I must be in some sort of rhyming mood today, because that just popped in my head. Looking at it now it looks a little twee, but it conjures up the gist of what I want this post (or probably series) to be. Recently, Brent Ozar moved on from Quest Software to join SQL Skills as a consultant/trainer. Before ploughing on with this post I recommend reading Brent’s post and also the comments for background. Since he moved along I have been inundated with questions, resumes from others in the SQL Land wanting Brent’s job, and I have spent more time than I would have liked explaining to internal folks and members of the SQL Server Community that it’s very positive for both Quest and Brent that he has moved on. Brent’s success is a reflection of what we were able to achieve together, and that’s always good. I’ve been some sort of manager of people for over 10 years now, and there’s never been anyone that I have managed that I haven’t been happy for when they voluntarily move along (and also most whom have moved along involuntarily).
I, and other members of my team, feel very proud to have worked with Brent. Together we achieved a lot in a very short space of time. When Brent joined us SQLServerPedia was stuck on 10,000 unique visitors a month; now it’s over 200,000 not even two years later. That’s remarkable growth right there. Our high level goal was to make Quest synonymous with SQL Server, and thanks to experts like Brent, Kevin Kline, and our SQL Server community projects we have largely achieved that goal.
Over the past months I had been talking to Brent about how we could evolve his role but it always felt like a long shot. We’re not set up as a consulting company; we sell software. There wasn’t much upside we could offer under our current structure and putting Brent in a role where he couldn’t excel at what he loves would not have been good for anyone and would have led to the same outcome anyway.
So what’s the point of this post? We experimented, we learned, we had fun, and we achieved a lot. That’s a success. Now what we do with what we learned is the key takeaway. So often in business we fall into the same insane trap – we learn a lesson, but because we are reluctant to change, we doom ourselves to repeating the same process with the same outcome. That’s something our team is very cognizant of, and why we are always up for trying new things.
In the next post in this series I’ll talk about where we are headed with our initiatives.
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