I’ve been spending much of the evening preparing for a “Technology Assessment and Roadmap” discussion tomorrow with a long-time Varrow customer….which served to remind me to what I like the most about my job — sitting down with people, discussing business needs/goals, and helping them with figuring out how to get “there” from “here”. Sometimes this involves technology, sometimes business practices, sometimes a mix of both (as sometimes changing a business practice can be far more cost-effective than any technical solution).

Yes, I work for a reseller and we need to sell stuff to keep the lights on…but it’s so wonderful once there’s enough trust on both ends (i.e. from the reseller that the customer understands the need to make money somewhere 😉 ), from the customer that the reseller won’t get them excited about technology or solutions they don’t need) that we can just sit down and have a no holds barred discussion. We’re here to accomplish the same thing — help meet the business needs of our clients (which is often the driving factor in picking up new products or dropping existing ones).

I first had this kind of relationship for 6+ years as a customer and it helped me realize what a true Value Added Reseller (VAR) could and should be. Now that I’m at Varrow I’m seeing the same kind of relationships….it’s not every customer (trust isn’t given lightly after all) but we have many customers where we can just down, work together, and dream together a bit.

Side-note: ask me sometime about the customer satisfaction surveys we get back….just really fun to read (in a good way no less).