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Epic Life Quest: Level 10 Achieved.

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Life’s little moments of success can pass us by so easily. If we don’t track the things we’re proud of, we lose track of how far we’ve come. Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome inspired me to build my own Epic Life Quest. I keep track of achievements, and after five significant ones, I level up.

In the last level, I focused a lot on passive income: building training that I could sell, and then getting that educational material out to as many people as possible. That paid off in this level because the passive income gave me more time to focus on other areas of the business – and some fun.

Here’s what I accomplished in this level:

Jeremy Clarkson’s old digs on the Isle of Man

  • Visit Poland. When I saw @AaronBertrand‘s photographs of his Poland trip, I decided I had to go. SQLDay 2017 in Wroclaw was great! Completed May 2017.
  • Half-point: Ride in the upper deck of a 747. I don’t count this as a full experience point, but I’ve always wanted to do it, and I wanted to mark the achievement here so I could remember it when I looked back. I usually fly United, and they don’t use 747s, so I had to take a Lufthansa FRA-MCO flight to do it. Completed May 2017.
  • Visit the Isle of Man. Famous stateside for the bonkers TT motorcycle race which produces terrifying crashes and kills riders every year, this beautiful island was way, way, way more beautiful than I’d expected. I rode most of the race course (in a taxi, not a bike), and I’m totally going back. If, heaven forbid, Erika passes away before I do, I’m moving here. It had that much of an effect on me. Completed September 2017.
  • Set the PASS Summit pre-con attendance record. The Microsoft SQL Server industry holds a big annual conference in Seattle, and I’ve helped teach pre-con classes there before. My Expert Performance Tuning pre-con with Erik Darling broke the sales record more than a month before the event, and PASS couldn’t fit any more seats in. Completed October 2017.
  • Half-point: Get code into a Microsoft product. When Microsoft announced SQL Operations Studio, their new open-source cross-platform SSMS-type tool, the execution plans looked awfully familiar. Turns out one of the open source projects they’re using is HTML-Query-Plan, an open source project that Brent Ozar Unlimited sponsors – because we use it for PasteThePlan! So awesome – because that means we might actually be able to get the PasteThePlan icons in there as a theme, heh heh heh…

  • So close, yet so far

    Sell $500K of training in one month. Our Black Friday sale has done really well over time, and this year I want to see if I can cross that big round number. Update: so close, yet so far: our Black Friday sales hit $439K. That’s more than double our prior record, but not the big round number goal I was aiming for, so no Epic Life Quest points here.

  • Sell out 2 pre-cons at the same conference. When our SQLBits 2018 pre-con sold out, Erik suggested something I’d never heard of before in our industry: why not run the exact same pre-con again a second day? It’s kinda like how musicians will add a second date when that one sells out. The Bits crew agreed, and we sold that one out too! Completed January 2018.

My achievements will slow down a little in Q1 due to a vacation trip to Germany, SQLBits in London, and several online training classes. I’ll make some more progress in Q2, but then our Chicago lease is up at the end of May, and we’re looking (again) at moving to San Diego. These winter storms make that decision a whole lot easier.

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Building the BrentOzar.com 2017 Black Friday Sale

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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, November training sales turned into a pretty big deal:

  • 2013: $52,780
  • 2014: $84,577
  • 2015: $167,728
  • 2016: $181,457

I’m sure 2016 could have been higher, but when sales opened at midnight, the web site fell over due to the load, and stayed down for almost two hours. That night, I resolved to take our web hosting to the next level for the next Black Friday sale. We’d been on a $600/mo Premium plan at WPengine, and that was more than enough horsepower for most of the year – but not Black Friday. Takes money to make money.

When I was planning my Epic Life Quest goals for this year, I asked myself, “What would a really ambitious and challenging November sales goal look like? And what would it take to hit that goal?” I figured selling $500K in training would be really, really hard to pull off.

So I went to work.

I added new courses and instructors.

I planned my all-new 2018 training class lineup to coincide with the Black Friday sales. I’ve been gradually building a larger training library over time, and this year I split our 4-day performance tuning class into 3 separate 3-day classes, all with hands-on labs. I also added a ton of other value-adds into the courses, like looking at the students’ production server data by way of an app we built to collect their data. In all, the classes were bigger & better, and I wanted to combine the Black Friday excitement with this new class excitement too. I had about 3-4 days of work in setting up all these 2018 online classes at once, and I had to do it all in advance because…

I added a new 2018 Live Class Season Pass. With our self-paced recorded training videos, our Everything Bundle has traditionally been our biggest seller. There’s a chunk of the market that just wants to swipe a credit card once (or do one purchase order) and get all of their training approved at once. I figured, “What if they’d do the same thing with live training classes?” I priced the Season Pass as the same as 2 3-day classes – and then students could attend lots of classes all year long, continuously upping their game. Since I had the entire 2018 class lineup set in stone and visible online, people could justify buying a Season Pass.

I added guest instructors. Edwin Sarmiento ran the first guest instructor class earlier this year, and it went really well. Our marketing tools plus his content combined to be a profitable relationship for everybody. It organically snowballed from there – we ended up with guest courses from Andy Leonard, Anthony Nocentino, Drew Furgiuele, and Steph Locke too.

I planned changes to the recorded video classes. Eagle-eyed readers will spot that I’m not doing the Senior DBA Class anymore. That will be moving into the recorded videos only rather than being a live class. More news on that as we approach the launch of that.

I built a marketing calendar & launch sequence.

Back in September, I had to design a marketing calendar: the things I wanted to communicate, and the dates I wanted to communicate them. For this year, I wanted to build a several-part launch sequence using the “Building a Killer Email Launch Sequence” guide by Startups for the Rest Of Us. It was going to be about a week of emails & blog posts leading up to an open-for-registration launch day.

I looked at the other events on my calendar:

  • Nov 1-3 – PASS Summit (it’s hard to get marketing news out during this time because there’s so much noise)
  • Nov 4-12 – Vacation (I’d already planned to be in Cabo)
  • Nov 20-22 – Thanksgiving lead-up (hard to get marketing news out here too because less people are paying attention)
  • Nov 24 – Black Friday

So I decided to split the launch into two parts:

  • Oct 24-31: email launch sequence
  • Nov 1: instructor-led training class sales open
  • Nov 16-22: subscription training launch sequence
  • Nov 24: Black Friday doorbuster sales on subscriptions (Everything Bundle)

Then, I started working on my launch sequence for the instructor-led training classes:

When the first email/post in the sequence went out describing the pain points, it generated 45 comments and hundreds of email replies. I didn’t see this much conversation coming in advance, but it was really useful to help refine the product even further (plus hone the remaining marketing sequence steps.)

I upgraded our WordPress hosting big time.

High level architecture

WPengine looked at our load last year and talked to me about my business goals for this year. (Total kudos to their sales staff who accommodated my request to work only over emails, and not phone hookups – my calendar was a hot mess at the time.) Based on their recommendations, I stepped up to a highly redundant setup with multiple powerful database servers and multiple auto-scaling web servers spread across two Availability Zones.

It ain’t cheap – over $6k/mo for the Black Friday configuration.

Yes, I can hear you screaming, “Brent, you know databases, web apps, architecture, and WordPress! You work on this exact same stuff in the Microsoft stack all the time! Why don’t you build all that and host it yourself?!?!” And it’s true – I adore doing this kind of thing, but I simply don’t have production-quality MySQL skills, nor do I want to be on call when there’s a load balancer problem, or hassle with upgrading anything.

It’s just an opportunity cost thing – it comes down to what my time is worth. I only have so many hours in the day, so if there’s something I can offload to an outside firm who does an amazing job at that, then I need to do it. There are some things I can’t offload – like designing my new courses, helping guest instructors craft abstracts – so I need to keep my calendar focused.

Besides, if you look at it as a percentage cost of doing business, it’s not that bad – if I could sell $500K of training in one month, then the web hosting costs are ~1% of it. Gotta keep things in perspective.

Dang, that was a lot of work.

I split the launch calendar in half between live instructor-led classes and self-paced recorded video classes because historically, the live instructor-led classes have been the minority of our Black Friday sales. I figured I’d take the lessons I learned from that first launch sequence, and use those to adapt the launch sequence for the video sales.

Off to a good start

The work totally paid off: in the first two days of the live class launch, we’d already cleared $200K, higher than we’d ever sold in November before – and we haven’t even launched the new/improved video recordings.

I might just make that Epic Life Quest task! But first – vacation and recharging in Mexico.

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Epic Life Quest Task: Setting the Summit Pre-Con Attendance Record

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When Erik and I got a PASS Summit pre-con this year, I asked Alison and Leeza a question out of morbid curiosity: what was the pre-con attendance record? They reported that 7 pre-cons since 2012 have gone over 200 attendees, and the record was 269.

I figured that would be really hard to beat, especially given that word on the street is that Summit attendance is down overall due to the Halloween scheduling. To make matters worse, I keep hearing “thought leaders” say that database work is dead, and the magic cloud is going to solve everything.

Would there be anyone out there who wanted to spend their Halloween with us, learning how to make databases go fast?

As it turns out, yes: y’all bought 360 seats.

Three hundred and sixty.

Achievement unlocked: we smashed the sales record. We were on track to break 400, but PASS can’t fit more seats in the room so they’ve had to close registrations.

The economics of that: our share is $75 per person, so that’s $27,000. I know the natural inclination is to say, “Wow, that’s a lot of money for one day of work,” but the reality is that there’s a lot of work behind the scenes to pull off something like this.

So now let’s go behind the scenes – I’ll share what we did and what we learned so everybody can up their pre-con game.

Part 1: Writing the Application & the Abstract

This year, PASS took a really cool approach: rather than submitting a title & abstract blindly, prospective pre-con speakers just filled in a form talking about what they’d wanna talk about. Here’s my submission:

Pre-con application, page 1

Pre-con application, page 2

Richie & Tara aren’t copresenters because they’re staying home from Summit this year due to the Halloween scheduling, and I totally understand & support that. The scheduling was also a worry for me, too: how much lower might overall attendance be, and how would that affect pre-con attendance?

Later, PASS gave us the word that our application had been accepted (YAY!) and it was time to start writing the abstract.

I start presentation design by defining the perfect attendee. Erik & I fired up a Google Doc (it’s like multi-player word processing) and brainstormed:

Here’s some of the highlights of our planning document:

Target attendee planning

Based on that, we sketched out the most important performance tuning tasks they needed to learn, prioritized them, and drew the lines on what we thought we could teach them inside one day. (When you’ve been teaching for a while, scoping a one-day class is brutal: there’s so much you want to show folks.)

Then we turned that into an abstract, sent a first draft in to PASS, and they started working with us to hone it and make sure it didn’t overlap anyone else’s abstract. I think PASS was a little surprised when I said, “Just tell me who the other speakers are that I might overlap, and I’ll work with them directly to make this happen faster.” Turned out the other big performance session was Erin Stellato’s, and we happened to both be at SQL Intersection in Orlando, so we just got together in person and finalized our abstracts. Erin wanted to focus on Query Store, so we removed that from our abstract altogether, and ended up with this:

Pre-con abstract

Yeah, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of words and paperwork here, hahaha. At the end of the day, selling a pre-con all boils down to putting the right words together to communicate your goals to the attendee. These words matter a lot.

Part 2: Launching a Marketing Campaign

In our pre-con application, I put a lot of my heart into answer #13. PASS is taking a risk by giving me one of the limited pre-con sessions. They’re investing in me, and I need to deliver a return on that investment by busting my ass to make sure they don’t have empty seats. For every empty seat in the room, we both lose.

It’s my job to tell my readers, “Hey, if you like my work, you can come see me do my best stuff in person here.” That meant we did a ton of marketing work that I’m really proud of.

Blog posts – everybody does a blog post announcing the pre-con, but it’s just not enough. People miss a single blog post. When we blogged about related topics, like How Much Can One Row Change a Query Plan?, I closed the post with lines like this:

Erik and I will be covering these DMVs and the ways we use ’em in our Summit 2017 pre-con, Expert Performance Tuning for SQL Server 2016 & 2017. There’s over 200 seats sold, but there’s still seats available – get yours before they sell out.

Shameless promotion

Online presentation – PASS hooked a lot of the pre-con presenters up with 24 Hours of PASS session spots, so Erik and I brainstormed a really fun topic that would bring folks in (bad fashion), teach them something, and then have a natural lead-in to the pre-con. We announced it, bought costumes, wore them on webcam, had a great time and generated a lot of buzz. (I wish PASS had included the webcam footage in the YouTube recordings – our costumes were spectacular.) When the video came out, we blogged that too. All of the posts tied back in to the page about the pre-con and the Summit registration form.

Email announcements – we’ve been building up our mailing list for years (coming up on 100K subscribers now.) Mailchimp helps us target people by physical location, what kinds of training they’ve bought from us, etc, so we did a few different emails announcing the class.

  • One to Seattle area locals who haven’t bought a full in-person class from us before, and who DON’T subscribe to the blog posts (some folks just get the Monday newsletter, for example) announcing the class, and explaining that you can go even if you don’t buy a full Summit ticket (because they may not have the budget for a $3k conference)
  • Similar demographic, but people who HAVE bought a full in-person class – because they’re likely to go to the whole conference
  • One to non-locals who have bought an in-person class from us – because they’re likely to travel to attend the conference and/or pre-con
  • Later, emails to people who didn’t click the first time, using different subject lines and/or bodies

Granted, this kind of slicing and dicing only makes sense when you’ve got a big mailing list with a lot of history, but even when you’re just getting started with a mailing list, you can still get a lot of bang for the buck from your subscribers.

This part is a lot of work, but once you’ve done it the first time, it’s easy to repeat the process each time you get a conference pre-con or training class. (I do this work for all of our classes.)

Part 3: Giving Attendees More Value

If you’ve been clicking on some of these links as we’ve been going along, you might notice that the BrentOzar.com pre-con announcements have a line that the PASS ones don’t:

Attendees will even get a one-year Enterprise (Everything) Bundle – with that, the $495 pre-con pays for itself!

There’s a reason for that – PASS is in a tricky position. They have to balance the goals of the attendees, speakers, and sponsors. Speakers love to give stuff away, and attendees love to get free stuff, but…some sponsors have a problem with that. Those sponsors say, “It’s not fair that speakers get to promote their company from the podium for free. When the speakers give stuff away, they’re advertising, so they should have to pay to do that.”

That’s why the speaker contract says:

You recognize and agree that the purpose of your session is to provide educational content and that it is not to be used as a sales or marketing platform. Personal contact, company information, and applicable copyright notices are permitted within the designated slides of the PASS provided PowerPoint template. You will not promote your company’s products or services, or that of any companies with which you have a monetary, sales, marketing, or business relationship for the purposes of sales or other commercial engagement. Provided that PASS is notified in advance, branded and non-branded item giveaways, draws, and/or prizes are permitted within your scheduled session with none being left behind at the end. In addition, you are solely responsible for any and all state tax related matters in connection with any branded or non-branded item giveaways, draws, and/or prizes.

That’s fair. I’ve sat in Ignite/TechEd vendor sessions that turned out to be pure spam, and the attendees lose there. It’s my job as a speaker to make sure attendees are happy, and that means zero advertisement. Plus, I love that they just say “PASS is notified in advance” – there’s no pesky approval process, and we just need to say, “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

Initially, we just thought we’d give everybody the free Everything Bundle, but when we broke the sales record, we thought, “How much more value could we add?” We came up with a couple of ideas, and then asked the readers for Kickstarter-style stretch goal ideas.

Here’s what we came up with:

  • 325 seats – free recorded version of the class
  • 350 – repeat the pre-con online
  • 375 – free 1-day class designed by the attendees
  • 400 – free 2-day class
  • Sells out – free 3-day class

These stretch goals didn’t really cost us much – we already have our own online infrastructure to sell & deliver live training classes – but they added a ton of value for attendees.

In retrospect, I should have asked PASS what their max number of seats was. I’d consulted the Seattle Convention Center’s capacity charts, and our room 6B supposedly goes up to 513 capacity in classroom setup with 3 people per table. However, I should have remembered that sometimes venues quote layouts that don’t really work well in reality. (“This Volkswagen Beetle seats eight comfortably.”)

It’s Not Really $27,000 in One Day.

I hate those blog posts that say “I launched an e-book and made $27K in one week!” Launching a product and promoting it is one hell of a lot of work leading up to launch week – and I’m not even talking about the work we’ve put into building the content. (This class is going to blow away expectations – as we rehearsed it last week, all of us had moments where we said, “Whoa, I didn’t know that.”)

Do you need to do all that work in order to have a successful pre-con? Of course not – but like anything else in life, the more work you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. Like Andy Frisella, the MFCEO, says: do the work.

That’s why I’m so happy with the outcomes, and why I’m sticking this as a point on my Epic Life Quest. We did the work. Next up, and a little related: trying to set a record on our upcoming Black Friday sale.

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Epic Life Quest: Level 9 Achieved. Let’s Talk About Passive Income.

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Life’s little moments of success can pass us by so easily. If we don’t track the things we’re proud of, we lose track of how far we’ve come. Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome inspired me to build my own Epic Life Quest. I keep track of achievements, and after five significant ones, I level up.

When I became the sole fella in charge at Brent Ozar Unlimited® back in fall 2015, running the company dominated my calendar for a while. I struggled with trying to grow the consulting company, then ended up laying off half the staff. Once I stopped trying to grow consulting, I shifted priorities and tackled a few other things:

Room 6E. No pressure. Instagram

Room 6E. No pressure. Instagram

  • Launch an online service. I’ve done scripts and apps before, but never an online service where code runs and stores your data in a database. PasteThePlan launched in September 2016.
  • Spoke in the biggest room at PASS, first session. After the opening keynote, I had the first session in the biggest room, broadcast live on the web. I wish I would have taken a panoramic photo! Completed October 2016.
  • Launch GroupBy, a free online conference. For years, I’ve been thinking about different spins on how the SQL Server community can get together. GroupBy.org launched in November 2016.
  • Scored Google as a client. I’ve had larger clients that I couldn’t talk about, but even if I could, Google would still hold a special place in my heart. I wish I had a picture of my face when they booked a meeting with me out of nowhere and said, “Hey, we’d like to work with you on an Always On project.” Completed October 2016, announced publicly February 2017.
  • Increase my passive income numbers to match my active income. Completed April 2017, and let’s talk about this one in detail.

Warning: the passive income topic is rife with spam. There’s a ton of slimy companies out there that wanna sell you their secret to making money while you sleep. Because of that, I’m not going to link to anything at all in this post – I’m just going to talk about strategies, and if you want to learn more specifics about a given strategy, you can ask away in the comments.

Active Income vs Passive Income

A quick definition:

  • Active income is trading time for money.
  • In theory, passive income isn’t directly tied to your time.

There’s a lot of gray area here. For example, if you have a rental house, and you earn rent money from it, is it truly passive? You probably have to deal with fixing the heat when it breaks, or chasing down tenants when they’re late on the rent. Another example is writing a book: you write it once, then earn royalties from it over time, but is that active or passive income?

For me, passive work means these four things aren’t fixed or related:

  1. The time when I do the work
  2. How much work I do
  3. The time when the income arrives
  4. How much income arrives

When I was learning about this stuff several years ago, I was mesmerized, and I totally understood that it was going to be the only way I was gonna get to retirement. Let’s face it, database administrators have a tough time accumulating a million bucks, let alone whatever money you need to retire. I had to figure out a way to build something that could make money while I was off doing other things.

But How Can a Geek Build Passive Income?

I’m a Microsoft SQL Server database administrator. I looked at people doing passive income businesses, and I had a hard time connecting the dots between what they were doing, and how I could make money. Eventually, I did enough research that I came across a few strategies that seemed to work.

I’m not going to include generic strategies like buying rental houses or stock. I’m specifically talking about things that us geeks can do.

Build a paid training course. It takes (a lot of) time initially, but once the material is built, people can buy and consume the material without you being involved. (Obviously, this is the one I went for.)

Build great content and get sponsors. If you can write or film stuff that brings in lots of eyeballs, you can cut deals with advertisers who want to piggyback off your popularity. You can make a living with active income as a vendor evangelist, but the catch is that when they let you go, you’re no longer making money off the content you built. If your goal is to do this with passive income, you’ve gotta figure out a way for the vendors to keep paying you long after you’ve stopped writing the content, or get other people to write the content. (This is totally doable in our industry – think about content sites with sponsors.)

Sell a retainer-based service. Clients pay you $X per month to watch over your systems, give them periodic health reports, and maybe even take action when the systems fail. In the cloud age, I see a huge opportunity here for ongoing DBA services to help keep monthly cloud costs low. This is tricky, though, because it can easily consume just as much time as active income, but the idea is to build something that you can hand off to someone else to perform.

License a process or idea. Say you build a powerful health check process, with tools and sample output. License it to other geeks who can use it with their own client base. They’re paying you while they do the work – although there’s also some ongoing improvement work you’ll need to do to make sure your process is the best. In the cloud age, this can mean building a VM template that has royalties built in – you just automatically make money when people start your VM template on AWS, Azure, or GCE.

Build a list and sell other people’s stuff. Start a popular blog, YouTube channel, or email newsletter, and then as your audience grows, use affiliate marketing to link to other creators. For example, people who start training classes want to reach as many people as they can, so they’ll give you a coupon code for your audience. When folks buy using your coupon code, they get a deal, the seller makes money, and you get a percentage. This was the entire basis of TheWirecutter.com‘s business – they made money when you clicked on Amazon links to buy products they reviewed. There’s no reason that business couldn’t work with tech industry products too, like monitoring software and cloud product reviews.

Build an app and make it popular. “But Brent,” you sneer and point, “that’s not really passive at all! Building stuff is hard!” Bad news: none of these techniques are easy. Remember, with passive income, those 4 key things I mentioned earlier aren’t related. If you can build something and make it go viral, the amount of money you make isn’t directly tied to the work you put in. More importantly, the app is making money that funds your next venture, and you can work on that next thing while you’re getting paid from the last thing. I separated out those two things – build an app and make it popular – because you gotta do both. There’s even a market for people who take a good app that never caught on, buy it from the creators, and then make it popular by selling it to their existing market. (This is how a lot of indie software makers get acquired.)

There’s many more, but I’ll stop there. When you’re looking for inspiration, don’t look in the tech market – look at completely unrelated markets like photography, gadgets, wedding planners, you name it. Pick your hobby, figure out how people are making passive income in your hobby, and then see if that technique can be used in your day job’s industry.

I Picked Training Courses, and I Worked My Tail Off.

You gotta use what you have to get what you want.

To do that, you gotta know what you have – your strengths and weaknesses – and identify exactly what you want. After a lot of self-examination, I decided that the best passive income strategy for me was to build training courses.

Free duffel bag with every subscription

It was a long, hard journey, but in April, I made it. For the last rolling 12 months, my total on-demand recorded online training – what I define as passive income – was higher than my consulting or active (live) training revenue.

Is it purely passive? Of course not – looking at my April 2017 calendar, I had four weekdays and two weekend days invested in the online training business. However, it’s a magical passive income feeling every time I check my email during a break, and there’s a handful of new-customer payment emails. Even now, as I’m writing this post, I’ve seen half a dozen come in. (I still have these going directly to my in-box during April just in case something with the new subscription process breaks. After I finish writing this, I’ll turn off that email again and just review sales daily.)

Having a passive income stream like this means that I’ve got more choices:

  • I can goof off on future Epic Life Quest goals (which to be honest, I haven’t done enough of lately), or
  • I can take normal consulting work, and basically get paid double, or
  • I can work on the training business, making investments to grow future passive income, or
  • I can work on other parts of the Brent Ozar Unlimited business (consulting & tools), or
  • I can give back to the community, like building GroupBy.org or the First Responder Kit

So that’s why I kind of look at our subscription training customers as community sponsors. They pay for my time to work on stuff like GroupBy. That’s kind of awesome.

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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 discuss it. We hit:

  • $1mm/year in training revenue (including both live & recorded classes), and
  • $2mm/year in combined revenue (training and consulting)

For numbers geeks, I’m measuring on a rolling 12 months basis – for young, growing businesses, you don’t wanna wait for calendar years to measure stuff. (Also, at the risk of stating the obvious: these numbers are revenue, not profit.)

How we got there: steadily building training

When we started the company, Jeremiah, Kendra, and I had a limited amount of presentations built. Since our day job was teaching customers what was broken in their SQL Server, we found ourselves continuously writing new training. That customer training material was designed to be super-concise, and it used real examples from their environments. Writing public training material is much harder.

We started with some online 1-day events, then gradually expanded to a 2-day in-person class. Over the course of a few years, we ended up with a huge library of online stuff plus three 4-day live classes: The Senior DBA Class, Advanced Querying & Indexing, and SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting.

Steadily building a tolerance for risk, too

Selling live training class seats means:

  • Paying a large deposit to a training class venue, typically in a hotel
  • Committing to a minimum spend for food, A/V, and hotel rooms
  • Buying your own travel to the event
  • And if enough students don’t show up, you eat some of the food/A/V/hotel costs

As an extreme example, I had a January class in Newark, NJ (SHUT UP I KNOW NOW) where only 5 students showed up. I lost something like $15k that week on hotel fees, and that’s not even including the money I could have earned doing consulting or something instead.

If you have one or two of those bombs every now and then, it’s no big deal – but as a small company starting up, those are big eye-opening events. We started with just a little risk, and then gradually added more and more risk, signing several contracts for class dates throughout the year, and forking out tens of thousands of dollars in hotel deposits at once.

We also faced risk in that there were only three of us, and we didn’t have complete topic overlap. All of us had written modules that no one else knew well enough to teach: I couldn’t teach Jeremiah’s dynamic SQL module or Kendra’s THREADPOOL module, for example. If one of us broke our arm right before class, we had to put our game face on and keep going.

But with risk comes reward, thus this blog post.

Training powered the company buyouts.

When the company bought out Jeremiah & Kendra, this trove of training material was key to making it work:

  • Jeremiah & Kendra chose to leave their intellectual property (training classes) in the company
  • This meant I could deliver those modules, generating cash flow to pay them off over time
  • But this also meant I had to learn to deliver the live in-person modules all by myself (the self-paced online recorded classes weren’t an issue, obviously)

Teaching a class is more than just reading stuff off a slide. (Well, that’s all you get in a lot of crappy vendor classes, material taught by people who’ve never actually done it in real life, but I won’t settle for that kind of garbage.) I had to dig deeply into the material and be prepared to answer tough attendee questions on it.

This also meant a spectacularly high level of risk. One instructor teaching a series of 4-day live classes, all by himself? No missed travel allowed. No sore throats acceptable. No off/downer/slow days. No second instructor to turn to for questions. Those initial 4-day classes were really challenging. (But also rewarding! I’ve been able to sustain and grow those training revenue numbers, and they powered the company through the really dark times – more about those in next week’s installment of my annual How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out for Me series.)

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Epic Life Quest: Level 8 Achieved.

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Following Steve Kamb’s lead, I treat my life as a video game with a series of levels. Whenever I unlock five new achievements, I count it as a level-up.

Company retreat in Napa Valley

Company retreat in Napa Valley

Level 8’s 5 new achievements:

  • Pass 50,000 Monday email subscribers. The Brent Ozar Unlimited mailing list has over 70,000 subscribers, but it feels pretty magical to know that over 50,000 folks want our favorite links in their inbox every Monday morning. Completed February 2016.
  • Tour a winery in Napa, California. The Brent Ozar Unlimited team went to Napa for the 2016 company retreat and had a blast. My favorite by far was the Cliff Lede Vineyards. Completed February 2016.
  • Visit Israel. I’ve always wanted to go, and I don’t exactly know why. For years, I’ve asked the SQLSaturday Israel organizers to let me know whenever they pick dates, and this year my work schedule finally worked out! Teaching a pre-con and spending a few days walking around the city, plus doing Vienna on the same trip. Completed April 2016.
  • Have readers on all 7 continents. I’ve always thought this would be a nifty badge to unlock, but Antarctica never showed up as a continent in our Google Analytics list. I sat down one day to figure out if there’s a SQL Server professional in Antarctica, and it turns out that Google Analytics tracks Antarctica as a country rather than a continent. We had a visitor from Antarctica this year! Completed June 2016.
  • Own the same car for five years. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I’ve never pulled this off before, and I was proud to pull it off. I have a serious attention span problem when it comes to cars. I bought my current 2008 Infiniti G35x in mid-2011, and I’m still happy to get into it and hit the start button, so I’ve made huge progress. Completed June 2016.
Mine for the last 5 years (and bought it used)

Mine for the last 5 years (and bought it used)

I feel a little guilty about three of these because they seem passive at first glance. Passing a subscriber number, having readers on all the continents, and owning a car for 5 years – these seem like you could just sit still and do them. They all required discipline along the way, though, so I’m marking ’em down as goals.

I also kinda feel like I cheated on the car one because I’m living in downtown Chicago at the moment. Parking spots here are $250-$350/month to rent, or >$50k to buy (plus homeowners association fees). I would really love to have an old Fiat or Alfa convertible for tooling around on nice spring and fall days, but I can’t justify putting a $3,000 car in a $50,000 parking spot. That just doesn’t make financial sense.

When our lease is up here in early 2017, though, we’ll likely move out of downtown Chicago and to somewhere with cheaper parking. That also means I’m probably going to keep the Infiniti almost another year. It’s still got under 70K miles – as telecommuters, Erika and I just don’t drive all that often. In the meantime, I do splurge on road trip rentals every now and then.

What I’m working on for Level 9

I have no idea.

My life went through several unplanned changes in the last year: the company buyout, then hiring our first developer, and then a few that I can’t talk about publicly yet. They’re all good – they’re just surprises that I had to take advantage of. Life is what happens when you’re making plans, and for once I catch myself full of life and not quite full enough of plans.

I have an Alaska cruise coming up in August, and I use those to reflect. I sit on the deck for hours with a notebook and a drink, think about what I’ve done right recently, and what I need to do better.

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How to Measure Your Career (SQLSaturday Israel Keynote)

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My name is Brent Ozar, and I help people make SQL Server go faster.

That basically means I measure things for a living.

If I’m going to make something faster, I have to start by knowing exactly how slow it is.

When I first started working with SQL Server, I just measured it with Perfmon metrics. I spent so much time capturing metrics, interpreting what they meant, documenting them, setting up email alerts about them. Then I found out about DMVs – SQL Server’s dynamic management views. I started querying those, and wow, there was so much information available about internals, what was running now, what had run recently, how healthy the server was, you name it.

There was so much information available that I couldn’t possibly collect it all – so I bought monitoring software that captured everything. It would analyze and trend it all for me, give me nice big dashboards, and it would even send me alert emails. Page life expectancy is too low! Disk queue length is too high!

I got so many monitoring alerts that I had to set up a rule in my email to push all of those alerts into a folder. And then I didn’t even read the alerts anymore. Sound familiar?

We’re all addicted to gathering trivial numbers.

Companies do this too – not just with their SQL Server data, but with all kinds of data. This is where the “big data” trend is coming from. It’s so cheap and easy to gather all kinds of data, but nobody knows what’s important, or how they should act on it. They just collect it all and stash it away somewhere, hoping that it will be useful someday. I’m not saying big data is bad – it’s awesome, when you have a use for it. But so often, it’s just like all those Perfmon counters and DMV metrics that we gather – it just lies around unused.

We even do this with our own personal lives.

I’ve got an Apple Watch on. (It’s no good, don’t buy one. Wait for the next version.) But one of the things it does is track the number of steps I take every day. I think we’re supposed to get like five thousand steps per day to be healthy. The first few days, I looked at it every day to see if I was active enough. I made sure I was taking five thousand steps, but, uh, I’m still fat.

That data point doesn’t matter for me. I’m just piling up more data that isn’t really relevant to my quality of life. What I need is for the Apple Watch to count the number of times I lift a beer glass. That would be a much more useful metric, right?

Finding the right measurement is hard.

I used to measure my career with the wrong metric.

I’m going to ask you to think for a few seconds about one number that you might monitor that tells how your job or your career is doing.

Was it money? Your annual salary?

That’s what mine was for a really long time. It’s how I got into databases. I always looked around the company for the most expensive thing. I wanted to stand near that thing, and fix it when it broke. When I worked in hotels, it looked like the computer was the most expensive thing, so I stood by that, and when it broke, I offered to help. Then I went to work for a hotel management company with lots of desktop computers, and I looked around again. The servers were the most expensive thing in that office, so I stood near those, and when they broke, I offered to help. I got so much server experience that I went to work for a software company, and I looked around for the most expensive thing there – it was SQL Server. So I read the SQL Server manuals and stood near that, waiting for it to break.

SQLSaturday Israel keynote - photo by Fabiano Neves Amorim

SQLSaturday Israel keynote – photo by Fabiano Neves Amorim

Along the way, I learned two things:

  1. If you fix expensive things, you make lots of money.
  2. Expensive things seem to break when I stand near them.

But because I used the wrong metric, my career went the wrong way.

I got a job working for a consulting company who said me: “This client is paying us to build them a data warehouse. The project budget includes a DBA, and we don’t have an extra one, so we’re going to hire you.” The money was fantastic – the most money I’d made so far.

But after I started, they told me a little something more: “We don’t actually have any work for you to do, so we just need you to sit in a cubicle, look busy, and don’t touch anything. As long as you can do that, we’ll be able to bill hours for your time, and you’ll make great money.”

That sounds awesome, right? Sit around and get paid!

But I wasn’t doing things I was proud of.

I wasn’t really helping the business, I wasn’t learning, and I wasn’t growing as a person. I was just putting in time for money.

My family life suffered. My health suffered. Even my dog suffered. My wife, Erika, would pick me up after work every day, and as usual, she had our dog, Ernie, with her. We started driving home, and on the way, Erika and I were both so stressed-out and tensed up that Ernie leaned over between the car seats and vomited. I’ve never seen so much vomit. I’ve been around drunk adults that vomited less than Ernie did that day. It was like you turned on a faucet and she just kept going and going.

Eventually the stress got to me and I tried something different.

I let go of my money measurement just a little bit, and took a lower-paying job that sounded really interesting. I went to work as a DBA with a team of fun people I really admired. I said to myself, I’d be willing to make less money if I could make a difference, and be more proud of what I did.

Those next few years were some of the best years of my life. I worked much, much harder, and I was making less, but I loved it. I learned virtualization, learned to manage shared storage, went to the PASS Summit for the first time, even started running.

I was doing things I was proud of.

So I started measuring my job by the number of things I was proud of.

I’m not talking about avoiding dessert, I’m talking about big things I want to tell my family about, just like a couple of things per year. Big things.

When you’re proud of something, you’ll work really hard at it. You’ll be excited by it, consumed by it, and you’ll get really good at it. And when you’re proud of it, and you’re good at it, it doesn’t even feel like work at all.

And it sounds odd, but you will make money at it.

You will make a lot of money at it.

This is the age of sponsored blogs, webcasts, podcasts, training classes, independent consulting – heck, even Twitch. If you’re good at playing games and you put a lot of love into what you do, you can even get paid for that! Granted, the competition is a lot tougher – but these are new careers our parents never dreamed of.

Here’s how to start measuring your job.

  1. Read Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome. It’s just a web page. If you like that, read his book, Level Up Your Life.
  2. Read my version, my Epic Life Quest.
  3. Make a list of things you’d be really proud to achieve in the next couple of years. They can be totally big tasks that you have no idea where to start – that’s fine.

Today, at SQLSaturday, look at the session agenda, and here’s how you pick sessions:

  1. Pick sessions that get you closer to doing something you’d be really proud of.
  2. Pick sessions by presenters who have done the task you’d be really proud of – whether it’s building a certain kind of app, getting a certain kind of job, or starting a certain kind of blog. Talk to those presenters after their session. They’re – we’re – here because we want to help you achieve great things.
  3. If you don’t know what you want to do, pick sessions that scare you, sessions way outside of your comfort zone. That’s how you learn new things you never would have considered, and that might be the career path that turns out to be right for you.

Thanks for listening to me this morning, and enjoy your sessions at SQLSaturday Israel!

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Epic Life Quest: Level 7 Achieved.

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Following Steve Kamb’s lead, I treat my life as a video game with a series of levels. Whenever I unlock five new achievements, I count it as a level-up.

Level 7’s 5 new achievements:

Breakfast with Dad & Caryl in Mexico

Breakfast with Dad & Caryl in Mexico

  • Become the sole owner of Brent Ozar Unlimited. Sounds kinda funny to be the only owner of a company with my name on it, but Jeremiah Peschka & Kendra Little were equal owners with me. (The company just happened to have my name on it since we started it from my blog.) Completed December 2015.
  • Grow the company to 5 full time employees. I would have called this an Epic Life Quest achievement, but I kinda cheated my way into it. I had to hire people to make up for Jeremiah & Kendra leaving, so I’m not counting the 5 FTE thing as a separate achievement.
  • Take Dad & Caryl to Mexico for vacation. When Erika and I first arrived at Casa de las Olas in Tulum in 2014, I knew I wanted to bring Dad & Caryl here to celebrate Dad’s retirement. Completed December 2015.
  • [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.
  • Blog at Ozar.me every week for 52 weeks straight. Writing energizes me, and writing here helps me keep track of my challenges and accomplishments. Completed November 2015.
  • Teach a week-long training class by myself. I’ve taught week-long classes with Jeremiah and/or Kendra before, but never solo. Managing an entire week’s worth of training and questions is not easy, but I eased my way into it with a whopping 5-person class. However, I count the for-real achievement unlocked with my 26-person class in San Diego. Completed February 2016.

And here’s the first few tasks I’m working on for level 8:

  • Pass 50,000 Monday email subscribers. The Brent Ozar Unlimited mailing list has over 70,000 subscribers, but it feels pretty magical to know that over 50,000 folks want our favorite links in their inbox every Monday morning. Completed February 2016.
  • Tour a winery in Napa, California. The Brent Ozar Unlimited team went to Napa for the 2016 company retreat and had a blast. My favorite by far was the Cliff Lede Vineyards. Completed February 2016.
  • Visit Israel. I’ve always wanted to go, and I don’t exactly know why. For years, I’ve asked the SQLSaturday Israel organizers to let me know whenever they pick dates, and this year my work schedule finally worked out! Teaching a pre-con and spending a few days walking around the city, plus doing Vienna on the same trip. Scheduled for April 2016.
  • Own the same car for five years. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I’ve never pulled this off before, and I would be kinda proud to pull it off. I have a serious attention span problem when it comes to cars. I bought my current 2008 Infiniti G35x in mid-2011, so I’ve made huge progress. Scheduled for June 2016.
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A million dollars.

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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 for the calendar year of 2013 – when managing a quickly growing company, you watch revenues over a running 12-month period. We did indeed have >$1mm for calendar year 2013, but we hit this achievement earlier than 12/31/2013. We hit it earlier in the year when there were only four of us doing consulting – me, Jeremiah, Jes, and Kendra.

How do consulting companies hit a million dollars of revenue?

The Brent Ozar Unlimited team, circa 2013

The Brent Ozar Unlimited team, circa 2013

For consulting companies, there’s three common ways to increase revenue:

1. Increase inventory – hire more consultants, minimize the amount of non-billable stuff they do, and make them work more hours. You, dear reader, know that our company philosophy focuses on a good work-life balance, so that last option wasn’t going to happen. We started by hiring Jes, and then after hitting the $1mm mark, we added inventory with employee #2, Doug Lane.

2. Increase the effective billing rate – sell time in blocks of days rather than hours, focus on adding as much value for clients as possible, and sell productized services: fixed-price packages rather than hourly work. For the first few years of the company, we experimented with several different kinds of services – project work, architecture, data warehousing, cloud, Hadoop, and even Oracle. Within a year of hitting the $1mm mark, we focused our offerings down to just one: our SQL Critical Care®. We made a profit on that product by giving clients a huge amount of value relative to what they paid, but it wasn’t like we could charge $1,000 per hour for this product. If we wanted to scale revenue higher, we needed a different route.

3. Sell things not tied to hours – non-consulting products like books, videos, training classes, applications. This looked like a pretty good growth route for us (in addition to scaling up the staff quantity), so in 2013, we started selling online SQL Server training. The idea is that you put in time to build and record the training videos, and then over time, they keep selling and providing you with income that isn’t tied to the number of hours you spend at the keyboard.

What we did isn’t the only right way – there’s lots of consulting companies that make different choices along the way and do a great job of scaling. I’m proud of the way that Jeremiah, Kendra, Jes and I took our route together, though.

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Epic Life Quest Task Achieved: one straight year of weekly blogging.

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Ernie recharging in Tulum

Ernie recharging in Tulum

Yesterday’s post marked 52 straight weeks of blogging every Tuesday. I’ve also got a blog over at my day job, but that’s separate and doesn’t count – here is all about my personal experiences, branding, consulting, tech, yadda yadda yadda.

It was surprisingly hard. Usually I counsel bloggers to have at least 3 posts in the queue before they publish anything, and to try to keep at least a couple posts in the queue at all times. If you let the queue get down to zero, you start writing crappier stuff just to ship. There was one time (last month, actually) where I let the queue get down to zero, and it felt like my writing quality paid the price.

I’m already back up to a nice Blog Post Queue Length again, though, and my upcoming Mexico vacation will help even more. I’m spending a couple weeks at Casa de las Olas in Tulum with Erika, Ernie, Dad, and Caryl (my stepmom). Erika and I went last year, and I’m excited to share it with my parents.

So check one more thing off my Epic Life Quest. On to the next!

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