what keeps YOU up at night?
June 5, 2007 by Doug Erwin, Chairman and CEO in Doug's Place
a night doesn’t go by that I don’t find myself thinking about the planet’s current and future customers … about their business needs … their suggestions and comments … and how they rely on the planet to supply their IT solutions … it’s one of the things that keeps me up at night … i’ve spent a lot of time in the past few months … talking to lots of folks and asking questions … anytime I could corner some of our employees, customers or industry folks … picking up bits and pieces on what we can do better …
i’m very lucky to have a great group of folks at the planet and incredible customers … all willing to talk to us … in fact, we feature a number of our customer success stories on our web site … dickson supply, bigstockphoto.com and auto lead exchange to name just a few … these companies come to the planet for help in managing their hosting operations … they don’t want to manage server farms or internet providers … and don’t want to run their own data centers and man them 24×7x365 or worry about negotiating the best hardware deal … they’ve asked the planet to take on that responsibility …
no matter what business you’re in … to serve your customers you need to talk to them and really understand their business needs … there’s an old, old, old sales saying, “to sell john brown what john brown buys, you must learn to see through john brown’s eyes,” … don’t remember the author but I picked it up during ibm sales training … a couple of weeks ago we had a company meeting and talked about some of our customers … I talked with employees about customer success stories … about how companies rely on us to run their business … which is why we’ve got to be at the top of our game … i talked about ownership and follow through … about customer satisfaction and how we all work to support their needs …
i wanted all my employees to hear from a customer first-hand so they can continue to learn what “johnny” needs … so i invited a customer to come and speak to the company and tell them first-hand about why they picked us and what they expect from the planet in regards to support and service … this customer also happened to be one of our newer accounts that’s moving their entire server inventory to the planet from two other providers … the speaker did a super job … at the end of the meeting I heard several folks talking about the impact he made and how it really crystallized our responsibility to customers … we’re going to do more talking and listening to our customers … I know we can never talk to all 22,000 of you, but we can try … over the next quarter we’ll be launching several programs toward this end …
we have a great group of employees at the planet … and we’re continuing to invest in them with training and tools … and along the way we’ll bring talent in to fill certain needs … speaking of which … the latest addition to the senior management team is steve reichert … steve joins us as vice president of information technology and operations … he’ll be running the IT organization, software development and operations of our data centers in both cities …
steve comes to the planet with more than 27 years of experience in running IT organizations and data centers … most recently from infocrossing in omaha … in college he did his fortran and cobol programming on a 029 key punch that he lugged around in his backpack … just kidding … he’s trading in the corn fields and moving to dallas, where he lived for more than 16 years earlier in his career … you can read more about him on our web site … we’re thrilled to have him join the team … we’re working really hard to supply you with great products, excellent service and great results … we know we have more to do … in fact we’ll never totally be satisfied because excellence in never truly achieved … the yard sticks keeps moving …
thanks for your notes … all the input helps me learn … and even sleep better at night … be careful … it’s a jungle out there.
- Doug
July 20th, 2007 at 3:22 am
Dear Doug,
Its nice to see your post. One thing I always try to understand of people like you is what drives you? End of the day I realize the drive is initially for survival and once survival is in place it is for the betterment of the people around…
I guess time again this has been proved and the world is a better place because of people like you deciding to dedicate your lives to create better and better systems that ensures we have more time for other things…..
January 9th, 2008 at 1:05 am
Hi Doug,
I was really inspired by the work that you had done for the betterment of our planet and we wish you a ery best of luck in the years to come. You have been very encouraging me to with your dedication and selfless human kind.
Cheers,
Take care of your health while you are working.
Bhuchung