I was recently out in the field meeting with a customer of mine who shared a story about how one of his Admins had accidentally deleted 40 accounts from Active Directory. This CIO was then faced with having to decide whether his team was going to manually re-create these or if they could recover a snapshot back up and merge them back into Active Directory.

When neither of those options worked, his team hopped on the phone with a Microsoft Active Directory Specialist. After going back and forth with the Specialist and Support teams and coming to no solution, they decided to call RedZone Technologies for support. RedZone Technologies is an MSSP I founded, specializing in Enterprise Security solutions. He informed me that within 2 hours after working with my team at RedZone, his domain was fully functional.

I was obviously very pleased to hear this story from a happy customer and realized if I hadn’t been out meeting with him on this particular day, I may have not gotten this insight. It is important to get out there and meet with your customers as a CIO. This is the only way you are truly going to be able to get a pulse as to what is going on from a micro level.

I would encourage you to set up time each quarter or schedule an event each month to meet with your customers face to face; and ask them what’s on their wish list of things they would like to have in their business. By doing this, there is a strong likelihood that you’ll be able to facilitate their wants/needs on the backend. Being out on the street, listening to the market is a powerful way to play offense in your business.

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