In the world of business, investors have different liquidity preferences. For example, the investment portfolio of financial instruments such as stocks and certificates of deposit (CDs) are considered to be liquid. You can access the $$$ quickly. A real property portfolio top heavy in raw land real estate would be considered illiquid. The reason I’m seating the table herein is to weave in the world of Office 365.
Long-time Small Business Server aficionados are suffering a liquidity crisis. They are holding a raw land skill set in a high-speed trading world. That is, the server-side on-premises toolkit that served you well for 15+ years in an SBS world, isn’t relevant. Contrast that with the top partners whom I’ve personally met on my recent global Get Modern tour. These partners have displayed remarkable agility pivot to a very liquid Office 365 portfolio. The extreme O365ers are into a client site quickly, use migration tools, like BitTitan or SkyKick, to pop the customer up to Office 365 and then they are out-of-there! They then live on a residual income stream akin to a financial services advisor or Realtor (around 6 percent a year from Office 365 revenue streams). It’s the new-new for IT Pros and it’s not for everyone.
But the only constant in life (and technology), is change. Therefore, it’s critical for you to periodically assess your portfolio allocations. It’s already past mid-year for 2014 so I suggest you do this now. Today.
Ideally, you want a balanced portfolio. You can argue that, with the liquidity concept, often there are lower rates of return and higher risk. CDs pay very little interest now days. Stocks are volatile. In theory an illiquid portfolio is based on the fundamentals. You can touch real estate and historically its value is not associated with high volatility (however in the great recession many of us learned otherwise LOL).
Here are some recommendations to construct a balanced professional portfolio based on Office 365:
- Technical Education. Any wise investor would educate him or herself on the opportunity before committing capital and time. Office 365 is no different. It is a robust technology platform that demands technical mastery. It’s “BackOffice” on steroids in a rapid development environment. One day when you logon you see it’s been updated to include a new multi-factor authentication feature set. You’ll likely go “what the hell?” and take time to explore what this is.
- Business Education. Every single day I have conversations with community members (IT Pros, sponsors, Microsoft employees) where there is one common refrain: what the hell do we do now? How do we make money? I’d like to tell you in the worst of time, in the waning days of Small Business Server, it’s surprisingly the best of times in the Office 365 community. You are there at the start and will define the business models that will be successful. More importantly, you’ll learn from your peers about current best practices.
- Just do it. Then it’s a matter of going out, doing it and learning in the school of hard knocks. You remember the 30+ minute reboot in SBS 4.5 because of MS Proxy Server? We’re going to go through all that again, but you will benefit, as the spoils go to the early bird (to use a mixed metaphor).
- Balance. You’ll find the balance between your on-premises, hybrid and Office 365 portfolio offerings. No doubt about it. But you need to add liquidity and not be stuck with the same old same old or you’re gonna be in trouble.
If you want to explore all of the above, please consider our three-day intensive deep dive on both the business and technical side of Office 365 at our fall conference. It’s in late September in Redmond. Learn more at fall2014.smbnation.com
