Thursday, June 12, 2008

Where is the ISP Trending?

This week I hit on why I think reselling DSL is a dead-end. In fact, a few ISP's agreed with me. One has canceled his service and is moving those customers he can to his own DSLAM's. Another is on RBAN and watching his clients choose to leave him. Then I spent some time talking strategy - about your culture, your employees, Attitude and Focus. It's not the first time I ever mentioned Focus. In fact, many VoIP companies have closed up due to a lack of focus. Sprint is in its situation because it lost focus on customers and network - a lesson that it could have learned from EarthLink.

So what does this have to do with you? Good question. In Consulting magazine this month, Deloitte has been seeing 18% growth. It will be slowing down, but its growth came from continually changing its service focus. Now the growth is in the area of Performance Improvement.

I know, you are still going: "Yeah, Yeah, but What's In it for ME?"

When was the last time you changed your product offerings? Many of you still sell Dial-Up, DSL, and dabble in Hosting. Oh, and you hate email -- the Number 1 Killer App on the web.

"But we still make money on this stuff, Peter. Why should I change?"

Because it is as Stale as your website! (Seriously, many of you have not updated your website -- your online presence, your online brochure -- in years! Here's some thoughts:

  1. The iPhone has driven people to SmartPhones, which means IMAP instead of POP3 email. Companies like everyone.net , groupSPARK, Intermedia.net and others can offer you white label Exchange and IMAP. Or you can run Zimba or Open-Xchange.
  2. Are you selling Blogs? Or fighting with GoDaddy over a $5 shared hosting account?
  3. There are companies like CleanMachine that you can resell for PC support.

I can go on and on. (Or you can read my book ;) for the rest of the list of ideas. There's money out there, even in Video Email.

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