Success Strategy: Strong Roots and Aggressive Pruning

Flourishing Pear TreeSuccess Requires Strong Roots And Aggressive Pruning
Many years ago while working in Singapore I was told that business success requires strong roots and aggressive pruning. I was a young programmer then, not really into horticulture, and didn’t quite understand what they meant. But now, after several decades at business, I have learned that building and maintaining trusted relationships with our vendors, customers, and friends is much like a garden. Some branches of our business needed to be pruned, and others needed help to encourage new growth. At the same time, to carry the metaphor further, creeping vines and other pests invade and must be attended to.
Creeping Vines--Help!

Cautionary Tale: Prune Vines Early!Many tech vendors we have dealt with over the years have stressed their strong partnerships with their resellers. I believe that a partnership should be a two-way street with mutual benefits for all parties. Not surprisingly, it seems that bigger companies don’t view partnerships that way. As an example, one tech vendor we contracted with as a reseller seemed great at first. But after a few months it became very clear all they wanted was our customer list. SNIP.
SNIP!

On the services side, we have a VOIP carrier whose sales team promised us they would introduce our company to their storage engineers if we renewed our contract. We provided them with a good background and some of their engineering team’s contact information to help them with the introductions. Not surprisingly, once we signed to renew the service agreement, the sales team never followed through. Next time the agreement comes up for renewal? SNIP, SNIP.
SNIP!

In another case, we’ve worked with a large broadband carrier for over a decade as both a vendor and as a customer. We have always met and exceeded the SLA for their support. But when we had serious bandwidth degradation recently, it was well over a month (after a long series of escalations to get their attention) before they finally came out and fixed a problem with their circuit. They still won’t tell us what the issue was or why it took so long to respond to us. Instead, they say services and support will improve if we upgrade. Um, what? SNIP, SNIP, SNIP.
SNIP!

When I planted the seeds for Zerowait in 1989, I did not know much about how to grow a business, but over time we developed deep roots with our customers and were able to branch out to help them manage their growth. Over the decades we have seen many competitors who grew fast, but when the economic storm winds blew their business tree came down quickly.

If you are looking for answers to your enterprise storage problems, and you are looking for a company that has deep knowledge on implementing, managing, migrating and upgrading critical storage architectures, give us a call at +1 302-996-9408 or email us at sales@zerowait.com.

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