. There were slow periods – both of our first two summers slowed down a lot, but we didn’t have enough experience under our belts yet to understand if that was a regular seasonal thing or just coincidences. I was making a little more than I’d made as a DBA or an evangelist, but nothing life-changing.

But to pull it all off – to bring in enough income, keep doing marketing, and keep taking care of the unpaid partner duties – I was working harder than I’d ever worked as a DBA. I traveled a lot (2-3 weeks per month at times), and I put in a lot of weekends. I’m most productive in the mornings from around 6am to 11am, and I would get genuinely resentful if Erika woke up before 11am on the weekends. She was always a late riser on the weekends, and I’d grown to think of weekend mornings as my time to work.

The first year of the company startup put pressure on our relationship. After busting my hump for quite a while, we came to the agreement that I’d travel no more than one week per month on average, and never more than two weeks in a row.

What I Expected for Year Two

We knew bringing Jes on board would be an incredible amount of work. Jeremiah, Kendra, and I were really three different consultants doing vaguely similar things in completely different ways, but we had to come up with standard processes that we could pass on to Jes – and then eventually on to more consultants. Kendra took on the challenge of system-a-tizing our server takeovers and turning them into our new SQL Server Critical Care™ process.

I had to figure out a smooth client sales process. “Sales” is really an exaggeration – I was not much more than an order-taker. People would email us, describe their problems, and I’d explain how we could fix them. In Year Two, I wanted to get much better at building a sales process and scaling it so that we could keep our second and third employees busy. I wasn’t even sure if people would be willing to take Jes as their primary consultant – right at the end of Year One, we had just finally conquered the challenge of getting clients to not just take Jeremiah or Kendra, but actually request them.

Meanwhile, Jeremiah was tackling Amazon Web Services, building up a business practice around helping clients move their databases to the cloud (plus moving our own databases and web site there). That required a whole new set of processes, learning new lessons.

The funniest part? None of us expected this at the start of Year One. This wasn’t what we thought we’d be working on. Thankfully, we’d all adapted and grown, and we really liked the work we were doing. (Yes, believe it or not, I was loving sales.)

Today: June 2013

Year Two has just finished, and so I know how all of this turned out. You’ve seen this year’s web site redesign, maybe caught the changes to our services page, and the most attentive readers might have even noticed subtle tweaks to our logo already. We’ve gone through much bigger changes behind the scenes, too. I’m looking forward to recapping this year’s progress next year.

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Why sp_Blitz™ is Free

May 6, 2013

Blog Posts

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 between two meanings of the English adjective “free”; namely, “for zero price” (gratis) and “with little or no restriction” (libre). The ambiguity of “free” can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of information, such as copyright and patents.

I can give you a free beer once, or perhaps many times. However, you may not get the recipe to my beer, and I may decide at any time that I no longer want to give it away.

sp_Blitz™ is Free Beer

We’ve copyrighted and trademarked sp_Blitz™ because we want to maintain ownership of it and protect the work we’ve put into it.

Nightmare scenario: a software tool vendor sees sp_Blitz™ and says, “Wow, this is awesome! We’re going to integrate this into our own tool so that it displays the sp_Blitz™ results, and we’ll say POWERED BY THE BLITZ on it so people will know it’s good. Except we’re going to change sp_Blitz™ a little – we’re going to take out some of the checks, and we’re going to add a few dubious ones, and we’re going to take out all of the references to BrentOzar.com.” Ouch. Not cool.

Gray area scenario: a blogger sees sp_Blitz™, likes it, and decides to put a copy of it on their site for free download for their readers. It starts getting search engine traffic, and next thing you know, people are clicking on that link, downloading their version, and not understanding that it’s really old. Maybe it’s got an ugly bug that causes problems. (Hey, who are we kidding – it’s mostly my code, so it very definitely has bugs.) We have no idea that someone else is hosting an old version, and it’s doing more harm than good.

This might sound far-fetched, but I know another blogger who’s experienced this exact problem. He wrote a web site with a lot of good educational content about SQL Server, and then he sold the web site. The buyer runs ads on the site, making money off it, but can’t be bothered to update the content. As a result, some of the advice on the site is now just plain wrong, and it’s spreading bad knowledge amongst new DBAs who don’t know about the site’s new ownership.

To protect ourselves – and by “ourselves” I mean those of us who work with SQL Server – we copyrighted and trademarked sp_Blitz™. We don’t allow other sites to distribute sp_Blitz™ because we don’t want to worry about a dozen different versions scattered all over the Intertubes. (This also explains the continuous ™ marks all over the place – the lawyers make me use that whenever I mention sp_Blitz™. Never thought I’d memorize the keyboard shortcut for that – on the Mac, it’s alt-2.)

But Why Give Away sp_Blitz™?

I don’t want to get paid to solve easy problems. I don’t want a client to schedule us in advance, get all excited, and then have us find out in the first five minutes that they’ve got auto_shrink turned on and it’s killing their performance. Sure, it feels good to get an easy win, but … that’s not really fair.

Nobody should have to suffer through poor performance just because somebody accidentally turned on a switch they didn’t understand. I want everyone to be able to run sp_Blitz™ and find out if their fly is unzipped without having to call a consultant. Heck, I wish SQL Server Management Studio ran sp_Blitz™ on a server every time it connected, and then showed big flashing red lights for dumb stuff like auto_shrink.

We give it away because we want people to find the easy problems on their own. We want them to look at the results, see our links to our site for friendly, helpful explanations of common problems. We want you to watch our free training videos explaining how to fix those common, easy pain points.

Then, down the road, when you run into a really challenging problem – something that really does require a Microsoft Certified Master or an MVP to solve – then you’ll call us. You’ll already know how we identify problems and give easy solutions, and you’ll trust us with your SQL Servers because you’re already relying on our scripts. You won’t email me today or tomorrow, or maybe not even this year, but this isn’t a short-term bet. I’m very bullish on the community for the long term.

And it works – you’d be surprised how often I hear, “We’re having performance problems, and we’ve fixed the obvious stuff from sp_Blitz™, but now we need something deeper.” Giving easy fixes away for free brings in consulting business. However, if I charged anything for sp_Blitz™ – even just $1 – it wouldn’t get word-of-mouth advertising.

It’s tempting to look at the download numbers (approaching 20k) and think, “If I just charged $5 per download, I’d have $100k, and I could buy that Porsche 911 I’ve always wanted.” Not so – by charging for it, I instantly change the game. People expect support for paid software. People rarely offer to contribute code for paid software. People complain about paid software. I don’t like complaints.

Besides, if I give it away for free, it doesn’t take a lot of consulting engagements to pay off $100k. I see sp_Blitz™ as kinda like a sponsored charity: companies pay me to improve sp_Blitz™ for the public. The more I improve it, the more companies pay me, and the more I can improve it again. It’s a wonderful cycle, and that’s also why I copyrighted and trademarked it: I have to protect that cycle. As long as I can nourish and grow sp_Blitz™ for the public, it’ll continue to pay for itself.

Could sp_Blitz™ Be Open Sourced?

To make that cycle work, companies have to contact me for consulting work once they’ve exhausted sp_Blitz™’s answers. To encourage that, sp_Blitz™ includes more-details links that point back to educational pages on BrentOzar.com. DBAs see those links, read the content, and say to themselves, “When we’re in trouble, I’m going to call these people first.”

To maximize my chances of making that work, I want to maintain control of the more-info links in sp_Blitz™. I prefer that they to point back to BrentOzar.com, not Books Online. We looked at putting it into Github so anybody could check in improvements, but then they could fork the repository and make their own version without giving us any credit. In a perfect world, I’d let anybody contribute to the project quickly and easily (while still protecting our rights). I’m not sure how to get there from here, but I keep looking to see if I can find a way.

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