I have been wavering for two weeks between one big, Walsh-sized, long post trying to wrap up our 2025 and talk a bit about the early tea leaves for 2026 and beyond, and two separate posts. But this will be fun – I’m going to try and sum up a year and talk about some exciting things for the year ahead with just three headings and a lot bullets. So here goes…
Straight Path – Three Phases
I’ve been thinking about this “Straight Path” journey as phases. There may be some jumbling between them, but I think knowing the phases and seeing the recap and future may make a bit more sense of some of the changes that have happened or are happening.
Phase 1 – This is the phase when I went off to be an independent consultant. Straight Path was “me” – but it wasn’t just “me” – it was a family supporting me, a wife advising (even helping to pick the name of the blog before there was ever a hint of a company to attach to that name), and a faith that set values and gave me the courage to go off. I started reading books about transitioning from solopreneur to entrepreneur and about serving clients well. Which sort of led to…
Phase 2 – I hired a friend of the family as our first support junior DBA – he could help with smaller tasks and onboarding while I tended to bigger engagements and taught him (he had a terrible teacher – I was always too busy – but without Bruce, we wouldn’t have ever had any employees.) Then we hired our first Senior DBA, Jack, who took a huge risk to become an employee at this thing I was building. We doubled down on our values. A Business advisor from the earlier days told me recently that he could never pin me down on a financial target – only what we wanted the culture to be, the values to be, and the principles we’d serve our clients by. A lot of growth. A lot of hiring. A lot of net promoter surveys, a lot more books, and I finally began to (sort of) understand and do delegation, and continued improving on that over time.
Phase 3 – We’re there – or maybe heading there. Some of the changes that either began in 2025 or are beginning in 2026 are showing this next phase. I’m moving more from a “Founder” mindset to a “CEO” mindset. Yeah, I’ll still be there helping things – I like a good emergency, but I am trying to step back more or maybe step up more. We’re a bit less afraid of process (but never “for process” – if we ever do process just for process’ sake, I feel we’ve crossed some line I don’t want to cross) – but process to fulfill a goal. We’re “growing up” here in Phase 3. The company should be able to survive something happening to me more easily than it could before; clients should feel the same values and care they’ve always had; in fact, they should feel it more.
2025
Some of the things in 2025 that stand out –
- Hired – Alex Martinez in support, Andy Kelly as a Senior DBA, and Buck Woody as our CDO (and someday, perhaps, your CDO if we can be of service 🙂
- Realized that part of data advocacy is through the CDO role – we don’t want to own all of the stacks, and be all things to all people – but the CDO role is as, if not more, important than the DBA role – and like the DBA role, most companies can’t justify it full-time. Imagine having a team led, mentored, and shaped by someone like Buck, who will be in in your corner.
- Invested significantly in building a monitoring tool that we own and support. It will not replace SQL Sentry for performance monitoring for us (anytime soon at least), but it will become our main monitoring tool in 2026. Security first. Proactive first – and taking all of the feedback we receive from our loyal DBA as a Service clients about what they care about, and how to report on it, and alert on it, and building it into a tool we support. The first release of this went code-complete at the end of the year, and we are testing it rigorously right now.
- Doubled down on our proactive stance – We began collecting much proactive data from clients and have our proactive warehouse where we can see not just the alerts and bad things from the current monitoring tools, but we can look at trends, best practice misses, and the things that will get people in trouble in months – improving our proactive footprint has cut down on emergencies – this has reduced hours needed – turns out it’s better to fix something ahead of time than after it breaks. (10-15 years providing services in EMS verify that absolutely.) David Seis on our team has done SO MUCH here as our developer and automation person.
- Began a SOC2 process – all of the processes, policies, etc – we will be SOC2 Type 1 in Q3ish – and Type 2 once the year-long audit is done. We have a trusted external Managed IT Service provider to help us build on our policies, enforce security, keep us safe, and ensure that no one here has to be the “de facto IT person” for the growing team. This is not inexpensive, but the thing that I lose sleep over most of all is security, liability, and that. We hammer our team on testing and awareness – but it’s not enough to just do that – we need the external review, the lawyers, the compliance.
- We had our first official Annual Reviews – every team member gets an Annual Review – at the same time, Evan and I run it. We’re focusing on growth – helping the team grow where and how they want in ways that help our clients and company grow. Give corrective feedback earlier throughout our 1:1 process, measure what matters internally, and tie it all to our client feedback and NPS scores.
- Speaking of that feedback, we continue to use an outside firm (Thank you, clearly rated!) to independently solicit, measure, and report on this feedback. We are still at 4.9 out of 5 stars. We scored just shy of 85% NPS, which is well above the industry benchmark of 55%. We also follow up on every response that has something meaningful for us to improve on – even if we get a 9 or a 10 (promoter), we reach out, understand it, and get it into our issues list to discuss as a group.
2026
As it stands now – this is what 2026 should look like –
- Hiring. Already! We have hired Amy Abel – she blogged about that here. You will see her on our Aboutus page in February when she starts. But if you go there now, you’ll see Jared Serino – he joined us this week on our support team. His passion for all things data, his expertise in SQL Server, and his commitment to customer service and excellence made him a natural fit here. He’s already hit the ground running. There will be some more announcements later, potentially – we’ll see how things go.
- Continued work on our monitoring tool – We’re not looking to sell software – we’re looking to really optimize how we serve our clients in SQL Server for now – modularity is key so we can adapt to the needs of our clients and to the changes to the industry.
- CDO Services Rollout – In the coming weeks and months, you’ll see more changes as we properly build the CDO practice to market. I’m excited. Buck is already making a difference for some existing and new clients, and I believe we are going to help a lot of companies have full confidence in their AI and analytics strategies – and just trust their data better.
- The next DB Technology – Hard to put a timeline on this one yet – but might as well put the line in the sand – PostgreSQL is next on our roadmap – and everything we are building and have built and who we hire and how we train are allowing us to have something modular – the values, the trust, the “michelin 3 star” service that really cares and always is proactive and advisory – doing that with another DBMS is “simply” a matter of time and investment and skills. We will not dilute what we do and we will not be all things to all people – but we’d like to be the proactive, caring, trusted, data advocate for our clients’ SQL Servers and their Postgres environments.
- sp_Check* – Jeff has been tirelessly owning these tools and scripts. sp_CheckAG is being released really, really soon. I’m excited as to what it shows. Andy’s sp_CheckActivity is a really lightweight tool that can tell us what’s going on with a bit less overhead than some of the great tools we will always keep in our own toolbox. And maybe we should release sp_CheckHealth to the world instead of using it in-house this year.
- Title Changes – Evan Corbett has moved from Operations Manager to our Chief Operating Officer. He has the ability to say no to my crazy ideas and always brings things back to “how will this affect the team? the clients? And how does it fit into our values?” He has saved the team from many of my bad ideas, helped come up with better ones, and always makes sure they are implemented. And we’ve also moved 3 of our Senior Consultants to “Principal Consultant” roles – this is to recognize some ways they go above and beyond: Jeff Iannucci – For all of his community involvement, all of his work on sp_Check*, and really being a sounding board and leader inside of the company. Sandra Delany – for being our absolute GURU on all things HA/DR (including Windows clustering) and migrations. She always seems to be involved in most things for most clients and is incredibly well-trusted and a mentor to all. And Andy Kelly frankly came in as one already in so many ways. WIth decades deep tuning consulting experience, time spent teaching the Microsoft Certified Masters, SQL Server Magazine contributions, etc. He is mentoring our team on performance but also consulting skills.
- Support Team has an Official Lead – Evan had been doing double duty (or more) as Operations manager, support team lead, plus the other hats. As we take on more COO duties, we asked Alyssa on the support team to step into the role of Support Team Lead. She is a natural for that and is amazing at all she does. We’re excited for her input and feedback as a leader.
- I’m going to College – well, not really, I’ll be taking a week-long class at the Harvard Business School called “Leading Professional Services firms” – and the “case” I’m bringing is “We built this company on people first. On shared values. On culture. On doing the right thing. We are growing – how do we continue to allow that growth to occur but do it smartly, sustainably, and in a way where values, culture, service don’t have to change?”
Here’s to Phase 3 – Look to our blogs and LinkedIn for more content as we work to get more out there this year. Where we are is a true testament to grace – it’s also a testament to our team. It’s amazing to have mostly the same team, and the same clients year over year, simply slowly adding to the numbers of each.
I’m excited for 2026. I’m excited to see what comes next. We wish you the best for 2026!
