It’s been one hell of a ride. I started Gilded Pendulum in 2013 while I was still a Network Engineer deploying 4G Wimax across the country with my then employer. Like with any major project that size, I got to work with some great people, and some not so great people. I had good days and bad days, but I wanted to start working with businesses directly because I saw how shady the industry could be.

So that’s what I did. I started Gilded because I wanted to provide a white glove service to business owners, streamline install, and get them the best deals on high-end tech that I could. I had to establish trust and become “The Wolf” (see below) to be the guy that can fix problems, get people into better agreements with no stress. To bring them out of horrible telecom experiences, into great ones. I’d like to think I accomplished this for the most part, at least in the earlier days.

The above is who I tried to model myself after. So I established numerous relationships with telecom providers and vendors. People who could help me get clients out of bad situations and who were also appreciative of the new business. Again, this was stellar for quite some time and everyone was happy. The client was happy they were paying less money for a better solution, and the provider was happy for new business and meeting sales quotas.

But, like with anything, I’m assuming greed and C-suite bonuses came into play, and the level of service and support have dropped off a cliff the last 2 years from my go-to providers and the industry in general. I ended up with egg on my face numerous times. I had clients not able to understand tech support when calling providers because it was outsourced overseas or they simply hired local people who had difficulty with English. They were treated rudely, some were even hung up on by local support here in the states.

In other instances, we would have a turn up of service scheduled, onboarding in the pipeline, and the person responsible would go on vacation, not tell me, and there was nobody cross trained to pick up the slack. Clients had questions about new services or applications and couldn’t get help because nobody was there to assist them. All of these things stopped becoming isolated incidents and instead became the standard of what to expect.

This month I’m onboarding my last client and I’m stepping away from the business. I can no longer sell these solutions in good conscience, knowing what clients will expect afterward. I’m not putting my name on deals when major telecoms are choosing to hire incompetent support reps instead of actual engineers who built the systems they’re selling. I had non-negotiable guidelines with who I recommended for services when I started this company, and that hasn’t changed. Unfortunately, these major tech firms are no longer able to fulfill those requirements.

It was always my intention to keep the service levels of Gilded Pendulum active and functioning like a well-oiled machine one way or the other, but I made one major oversight. I believed that there would always be providers that could provide high quality experiences for the client (how else do you stay in business?), and my mistake was depending on a third party to provide that service.

At this point to provide a trustworthy service, I would have to build out my own solution, implement numerous data centers across the country for backup, and likely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at the absolute bare minimum to get something off the ground and functional. And I’d still be outsourcing the redundancy to the data centers and transport intermediaries, so the problem could very well persist.

So no. I’m not doing that. I’ve moved onto other things. If you’ve been a reader of this blog or know me personally, you would certainly know I’ve had a pretty substantial presence in the digital asset space. The level of curiosity there with the middle-aged and senior folks has been palpable to say the least. Wall street and nation states have now gotten involved as well, so I went ahead and started the Bitcoin Foundry.

I now have total control of the client experience and educational aspects and can teach anyone how to buy and hold pristine capital that swims in $40 billion of liquidity daily. Ergo I’ve built an online university with a one-time purchase and lifetime access, and I’ll be the one 100% responsible for support thereafter.

But I want to thank all my previous and current clients at Gilded. I want to thank you for trusting me all these years and giving someone you’ve never heard of a chance to serve you in the telecom space. It’s been my absolute pleasure (in the majority of cases) to do business with you. I hope you can understand why I made this decision as outlined above and why I’m stepping away now. I’m not sure what the future of telecom will be, but if they don’t fix it, they’re going to find themselves hemorrhaging capital and eventually going out of business.

If you happen to be in Nevada or Arizona and need an IT company with stellar service and support, I’d like to wholeheartedly recommend my friend Jim at SilverPine IT services. He does amazing work on the PC, email, and localized network security side of things. If you have a small office(s) or medium sized business, him and his team would be an asset for you.

Lastly, I want to thank you again for the years of trust and recommendations. I wish all of you the best and will still be here to assist our current client base with any questions or service level issues. But sadly Gilded Pendulum can no longer be a focus. As of now, we’re no longer taking on new any clients or providers.

Best Regards,

Dominic

State of the Industry and Why I'm Stepping Away