"A true friend stabs you in the front" - Oscar Wilde
With all of the frenzy of #SXSW I didn’t ever share this video with you. Love what we are doing with and for startups. Love that Rackspace trusts me with stuff like this – because it is really important stuff.
Having Dave McClure on the same video is just golden – anyone that knows us both knows we share a lot of the same fucking quirks. Like using bad language inappropriately 
My cell phone rang a while ago, and an older man asked, “Is this Robbie?”. Hardly anyone calls me Robbie. My mother did, and my dad sometimes does – but nobody else. So I assumed, correctly, that this was a wrong number.
I tried to explain this to the gentleman when he told me I needed to shut up, so he could make amends and leave this world in peace.
It is really hard to just hang up when you hear something like that.
So, I told him I was Robbie.
Then he started to tell me his story – and explain to me how he wronged me 17 years before I was born.
It seems he, who he said was named Guy, was a bit of a swindler. A bit of a big-time swindler. He confessed that he had stolen $6500 from me in a bridge building scheme in Colorado, back in 1944. He says he claimed to be working for the government who needed a new bridge to supply a new top-secret base in New Mexico.
He rambled a great deal, and I could tell he suffered memory loss, because he repeated parts of the story several times.
This was a 45 minute phone call. Why would I spend 45 minutes listening to him? Well, it actually just beat anything on television.
At the end, he was sobbing, and asked my forgiveness, which I gave.
At the end, I was compelled to send a Tweet:
I have the most unusual conversations. With the most interesting people. That nobody has ever heard of. #thingsthatmakemesmile
Most Tuesday evenings, at 8PM Central, I am tied to Twitter, engulfed in a chat that most would really not want to join. Nobody sane, anyway! Why? It is a Customer Service chat – you can find it on the hash tag #custserv.
Every week there is a new “topic” – put in quotes because the topic is always the same – “How do those of us that love customers get the voice to speak for them, the credibility to do what is right for them, and the respect to represent them to our respective companies?”
In other words, we often bitch when we don’t feel the love and respect we think our customers deserve from our employers. Note – I did NOT say the love and respect WE expect we deserve. Completely different things. Which is what makes us people who truly love customers – we put them before us. We actually can’t help it. It is just who we are.
And we are a widely disperse group – some of us (me, luckily) have a great deal of voice and leverage for my customers. Others feel very little empowerment. We come together to try to change it for everyone. To try to learn enough, and teach enough – to try to just move the bar a little bit. Every week. Move the bar. Just a little.
Over time, I hope the bar moves a lot.
But I don’t expect a lot today. I do enjoy the company of like-minded people who care about more than a paycheck and to whom a customer is not a 16 digit number.
I love the fucking humanity of it.
This past Thursday we hosted over 100 local business, media, and PR professionals from the local area as guests at my employer’s office. The group is called BMPR, affectionately called “Bumper”.
I’ve been lucky to meet many members of this group, to include most of the founders, well before this event. What started as a Tweetup has grown into a community of like-minded people that want to help each other raise the bar – to get better at reaching, serving, and satisfying their customers. And to teach each other how to get better – which is the real key. Vibrant communities are built when people care more about US then they do about “me”.
This is a pure grass-roots organization, with no dues, no real rules, but a lot of shared excitement, and curiosity, and a desire to both learn, and to teach.
I was lucky enough to speak at BMPR two months ago, and I had fun with it. I had the dorkiest slide deck ever because I’m not a fan of slides. I would rather “talk story”, as they say down under.
So for three years, almost, I have been talking about this company I work for, and how amazing it is. And I know some people were probably getting tired of it, because it just sounded like me beating a corporate drum. But last Thursday a lot of my friends got to come and see why I love talking about who I work for.
It is not a perfect place, but it is most often a magical place. Being able to share that with 100+ of my friends, and the friends of my friends was really cool. I was pretty proud to have them see what we did with an old shopping mall – how we turned it into a very comfortable home for Fanatical Support to live – and grow.
Managing over 100 guests at a time, to include a tour through offices with a thousand or more people actually doing their day jobs isn’t something many companies would welcome. My bosses supported the idea from the first email I sent that asked, “What if…?”.
They were so in sync with me on my desire to just show off a little bit of what we are building – we are not done by any means – both our mall (The Castle) and our company are still expanding very quickly. They had no clue who BMPR was – they just knew it was important to me. Important enough that a member of the senior leadership team took some time to welcome people, and stayed around for most of the session.
I’ve been a Rackspace customer for a long time – and approaching being an employee for three years. The things Rackspace has let me do – the ideas they have let me pursue; the chances they have let me take… It really is a different kind of company. Where the Chairman might call me at 12:30 am if that is the only time we can find to talk, or I might have a 1:1 dinner with the CEO. Where a Social Media team is built off of engineers and not marketing. Where one over-riding goal of “Be Helpful” permeates everything we try to do.
Where a great idea can get funded if you are passionate enough to pursue it.
That doesn’t happen in a lot of companies our size. It is a little magic. And I’m glad I can invite in guests that can get a bit of a sense of that magic.
Everything starts with community. From the way we are building our company to why BMPR matters.
If you want to make your life more full – get involved with your community. There are some amazing people out there wiling to both learn and teach you. Find them. They are looking for you too.
We all need each other.
Thanks so much to my friends in BMPR for letting me show you a bit of my world – and for sharing so much of yours with the rest of us.
Note – edited to link to my dorky slide set, per request.
I often tell people that my current job doesn’t stress me out much. I can’t make a mistake and kill a baby. I can make a mistake that costs us money, but this is not life and death. I have dealt with the stress surrounding life and death. This is a different (more manageable) level of stress.
The truth is every job produces stress at times, and I do feel it on occasion.
As a manager, when I feel stressed out I always try to stress up, and not stress down.
In other words, when I am stressed, I stress out my managers, and not my employees. I figure my manager’s get paid to deal with it, and my employees don’t.
So a very short post.
When stressing out, stress up. Never stress down.
If your bosses don’t react to it well then find new bosses. Or find a new job.
But never stress down – your employees don’t deserve it and probably can’t affect the cause of your stress anyway.
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