“ First , as Rackspace ’ s original home , and later as the birthplace of a small company you may have heard of called YouTube , which famously called one night during our early days , asking for overnight installation of ten new servers for its fledgling business .”
I NEVER really considered myself a “ techie ,” but boy , could I nose out business opportunities . I launched a variety of businesses beginning at the tender age of thirteen , ranging from selling pork to livestock photography to , eventually , real estate and development . Yet there was a growing force that I simply could no longer resist : the Internet . Though comfortably ensconced in my thriving real estate business , I sensed opportunity and I wanted “ in .” When I encountered three local Trinity students seeking funding for an Internethosting business , we banded together and I became the first investor and cofounder of their fledgling company , Rackspace . com . Within six months , I had put my real estate business on hold and assumed the roles of CEO and Chairman , positions I held until 2006 .
A full two decades after we founded Rackspace , I still enjoy recalling the early days at the company and describing how we ended up veering from our initial concept . At the beginning , I assumed I would model it after the real estate industry . Instead of renting apartments , however , we ’ d be renting out server space to customers . Back then , we helped our Internet Service Provider ( ISP ) customers with just about anything and everything , including fixing computers and networks , just to generate revenue . But when we zeroed in on the dedicated-server rental concept , we chose to focus on that to the exclusion of everything else . Our ideal customer was self-sufficient — in the model of Amazon or Google — where transactions were made purely online , with no customer support and virtually no customer contact of any kind .
To give you an example of how diligently we stuck to this philosophy , one founder actually had his email autoresponder message state his mailbox was full and divert people to the customer support number , while his phone message did just the opposite — refer people to a full mailbox . In reality , we were not dealing with this “ novice ” group of customers at all , deeming them incongruent with our desired customer profile . The angry emails started pouring in , and they were decidedly not in the form of emotional rants . Instead , they included logical arguments supported by details of customers ’ multiple contact attempts and their resulting frustration .
I grabbed one such relatable email — remember , I ’ m not a techie myself — and showed it to our founders to discuss . Somehow , generating all this anger seemed contrary to the principles of good business management , and the alarm bells were ringing . If there were so many people out there wanting to do business with us , shouldn ’ t we find some way to accommodate them — and , of course , monetize our idea in the process ? A Reversal To Fortune We decided to do a complete one-eighty . The company was only nine months old at the time , and I knew that it was not too late to change our culture to one of service , with customer satisfaction as our ultimate barometer of success . I realize that every company these days has a mantra of customer service , but what does it take to actually make these words a reality ?
I called on David Bryce , the most customer-focused executive of anyone I knew at the time , to shepherd this change . He joined the company in 1999 as the vice president of customer care . Handing me a book by famed customer service advocate Leonard Berry , Bryce set the company on a brand new path , which he called “ fanatical
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