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The Two Amys Nailed It

As usual…

Amy “Lady Firewall” Babinchak and Amy “Mastermind” Luby both prove they each have more intelligence going on in their right pinkie fingers than most people have in their entire bodies.

Lady Firewall got it right on the money almost 2 weeks ago, right off the bat, with her response to my open challenge to GroupLeads post. If I had to boil it down, tho…here’s the money shot:

Starting and promoting a user group is just like starting up a new business.

I met Lady Firewall in 2005, and was basically the most goofy fanboi you could ever imagine. I told her how much her posts on ISA and firewalls in general rocked and how much they had helped me out of some jams. Amy B. kinda looked at me like I had just sprouted two extra heads from my shoulders, and I figured she thought I was some crazy weirdo and we’d never talk again.

As it turns out…we chat fairly often, comparing biz and tech notes, or sometimes just shooting the breeze. I planned to recruit her for XChange in Orlando, but Mastermind beat me to it.

And speaking of Mastermind, bless her…she just yesterday posted her own interpretation of the Challenge and TEAM NEWBLOOD, like so:

The point I took from his post was that most people involved in the SMB space are not in this Yahoo group. Therefore, if this is your only point of reference or avenue for communication, then you are challenged to look outside this group.

Remember, this is the woman who I first met in 2005 when she told me, point-blank and to my face, I was full of it, with a capital SH.

We’ve had a glorious friendship ever since…no joke.

Here are a couple of newsflashes, in case anyone still needs them…

• There is life, and lots of it, outside the Yahoo groups. Also outside your own group, and any conference with SMB or SBS in the title.
• If you are always navel-gazing…after awhile, all you see is lint.
• It’s hella OK to praise someone for their efforts, even if the first shot misses the target. At least they’re trying to aim in the right direction.

OK, enough homilies. I’ll leave those kind of soundbites to Seth Godin and his army of purple cows.

The simple fact of the matter is…

Sometimes, our little “Community” here is too damned stuck-up. Stuck on itself. In love with itself, whatever. Super-quick to pat itself on the back for…what? Sending e-mails to a mailing list? Pointlessly flaming a vendor into oblivion?

In Orlando, I intentionally spent most of my time meeting folks that were not part of the Community as most of us know it. I did get the chance to put some names I’ve seen in e-mail sigs here and there to faces finally.

But by and large…

I made a concerted effort to work on expanding the community’s sphere of influence (and, in the interest of full disclosure, my sphere as well…I’m not completely altruistic), if even just a little bit. I don’t know if it will pay off or not for anybody. And I missed getting a chance to hang out with my pals, including both Amys. But my observations while there are what spawned this whole TEAM NEWBLOOD thing. So I’d call that a plus, even now.

Finally, here’s the deal with the dossier. 

That’s MY dossier. As in, a hella big fat thanks to people who have been gracious, supportive, and all-around good eggs to me personally over the last couple of years. All folks who I’d have absolutely no qualms about introducing someone new to, because I’d have no worries about how that new person would be treated by those individuals.

Only 2 other people, Vijay in the UK and David in Australia, responded in kind and started a TEAM NEWBLOOD dossier of folks in their respective areas. To Vijay & David…well done you!

Sharp-eyed folks would have noticed that fully half of the folks listed in my dossier work for vendors, primarily MS.

I’ll leave the importance of that for you to figure out on your own.

But if you were in attendance and really paying attention at the SBSmigration conference in NOLA, you should already have that little riddle solved.

|| posted by chris under clueless, community, rx, shoutout, travel || || ||