Owl Advisors, LLC

When Owl Advisors was formed, I took a long time to think about the “institutional attitude” of the organization. Of course, business seeks to make money. So far, so good. But what about community participation? What about being social? What about “the greater good”? I had to think about how the business would reflect and embody my commitments and beliefs in those areas.

My History With Volunteerism

I was introduced to volunteer work through church as a child. As I grew older, I recognized that volunteering your efforts was a good thing to do in or out of church, and I took on leadership roles in volunteer efforts at my high school. Later, as I entered the business world, I worked in soup kitchens, performed music in hospitals, and played in charity basketball and golf events.

At the end of the day, I enjoy helping others. It’s one of the things that has made my business successful. When you enjoy helping others, as opposed to being forced to do something for a paycheck, you listen more closely, you are more responsive, and better able to put yourself in the client’s shoes. Instead of being motivated by strictly monetary goals (not to deny their existence), you’re motivated by a more organic inner drive to help out. Your propensity to deliver and go beyond a customer’s expectations in every interaction with them skyrockets.

Of course, part of business is selling, and the core foundational concept of selling is that you’re always really selling yourself, and if you don’t believe in yourself and your product, neither will your client. There are good actors who can make a living selling, but the people who are “true believers” in what they’re delivering are in another universe of success altogether. When you are motivated by your internal belief system which is largely unchanged since early youth, you have the potential to poke through to this stratosphere of success.

Volunteerism at Owl Advisors

These days, there’s a great deal of my time consumed by running my business, continuing my education in my field, and family life, but I have still committed to making sure that Owl Advisors performs at least one volunteer consulting engagement every year.

Ideally, the engagement involves technologies that I’m familiar with and work with daily, such that my stepping in to handle a project results in an outcome that would have been unthinkable without the help of someone with our experience. However, occasionally things come up where there’s an urgent need to use or deploy a technology that isn’t a core part of my business, or isn’t very familiar to me. In those cases I lean on my social network, and my ability to grasp new concepts quickly. If I can’t find an expert in the technology to help out, and they can’t either, I’ll study up to get things done.

For the year 2009, I’m still accepting (and pursuing) ideas for the year’s volunteer consulting engagement, so if you are, or know of, an organization who needs an experienced infrastructure engineer and a proven solution provider to help them understand how to approach a problem and execute a plan, let me know. If you know an organization that has received a technology grant with no funding for training the staff, let me know. If you know a school district with an unstable history with technology and a desire to change it, let me know.

In short, if you know an organization that needs something Owl Advisors can provide, let me know by email: jonesy at owladvisors dot com.

I have no complaints or regrets about my career to this point, and I owe a lot of my happiness to the fact that I shunned becoming too highly specialized in any one specific technology. For example, some people are “mail administrators”, or worse, “Exchange administrators”, or “backup administrators”. Not me. What I’ve done for a living for the past 10 years doesn’t even completely fit within the title “System Administrator”. I’ve developed web sites, done security audits, administered and modeled databases, wrote APIs in Perl, Python, and PHP, and set up a whole lot of core infrastructure services like DHCP, DNS, Apache, NFS, LDAP, the list goes on.

When I decided to “go solo”, I was now in a position I was looking forward to: running a business. I grew up in business. I cut my teeth in business, and in running businesses. Long before I even got into technology for a living, I had been a stockbroker, and a restaurant manager. I had also been exposed to it through various family members, including my parents, who both ran businesses. I knew what I was getting myself into, and I was looking forward to it.

But it left me with a problem: marketing my services. “What exactly does your company do?” I know that this question needs to be answered at parties and networking events in just a couple of sentences, and yet wrapping up what I do in a couple of sentences is nearly impossible.

There’s also the issue of ongoing support of clients. It’s one thing to work internally for a company as an employee wearing a lot of hats, but when you have a dozen or so different clients, do I really want to have to think “now, what hat did I wear for this client?” No, I don’t. So while I’ll probably always be a generalist and pursue projects involving a lot of different technologies on my own time, Owl Advisors, LLC will have a more refined focus: we do training, and we do technical consulting for LAMP and cloud-based environments.