Straight Path Principles #2 - On Being Cheap!

Introduction - Why these posts? Why these principles?

As we build Straight Path Solutions and the team forms within, I realize the best thing I can do is get out of the way of the smart people we are blessed to hire. To that end, I've created a list of "Straight Path Principles." Sort of a list of bite-sized proverbs that say, "this is how I think, and it's a framework for how I'd like our company to think." I don't want automatons working here. I want to decentralize my command and let the team have autonomy and decision making, but I realized that some like a direction or target. The list is an evolving list, and the team can change the list as we grow. I decided to post about these principles here weekly, or so. As a way to remind myself why and what, and a chance to distill my thoughts and expand them. And as I learn how to be a leader the hard way, maybe it helps someone watch my mistakes and learn from them while laughing at us! I'll keep these LinkedIn articles rather than blog posts. And I'll probably post them on the weekends.

One principle I should probably make "Straight Path Principle #0" gets at the heart of what I mean when I say these principles are "guideposts" or "bumpers" - I want the team to be deciding and acting and moving. I don't want to be a blocker to progress or an approval chain for all things. We're a small enough company with 6 Full-Time Employees that I have enough hats to wear and hope the "principles" let more creativity to flow, let more progress to happen and lead to more clients being served on time and with a consistency that makes them know they are well cared for. I'll probably keep this intro and this first "guiding principle" on all future posts:

#21 - Decisive Action is rarely - if ever- punished - If a decision needs to be made, make it. If you are really not sure, a leader can guide you. But use these principles and make a decision. Straight Path people are decisive. If you followed the principles and the outcome wasn't great - that's not your fault, it's Mike's fault for setting the stage for your failure!

Principle #32 - "We're Cheap!"

I'd love to start in an orderly fashion with Principle #1 - "Leaders Serve" - but I'd rather talk about them as they come to me or as I have a good illustration or prompting that week. This week, I had a great chat with a customer I think we're going to love. We don't have sales folks today, we go for relationships, long-term client partnerships and word of mouth referrals - and we do alright. So when I am blessed to have a chat with some folks who really get their business, who really seem ready to receive our help and fit our long-term relationship model and will appreciate and benefit from our services I get a kick out of the call. The folks in my mind hit that spot. And we talked about many things - but one aspect of the conversation had this principle in mind:

32. We're cheap! Efficient? Economical? Whatever. We're cheap. With Straight Path's money, sure, but with our client's money also. The most expensive and exciting solution isn't always the best. We do what is right, and we help our clients value our impact not just on their performance and uptime - but to their bottom line. As our own revenues increase and expenses decrease, we build a true profit which Straight Path will share. We all watch this with our budget and with our client's budgets. 

I hate that word, 'cheap.' They say we should use a less demoralizing word. Something that builds up and speaks to value. Cheap, well, cheapens the topic of discussion, linguists say! Another principle is #35 - We're Clear, so this is practicing what we preach.

Internally, the word makes abundant sense. Spend less. Don't be fool-hearty with company money. If we are able to drive revenues up and expenses down, the magic in the middle is called "Profit." As we grow, I'm committed to seeing Straight Path be a company that gives back. Through our one week off a year teammates get to give back to a non-profit or ministry and not touch their vacation time; the company-paid benefits we try and make more generous as we grow; the 401(k) match we're starting in 2019; and someday to proper profit sharing - we want to give back to the team who are forming us, and to the communities we live in. You could call this stewardship. That's a perfect word for it. Straight Path people are wise stewards with what has been given to us. But not just with our money. Not only with our time...

We're to be wise stewards of our client's budgets, too. Our managed database service clients are agreeing to give us some set amount of money each month in return for regular upkeep, monitoring, maintenance, break-fix support, development advice, tuning, decisions about their future, and any number of elements of support in the Microsoft Data Platform and Cloud Data space. They are cutting up a part of their budget and contributing to ours. That's humbling, and it isn't something that we're entitled to. It's a responsibility we've earned and need to continue earning. The moment we aren't adding value, they ought to stop using our service! And value isn't just making the thing we're working on at that moment better. That may pass as value - but the real value comes from attention spent on the relationship. And part of that means looking for ways to help our clients with their own "Revenue Up + Expenses Down = Profit" calculations. We can help empower our clients to make a difference in their parts of the world and serve their own customers and employees better.

Sometimes as technologists we get excited about features, and cool stuff and new this and new that. And it's not without reason! The latest is often better, and many people are at risk by not upgrading (I'll have a webinar series starting up in January talking about upgrades, in fact!) and sometimes wasting money by doing things the "old ways" - but sometimes "cooler" doesn't always equal "better". I wish we tracked the times we've helped clients cut budgets better! It would make for a cool marketing infographic! Sort of like McDonald's "___ Billions Served," we could flash "$1,270,500 saved by our customers this year!" or whatever the number is. It's probably not a small number, either! SQL licenses are expensive. Hosting is costly. The wrong setup in Azure is pricy!

But this new client exploratory call and eventual agreement signing this week reminded me of this principle. I don't know enough about their environment yet to know for sure if we'll make the savings. But by all indications on the call, they're paying monthly for SQL Server Enterprise edition in the cloud, and they should likely be on SQL Server standard. I think their VM is probably the proper sized VM, but we'll look at that, too. Based on their core count, there's a strong likelihood that we'll cut their budget down by at least $1,500/month. This isn't a lot. But for a small company? That will probably be well situated in our "Micro" level Remote DBA service tier ($800/month for a couple hours of our time, a full suite of monitoring tools, full attention of our team, included daily health checks and access to our 24/7 per-call support number that rings the FTE on call that week)? This means that this client has the potential to save our fees and still have change left over! Time will tell if our feelings from the initial chat were right, but we love the stories like this. It's not the first time. It won't be the last time - but it's well-timed with me trying to force myself to share these principles! We're cheap. With our money. With their money. When we care more about the relationship than the margins, and we care more about saving their budget than expanding ours, we actually end up doing alright ourselves. It's cool. Maybe we can kill two birds with one stone here. Another of our principles:

#3 We value relationships - Relationships matter. People matter. We are serving our clients. We will, therefore, build lasting relationships. No, we don't need to be best friends and share all our secrets. But we ought to develop relationships and be just a little sad when a client moves on for whatever reason. We will never rely on pushy sales tricks. We believe loved, and healthy relationships breed more work and more referrals and more connections. It's not just right, it has a proven ROI, but even If the ROI were bad, we'd still value relationships first.

Cheap doesn't mean "Penny Wise/Pound Foolish"... For every story I'd share about how we cut down someone's Azure or AWS billing or helped someone upgrade and migrate from Enterprise to Standard or cut hosting fees, I'd be able to share the times we've actually forced a client to spend a little more on these things. When a client works with a consultancy in many sectors and with a lot of combined years of experience, they also get the benefit of what I'll call "Second-Hand Been There Done That!" - They can learn from the mistakes we've made, or we've been called in to help pull people out of. Sometimes a client will try and save today, but we know they'll be spending a lot more tomorrow. Sometimes this principle means trying to use foresight and planning to help increase a budget today, knowing the savings it will bring in the future. I wrote a blog post many years about this upon reflection after planting asparagus in my garden. I still refer folks to that post from time to time. It gets at what I mean here.

So to wrap it up this principle is a good one for any company to adopt. And it's a good one to think about regarding not just your own bottom line but the bottom lines you impact. The budgets you help influence. If we can help others save, we all can win together. And, relationships matter. It's all about relationships! This wouldn't be worth continuing if we weren't building relationships along the way, I'd instead close it all down and do something else!

About Straight Path and Mike -

Companies struggle with database issues like security, availability, or performance. Straight Path Solutions are on-demand experts that help own your databases so you can focus on your growth. 

We do project-based work, too, but our mainstay is our relationally focused managed services that help get the databases out of your way of success. We're a smaller company with 6 full-time employees, but we're carefully growing our team and the services we deliver our clients. Most of our clients have been with us quite a while. Our website is https://www.straightpathsql.com. 

Mike Walsh founded Straight Path after working as a DBA for quite some time. With 20 years of experience at the technical side, he's learning the management side and realizing he's enjoying the relationships and lessons learned along the ways. When he's not fixing databases, leading a great team and speaking about SQL Server topics, he's hanging out at his small family farm with his 4 children, wife and assorted farm animals.