Yes, the Rackspace adventure has ended, and my next life adventure has begun! I’ve started my own company!
Yes, here’s the story..
A couple of months ago, about 15 of us were basically told that our whole department, SharePoint Professional Services at Rackspace, was being eliminated. So the team of SharePoint project managers, myself, and my team of seven SharePoint (rock star) consultants… was all dissolved. (Rackspace still does sell hosted SharePoint, though.) We were told that we weren’t being fired or laid off, we could just get a different job at Rackspace.
After spending the past seven years or so in building my own brand, and doing all of my blogging, videos, and social media, I figured I would just go and and give it a shot and start my own company. So I did! A lot of my friends in the SharePoint community also own their own companies, and a lot of you have reached out and offered information and suggestions regarding the business side of getting a company up and running. Thank you all! You have all been super supportive in all of this, and I appreciate it tremendously! Special thanks to Shane Young at Bold Zebras, for advice and social media / SEO important tips, and help with my website and messaging!
So, what exactly am I doing now?
I started a new company. The official business name is LC Rogers Technologies, LLC.
My training company is IW Mentor. Information Worker Mentor.
What do we do at IW Mentor?
SharePoint training! SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016, and SharePoint Online with Office 365. There are virtual instructor-led classes, and there will soon be self-paced online classes as well.
What kind of training?
There are three different types of classes:
Beginners – Absolute beginners, end users. Learn fundamentals about how to get around in your SharePoint site, and how to work in libraries and lists.
Power Users – Learn how to organize lists and libraries, how to manage your site, permissions, and a lot more. Not for beginners.
Workflows and Forms – Deep dive class, but still no-code. Learn how to create and troubleshoot SharePoint Designer workflows, and how to build complete business solutions with lists, lookup relationships, and web parts. Not for beginners.
There is a lot more information, such as dates and FAQs on the site, www.iwmentor.com
After teaching a SharePoint Power User class for several years, it became apparent that there were three distinct groups of people that took the class. Although it was not meant for beginners, people who were brand new to SharePoint signed up for the class mainly because we did not have a beginner class offering. By the second day, they typically had difficulty keeping up. The second distinct group were the intended audience. These were people who had been using SharePoint for at least a few months, and needed to learn more about managing sites, organizing libraries, and managing permissions. The third group were people who were already advanced users, and wanted to learn more, specifically about building business solutions in SharePoint using forms and workflows. Because of this experience and these typical audiences of people, this training is structured the way it is, now with separate classes for the three groups of “SharePointers”.
Please check out my new site and follow iwMentor on twitter. Let me know what you think. Oh, and spread the word! 
