Moving on up. From VAR to VP.

I left the world of Government employment about six years ago.  At the time I was questioning if I even wanted to keep doing the whole IT thing.  Some people are wired to work for lazy bureaucrats who lie cheat and steal their way through the governmental ranks.  I am not.  That 3.5 year experience  just about broke my will and my desire to succeed.  However I am a bit more resilient than that, and when I landed a job at a consultant with a now defunct Silver VAR it quite laterally changed my life and career.  What I learned was that my desire to succeed and drive solutions was not dead just beaten and bruised.

So in the subsequent six years I have flourished.  I have met hundreds and hundreds of clients I have designed, deployed and supported more networks than many engineers will ever ever touch.  I have learned quite surprisingly that I have a pretty good talent for closing deals and selling solutions.  In the roll I sadly left today at Netech, I was given the huge opportunity to not only launch their Ohio branch, but also to grow the revenue from zero through 12 Million dollars in our first full year.  And up until a week or so ago I figured I would be at Netech for at least a few more years as I was transitioning into a dedicated pre-sales role.  But as I alluded to on Twitter I was hit by a total left hook.

As I was settling into my new role at Netech and completing my four month stent a client, out of the blue Language Access Networks (LAN, Ironic huh) contacted me and said they were interested in me taking over their IT team.  I wont go into the nitty gritty of what happened from there around negotiating for my new role but I will say at the end of the day the opportunity was very challenging and they provided a compelling reason to join their team.

So as of today I am joining the team at Language Access Networks as Vice President of Language Network Services.  I will be going from designing hundreds of networks to stabilizing and growing one network.  I will go from interviewing potential peers to interviewing and hiring employees and then taking the responsibility of growing them into successful members of our community.  In the process of it all I plan on innovating and pushing technology to the very edge of what it is capable of and in doing so make the tech transparent to the solution that it is driving.  If I can do that and grow people then whether this lasts a year or twenty I will have been successful.

I look forward to writing more about tech on staticnat but also about what I learn as I move into technical management.  One thing I can already say though is that there is no way I could have made it to this point with out huge support from my wife Patti and my kids.  I also owe a huge thanks to Rob Turner for taking a risk on a broken engineer and helping make me a successful engineer.  I would also like to thank Jim Engin, Mark Werienga and Tom Montes at Netech, they put huge amounts of trust in me to grow their business and let me push the limits of who they were to drive business.  To cap this point off I have also grown immensely following the words of Charlie “Tremendous” Jones “You are the same today as you’ll be in five years except for two things, the books you read and the people you meet.”  Between the people consulting has exposed me to, the community I have joined on Twitter and information I have gleaned from authors like Seth Godin, I am a totally different person from five years ago.  I hope others have had a similar past five years or that you are applying yourself to have a great next five years.

7 comments

  1. Ethan Banks says:

    I got sick of never being able to finish up properly and/or tweak a network because I was always running off to the next project when I was consulting. Doing one network and doing it well is nice, and usually easier to troubleshoot when it blows up. It’ll be awesome for you…I think you’ll love it.

    • Josh says:

      Ethan,

      Thanks for the comment and thank you even more for the advice you have been willing to offer over the past six months. At my core I am a consultant and a designer. But I have realized that I am able to take that into other rolls in our industry and continue to drive innovation and change. Already this is an exciting opportunity. I can’t imagine what a year from now will bring.

  2. Ethan Banks says:

    I got sick of never being able to finish up properly and/or tweak a network because I was always running off to the next project when I was consulting. Doing one network and doing it well is nice, and usually easier to troubleshoot when it blows up. It’ll be awesome for you…I think you’ll love it.

  3. Wpwilt11 says:

    Congrats buddy. You will do well. Read the first book in your list I don’t always agree with Dale, but it will help you.

    Bill

  4. Wpwilt11 says:

    Congrats buddy. You will do well. Read the first book in your list I don’t always agree with Dale, but it will help you.

    Bill

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