I know this is an overdue rebuttal, but I have to stick up for myself here. Recently it has been brought up the high five and the fist bump pro’s and cons. I am here to shed new light on the matter which will provide a feasible alternative, but at the same time bring respect to all no matter what form you like to bring it.

Lets review:

The high five is a cornerstone of cool. It is the revolutionary leader in which we should pay homage because without it we wouldn’t have this conversation in the first place. God only knows when the high five was invented, but even then he must have been impressed. So in the interest of staying positive let’s stick with the pro’s of the high five.

• A high five can be a good alternative to anything else because of range and when height is a factor (especially over a cube wall).
• The high five is versatile in different levels and angles that it can be applied from. It can even go inverted (see explanation of “low five” in blogs to come)
• The high five is not likely to spur on a game of bloody knuckles or other such contests of pain thresholds even as invigorating as they can be.
• The high five is universal and you can take it all over the world. (see Borat, he’ll tell you all about it)
• The high five can be seen in many instances throughout the movie “TOP GUN”. Especially in the brotherhood of “Maverick” and “Goose”. I don’t care who you are or how old you are TOPGUN is still one of the coolest movies around and the high fives used in the movie just help make it that much cooler. Also, as a side note, if you didn’t feel remotely bad when Goose died in the movie you have no soul and can probably stop reading at this point.
• Above all the high five has withstood a test many popular things haven’t or won’t; the test of time.

So now that we have elaborated on why the high five is not the evil empire of office camaraderie, but in fact a form of communication to be respected and treasured, we can move onto the fist bump. The fist bump is more recent. It’s hip, it’s now, it’s from the streets. You can do kewl little things like “lock it up” or “blow it up”. They perform a fist pump out of sign of respect before any boxing match or other fight. Some believe it to be a sign of strength or superiority. I find it simply to be a solid alternative to be used to keep things fresh when pumping up the colleagues. For more on the positive promise of the fist bump please note our CEO’s perfectly mannered and unbiased point of view of the subject in an earlier blog.

Taking it to the next level people have suggested the chest bump. However, I don’t have a lot to say about this one because I don’t know when it’s ever really ok to get that close to someone else in the office and we’ll just leave it at that.

OK, so after all this. I have a suggestion to include the elbow into the repertoire. Names that have been thrown out have been simply “the elbow” and the “e-dap”. If stating that the fist bump is a sign of strength and thus making it good the elbow bump or other connection has to be the next logical form of enthusiasm.

• No set of bones in the human body are as strong as the elbow (the thigh could claim some contention, but we’re not touching that with a really long pole) and nothing can be as impactful as a well placed “forearm shivva”.
• In the heyday of steroids in baseball it was the en vogue way of celebrating. At no other point in time was neither baseball nor the players stronger than during the reign of “the elbow”.
• In entertainment disguised as sport in wrestling “The Rock” (name spurred on from a symbolism of strength) had a favorite move called “The People’s Elbow”. It was aptly named for the people because of its popularity.
• The Elbow has an outreach so wide that Michael Miller of the sales department often speaks of “The Flying Elbow” inspired by the Macho Man Randy Savage.

The fist bump is still quite popular now, but with all of this evidence available I implore upper management to cease its discrimination of other forms of enthusiasm. Please broaden your horizons to accept new ways as well as classic ways of expressing ones pride in celebration. After all people of one mind and one spirit working for one goal cannot be wrong in any form of celebration as victory is achieved.

I am a CSA with SoftLayer and I have the privilege of working with extremely successful customers on a daily basis solving issues and keeping their businesses running smoothly. I continue to be amazed at the amount of money that some of our customers must be making. I looked at a certain customer’s website, and then compared his prices for the services he provides using his SoftLayer servers with the average price of a server on SoftLayer’s website, the conclusion I came to was unbelievable. Of course, I had to make an educated guess concerning how much he could provide per a given server. And, I do not know how much he actually pays for any particular server as specials have been run at different times on different servers. But, taking into account that this particular customer has over 30 servers with SoftLayer, and few other factors that I know about this customer from speaking with him over the phone at different times, my best guess is that he is making somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000 per month all things considered. WOW! (Hold on…I choked…yep, that’s right…about $30,000 per month)

Example Customer X (one of many!):

• Started with one server and a great business model
• Took advantage of all that SoftLayer has to offer (specials, tools, resources, etc.)
• Continued to grow to more than 30 servers
• Now brings in at least $30,000 per month per my best guess! WOW!

Of course, this is just one of our customers. SoftLayer has many extremely successful customers like this. I find it very interesting that we have such a large number of very successful customers. That tells me that SoftLayer must be a great foundation for a successful business. It just makes sense. If you have many unsuccessful customers and the customer turn-over is high, then your sales team must be great, but your product is bad. But, when you have many enormously successful customers and customer turn-over is low, then you must have a great product that is the best thing going. And, if these successful customers could choose to support their very successful businesses with any provider that they wanted, and yet they continue to choose SoftLayer, that means that SoftLayer is a great choice if you want to be successful!

Personally, I will attain this level of success one day. Will I be a Customer X or will I be a Lance Crosby? I don’t know yet. I do know that I am truly enjoying the journey to my ultimate success while learning everything I can in my current position here at SoftLayer.

So, to all you amazingly successful SoftLayer customers…and to all of you who are so quickly building your success on the foundation of SoftLayer, thank you for your inspiration.

If you don’t mind sharing some of your story of success with us here on this blog, I, for one, would really enjoy reading about it.

With Skinman blogging about outsourcing (here, here, and here) along with Michael Miller blogging about the ease of leasing vs. buying, I had to jump in to say that the numbers show that their thinking is right on track.

Using database driving financial modeling software, I modeled a small internet-based business doing their IT infrastructure in-house versus using SoftLayer to handle the infrastructure for them. The benefits of using SoftLayer are eye-popping.

Here are the basic assumptions of the mythical company. There are 8 employees, 2 of which are founders who took out second mortgages on their houses to launch the business. First year sales are about $1.5 million. Business needs require 12 servers in two different geographic locations, housed in climate controlled rooms. Pricing out the servers and networking gear on Dell and eBay worked out to $71,509. This gear was financed with part of the proceeds from the second mortgages, booked to the balance sheet and depreciated. After three years, it was disposed of and upgraded with new gear costing $125,000.

Using SoftLayer changes several of these assumptions. By letting SoftLayer handle infrastructure, one less employee was required. There was no capital outlay for the needed 12 servers and networking gear. SoftLayer got the servers running in a couple of hours with no setup fees for a manageable monthly charge. This allowed less debt to start the business, and there were no long term contracts with SoftLayer if the business idea didn’t work out. There was no need to book the assets to the balance sheet, depreciate them, and upgrading them after three years involved a simple phone call so SoftLayer. No disposing of old gear or balance sheet write offs were necessary.

Consequently, this improved all the most important financial statement measures besides revenue, which remained the same in each scenario. Gross profit, EBITDA, EBIT, and Net Income all improved dramatically from using SoftLayer. Balance sheet credit worthiness, measured by things like equity and the Current Ratio among other things, dramatically improve. Finally, cash balances and cash flow almost double by using SoftLayer. Just compare the highlighted fields in this spreadsheet.

As they say, “your mileage may vary.” But odds are that you can significantly improve your financial performance by using SoftLayer to eliminate operating costs, depreciation, debt financing, and upgrade logistics related to your IT infrastructure needs.