Henry Ford once remarked, “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business.” Don’t get me wrong, making money is great, but not at the expense of others … especially our customers. Earning money because you did a great job—honestly and ethically—helping someone else’s business get better… Now that is rewarding. And funny enough, it’s also the cornerstone of real customer loyalty. Do a good job, they call you back.
Ah, the beauty of simplicity.
The dust is still settling from our 2nd virtualization conference, and I think it went great. The keynote talks went well, the technical presentations were well attended, and the hands-on demos at the IT Weapons booth were a hit. I’m really proud of the team. They worked super hard putting this event together, perfecting their presentations, building the demo environment, coordinating with the vendors, and networking with people at the event. For the first time, we also had Mike Dabner MC our event; warming up the audience, introducing the speakers, and keeping us on schedule. He did a great job.
The swag was cool too… Every attendee got plenty of weaponized gear. We gave away 2 Nintendo Wiis, a Blue Ray player, a GPS unit, a few iPods, and some other cool items. What could be better? A day of education, prizes, and even a fancy popcorn maker!
I got some great feedback about the conference yesterday. My favourite was: “thanks, Ted. I went to another IT Weapons event and I learned so much and you guys treated my team so well. IT Weapons truly is a key piece of my team. You guys are a class act.”
We’re really trying to brand our events as educational, geared toward empowering people rather than trying to ’sell stuff’. We do our best to get competing vendors in the same place and let them prove the value of their solutions. Sometimes this strategy can frustrate our vendor partners. But it’s about being honest with the customer… and people love it.
Again, the beauty and value of simplicity; we show clients all the info around each vendor solution and together we can make the right business decision. They trust us, we help them, and everyone wins. Thankfully, I’m starting to see the vendors coming around to our thinking.
Looking ahead, we’ve already scheduled a lot of meetings with attendees, some PoCs, and we even inked an agreement for a large number of virtual desktops delivered straight from the IT Weapons Cloud. What an excellent event. I think Henry would be proud.
