Tony Perez On Security, Business, And Life
If you’re looking to exit your company, building the financial structure for your business will be important. It will be the most important piece of the equation in any future conversations. Unicorns need not apply.
It is the most under appreciated. They will get you to the promise land, but then they will also fall back into the abyss. There are only a few groups of people that really care about your financials.
You will undoubtedly undervalue your product or services, and your pricing will be wrong; this I am sure of. It will be echoed by every seasoned business person, professional coach, and everyone in between. You will start researching and googling how to raise your prices and you’ll find over 7 million results offering you advice.
Your inability to make any sense of it will be frustrating, and with every article you read you’ll find some qualifier that holds you back. The fears you feel – “what if we’re wrong”, “can we just revert?”, “what will the impacts to the brand be?”, “will my market work with this change?” – never really go away. Your frustrations won’t be that you don’t understand the idea of raising prices, but more along the lines of how.
While we are all accustomed to reading advice that starts at the conclusion, I instead want to focus on our journey. Specifically our journey with pricing at Sucuri. The real insights come from analyzing how someone reached a conclusion, because what we’re really after is the thought process more than the end result. How do I navigate the process of raising or changing my prices? I honestly have no idea, but I’ll tell you our story.
To think I was not going to attend the event.
It was already later in the year, November, and besides, as my beloved friend Chris Lema pointed out, I had been rejected to speak.
Forgive @perezbox and his tweets. He got a rejection letter from #wooconf without even applying to speak.
— Chris Lema (@chrislema) November 3, 2014
I didn’t even get my name in the hello.
If you’re anything like me you’re constantly on the go, well at least in my mind I am. At least virtually you’re constantly moving, jumping between social streams, reading posts, updating posts, pushing posts, it’s our own little chaos of a world.
For a while now though I’ve been really struggling with a clean way to save interesting links. That’s compounded by the fact that I am constantly on multiple devices (i.e., desktop, notebook, iPad, mobile, etc…). For a while I was still using Delicious, seriously, I was. But that’s just not very useful, at least it wasn’t to me.
I was talking to a friend of mine, Cory Miller (at least I think it was him, if not, oh well he gets the credit), and he introduced me to this app called Pocket. At first glance it looked cool, but as if often the case I kind of shrugged it off, I get a lot of recommendations for apps.
Finally settling in at home though I started playing with it and quickly realize how cool of an app it was – more importantly how awesome the user experience is.
Often when I give talks on website security one of the various discussion points is, and rightfully so, around your individual posture when interacting on the web. This often means being aware of things like transferring your data insecurely over the web.
This insecure act is often achieved through the use public WifI access points (i.e., Starbucks, Airports, Hotels, etc.). The most obvious solution, or what feels like the most obvious is to work off a Virtual Private Network (VPN). When talking to a Network / Systems / Security individual this is the obvious choice, but to the everyday consumer it’s not.
**Updated August 2017 to reflect the most current changes**
I am personally a big fan of Google Apps for all Small Businesses. I find it to be a comprehensive solution, offering a wide range of productivity tools – including email.
As a small business, one of the things that helps establish trust and authority with your customers is when they see that your domain corresponds with your company name. The challenge you might find yourself with is the associated cost. I was fortunate enough to start with Google Apps during a period when it was Free for users with a low number of emails, that’s no longer the case.
In this article I’ll introduce you to the process of creating a Distribution list within google apps so that you can created emails like info@yourdomain.com, sales@yourdomain.com or billing@yourdomain.com. As a small business these are some of the more common emails people expect to use, and will try them by default. Creating them when you have a cost associated with them is challenging. Distribution lists allow you to get past the cost implications, while empowering you to share access with more than one person (i.e., multiple people can get the emails and respond to them).
If you’re not familiar with Filezilla, it’s an open source tool that allows you to quickly FTP/SFTP into your servers.
Unfortunately, if you have worked on Windows and Mac you know that sometimes you can’t quite do all the same things. One of those things that has been irritating me for quite some time is opening a new instance of FileZilla on a Mac. By instance I mean a new window.
I recently wrote a post about the Keys to Working From Home, this adds to that post. In the post I talk to a number of things that helped me be successful working from home. I specifically spoke to being comfortable in your workspace. Carrying on when with that philosophy I decided to make a new investment.
My prior set up had two notebooks, one with a Windows setup and one with a Linux setup. As much fun as that was, working between the different environment environment became a bit cumbersome and my desk started to look a bit chaotic with all the keyboards and mice and the sort.