Just recently M6.net received this question: "I saw your site and was really impressed. The plans and prices you offer are very compatible. I continued to look through your site and found good and bad reviews, fortunately more good than bad. But, if you are really good, then why do you have bad reviews at all?" It was an amazing question, and made us think for a minute - "If you are really good then why have bad reviews at all?"

Well, we're not perfect, we try to be, but its likely not possible, we have many clients with varying degrees of expectations. There is a saying, "You can keep all customers happy for some of time, and some customers happy all of time, but not all customers happy all of time". This is so true, for whatever business you are in.

The web hosting industry is only 3 years old and many of large web hosts face similar problems. There are many challenges using Windows NT and trying to host a number of clients running ASP/PHP and databases on same system. Every bad review you read is just an indication of 'happening' and 'date', of those individual challenges.

I started jogging several years ago. It was a New Year’s resolution. Like most of my New Year’s resolutions, I was confident at time that euphoria of holiday season would end soon and so would my brief encounter with running. Unfortunately, that was not case this time.

Six months into year, I was still running several times a week and had even extended my endurance to about two miles a run. It was at that time that a good friend of mine suggested that I enter Atlanta Peachtree Road Race. What a ludicrous idea! The “Peachtree” was a 10K (6.2 Mile) run. This was way beyond my running capabilities. Besides, there would be 50,000 other runners and several hundred thousand spectators. Not a chance…

As I considered this “opportunity” (that’s what my friend called it), I thought back and considered that this would be just about craziest stunt I had attempted in about fifteen years. That was about time it was first suggested that I should manage a family-owned business. In hindsight, I recalled that I had survived that “marathon” and two more small businesses after that.

I began to consider notion that preparing for and participating in this race would be much like preparing for and starting a small business. Or would it?

When I decided to enter Peachtree, first thing I did was tell my family and close friends of my intentions. This experience reminded me of when I would tell a similar audience of my intentions to start a new business. Most people thought I was crazy. Some people shared same excitement that I did. Some people even offered to help me prepare. My wife increased death benefits on my life insurance policy.

My next step was to initiate some strategic planning. First, I attempted to determine objectively what my condition was at time. I even did a quick S.W.O.T. (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, & threats) analysis. I concluded that I was in pretty good physical shape (strength), I had never run anywhere close to six miles before (weakness), environment of race should be a motivating factor (opportunity), and there had better be paramedics on call and ready to administer lifesaving techniques (threat).

The second step in strategic planning was to establish several goals. I decided that I wanted to finish race by my own will, I would not be last finisher, and I would get an official race T-shirt.

This reminded me of planning for a small business start-up. Most of time we don’t plan to be biggest or best company in our industry or market. We tend to only focus on survival. I wonder how I would have placed in race if I had planned to win? I wonder how successful my businesses would have been if I had planned from beginning to be largest, most successful, and most profitable company. Once I had determined my present condition and my destination (my goals), I now had to develop an action plan to facilitate my training. I decided that prior to race I would run a minimum of three times a week. Every week I would try to push my endurance one step further.

I also needed to conduct a little market research. I needed to study history of Peachtree Race and layout of course. How many spectators would there be? What kind of weather could I expect? Who was my competition? What were past winning times? (not particularly relevant in my case). What were average times? (more important) What was worst time last year? (critically important)

My planning and training took about six months. Coincidentally, average small business takes six months to start business from time of initial decision to start business to first day of operation. My experience is that on average, most successful small businesses are ones that take necessary time to plan their business and get "in shape". It's than those businesses that start without a plan of attack and without necessary resources that than take quickest exit from "race".