Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?
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@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Dashrender said
because it's counter to one of your primary business cores - being a consulting company that gives unbiased opinions.
How can you possibly say you're unbiased if your company sells one of the products you're recommending?Well, in theory these sides never meet. But what I am saying is if the consulting side recommends DELL 80 out of 100 times, and the sales side says, holy cow, we sell a lot of DELL, we should get a kickback, then what's the difference?
Yes, the consultant TECHNICALLY doesn't know if they are a reseller on the sales side, but of course it would make sense.
I would think the a consultant should NEVER sell, or have anyone else associated with them selling.
This would work, I feel, in a situation where you could maintain total air gaps and that the consultants could not find out that you had a sales side. Like if NTG had a secret sales team that would transparently grab sales mid-stream and inject themselves without the engineering team ever finding out. That would be great. But reality is.... customers would mention it, we'd find out and we'd be influenced by the knowledge. Maybe not a lot, but a little. Maybe a lot, depends on the person, I guess.
So NTG has NO sales side?
Someone said it did, and that's what I thought was weird since you are so anti it.
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@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@IRJ said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@IRJ said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
AH!! This summarizes the entire objection. You guys think the use of affiliates means a person is "chasing", perhaps obsessively, for pennies to screw over clients where the actual money is.
I've been fighting this whole time against this idea. The affiliate thing changes NOTHING. I and probably no one else whose though about this have any intention of screwing their clients and their "pounds$$" over pennies.
Your assumption is that this is exactly what we do. I don't know what else to say. The pennies are literally bonus money on the sidewalk. Just bend over. It's really not hard.
Do whatever you want. We all adults here, but making $20 on the side could ruin your whole business. I know what amazon affiliate links look like as many other people do and it could put your reputation at risk.
Here is an idea. If the $20 is that important to you then just add it on to the bill. No one will complain then.
I doubt that it will ruin his business. Chances are, no one is going to catch him. This kind of thing is super common in IT shops. Getting away with it is easy. Living with it is what is hard. If he can clear his conscious, that's his business. Well, and his clients' business. It's obviously unethical, maybe illegal, but likely to get caught or found out? No way. This is purely about professionalism and ethics, for all intents and purposes. It definitely will help him make a viable business out of the SMB market.
Well, the reality is also that it's likely that the OP will never do real consulting work either - and by that I mean a job where is he paid to do research and present the options for a project for a customer. It's much more likely that he will have clients who come and say - I want a server. Then he is welcome to be a VAR all day long with no ethical/legal concerns.
I think this is the takeaway from this massive thread.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
and Scott has said that this is what NTG struggles with all the time. A huge difference there is that they have consultant, Scott, and they implementors, Gene, etc. Keeping these roles separate enables the consult to remain a bit more unbiased as long as he doesn't know who or what is an affiliate with the company.
So Gene can use all the affiliates he wants from the list?
If this is a generic example, yes. NTG has no affiliates of that nature (except as we said, Webroot) so it wouldn't apply to Gene specifically. But as a general idea, it would help to some degree, I suppose.
In the real NTG world, we have an anti-affiliate list, vendors we can't work with, but nothing more. Like Lenovo we can't recommend on ethical and security grounds. But that's just to maintain professionalism, things that we trust we would never have to say, but just to be sure that everyone is aware of vendors so bad that they could never offer them.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
So NTG has NO sales side?
Correct. There is no sales system or process. No one gets commission. The one odd piece is that we do resell Webroot, and we disclose that heavily and it's really trivial and no consultants get money. People want AV, we offer it, we don't push Webroot or do AV consulting but if people ask for it, it's offered. It's outside of our consulting scope and we happily work with other vendors (and often do) but some customers want AV through us, and it's there. So we are an AV VAR with Webroot.
I forgot, we also do backup. This is because we feel that backup is so ubiquitous that we would never be influenced to "sell backup where it is not needed", and backup capacity planning is very regimented - meaning we couldn't reasonably oversell it. And again, no one makes commission so no one is individual incentived to sell it. And, like @guyinpv had mentioned, we sell all reasonable options (Unitrends, Veeam, StorageCraft, etc.) so to level the "vendor bias" field. There might be differences in how much the company earns from different solutions, but as an engineer, I have no idea what that is. The air gap is pretty good, there.
In the past we sold other things, we've since dropped reselling (or affiliating) Google Apps, Office 365, Rackspace and more as they just didn't make sense to continue. (To be sure, you can still get Office 365 from us and I encourage you to do that, we still deliver better service than MS direct, but we do not get any payment for that, so nothing like reselling.)
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Dashrender said
But like the car sales person, assuming commissions, they want to sell you the highest commissions items in the place.
OK, so let's take a specialized car salesman. My mom is disabled, so I have some experience with customized vans and whatnot. Now, these guys are still salesman, but I honestly believe most of them are in this line of work because they care, and are really looking to get the handicapped person the best possible vehicle for them.
So, this customized van salesman is ... a VAR?
A VAVR (Value Added Van Reseller
If they are providing real value add, then a VAR. Sounds more likely to just be a normal car salesman, though. What's the Value Add?
And that they might or might not like getting people the right thing really isn't relevant.
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NTG uses a VAR when needed to get things for our customers, but they never purchase directly through us, they purchase from the VAR.
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@Minion-Queen said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
NTG uses a VAR when needed to get things for our customers, but they never purchase directly through us, they purchase from the VAR.
Several VARs, actually. Good VAR selection and management is an important part of any IT offering whether internal IT or external, like us. Experience with which VARs are good, knowing what they can do, and having the scale to keep them working hard for us are big values that we bring to the table.
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@Minion-Queen said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
NTG uses a VAR when needed to get things for our customers, but they never purchase directly through us, they purchase from the VAR.
And is getting a finder's fee or whatever from the VAR also verboten to a consultant, I presume?
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Minion-Queen said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
NTG uses a VAR when needed to get things for our customers, but they never purchase directly through us, they purchase from the VAR.
And is getting a finder's fee or whatever from the VAR also verboten to a consultant, I presume?
I like how all these new terms come up.... lol. Affiliate, finder's fee, kickback. It's just sales commission however you put it.
Yes, that too is verboten no matter what word is applied. With our largest VAR, our customers do know that while we don't get a commission, by using them they do (voluntarily) join our buying group for volume discounts. So we all get discounts together by raising our collective volume. But it's a cooperative, not a commission structure.
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@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Are we saying that people who DO the work and have to buy the solutions can do this but it's only the consultants we have to worry about?
Yes, that was stated above.
I'm unclear what is meant here. Basically if you are paid to give advice, you can't resell without it being a problem. If you don't give any advice and just press the buttons that someone else tells you to press, you can resell, sure, because you are not doing anything that involves selling advice.
Problem is, implementers in IT normally give a lot of advice, even after the initial consultations. IT isn't a mindless button pushing job, in general.
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@Minion-Queen said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
We have small companies that hire NTG for consulting.
I did. I wanted a whole plan of how to install configure, setup a FreePBX system.
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@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Dashrender said
and Scott has said that this is what NTG struggles with all the time. A huge difference there is that they have consultant, Scott, and they implementors, Gene, etc. Keeping these roles separate enables the consult to remain a bit more unbiased as long as he doesn't know who or what is an affiliate with the company.
But that is ridiculous from the sales side. (If there IS a sales side.) If you were running the sales department, and 4 out of 5 recommendation is from Company ABC, why wouldn't you want to become a reseller?
For that matter, why not get kickbacks from every possible vendor possible?
If sales is completely removed from the consulting process and recommendations, why shouldn't the implementers who are told "do this stuff" use all the kickbacks they can get? Now that the bias part is removed?
Well, because as Scott mentioned earlier, it's really hard for the owners to not realize how much money they can make on kickbacks and in the end start putting pressure on their consultants to only offer solutions with their kick back partners.
Scale makes a huge difference here too. You as a single person might, MIGHT be able to not allow the kick backs to influence you.. but as a company... the owner isn't a consultant.. he hires consultants... the owner wants to make money.. see above.
I actually think that a larger company makes it easier, because if they truly care, they could mandate some things that would help a lot in reducing the influence (actively forbidding commissions, ensuring that there are no reports typing people to sales, not telling people who is an affiliate, etc.) It would still have bias, but a larger company could enact more of a barrier.
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@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Minion-Queen said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
We have small companies that hire NTG for consulting.
I did. I wanted a whole plan of how to install configure, setup a FreePBX system.
And if we sold FreePBX, Yealink phones, voip.ms SIP lines, Sangoma cards, or whatever else we recommended (I have no idea on specifics, even if I was the one that did it, i just don't have that kind of memory) it would have been a conflict of interest, no matter how small it was.
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@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Dashrender said
because it's counter to one of your primary business cores - being a consulting company that gives unbiased opinions.
How can you possibly say you're unbiased if your company sells one of the products you're recommending?Well, in theory these sides never meet. But what I am saying is if the consulting side recommends DELL 80 out of 100 times, and the sales side says, holy cow, we sell a lot of DELL, we should get a kickback, then what's the difference?
Yes, the consultant TECHNICALLY doesn't know if they are a reseller on the sales side, but of course it would make sense.
I would think the a consultant should NEVER sell, or have anyone else associated with them selling.
Most places that are Dell partners, they plaster that fact all over the place! so it would be near impossible for the consultant to not know.. and your customers would know too, because of the plasterings... so at that point you stop being real consultants, and instead become VARs for Dell.
Not all Dell partners can resell. We are non-reseller Dell Partners specifically because Dell respected our choice to be consultants, not vendor representatives. But both we and Dell wanted us to have VAR-like internal resources for support and such because we have too much value to add for the customer.
We bring the VA without the R.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
You are applying false motive here. It's assuming that the only reason I pick a product is BECAUSE I get kickback. ..... If such pure objective work is so important. If so, enjoy paying your $200/hr fee to basically end up with recommendations for Dell and Microsoft anyway.
In one case, you are assuming that the kickbacks don't drive the solution. But then you assume that one contrived solution that mostly only exists due to reseller kickbacks is the only one that will survive. This doesn't add up.
If you think that consultants that don't resell are always coming back with the same basic answers I think you are dealing with resellers and they've been hiding this from you. As a consultant, I can tell you that no two customers are the same, ever. It seems like they will be, but they never are. Each is very unique. Real consultants don't end up with cookie cutter solutions at all. Sure, get big enough, do similar enough companies and maybe some patterns will start to emerge, but rarely and only on the surface.
If you have a true consultant doing their job, this won't happen at all. Hence why we keep pointing out that affiliate programs based on a "normal case" are false hope. There is no such case. Not for home users, not for business.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@JaredBusch said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I, personally, do not think I understand what a true consultant delivers. I mean, if I go and ask for a server, correct, how many different types of servers are there?
You do not hire a consultant if you know you need a server. you go to the vendor or VAR.
You go to a consultant to determine the best server for your needs.
But that is the point I think @guyinpv is trying to make.
His customers come to HIM and say "I want a server". They trust him to pick the best solution for them.
If it was ME, I'd ask a ton questions first ... do you really need a server? being the first.
For example (and keep in mind this is NOT my line of work, doing this sort of stuff) a non-profit comes to me recently, with 3 users, and really, really says they need a server. I immediately explain why they don't need one. And I've been arguing back and forth with them on it. They are adamant they need one.
Good example. If you were getting paid to sell servers, you'd be much more likely to just do what they think that they want rather than actually trying to consult and help them.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said i
People who contact me, they aren't thinking at this level, they just want it done, fast, cheap, now.
Same here.
And while some will say that's why they are small business and will never grow, it is what it is.
That's great. They want a VAR
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Really, what the difference as @guyinpv has said between charging $400 to say buy DELL, and just knowing that 9 out of 10 times they need a DELL?
The difference is determining if they are the one time out of ten. But what I can't explain enough, is that it is not 90%. It's 20 - 40% at best. Consultants don't see this cookie cutter world. VARs do because they let the product drive the decision, not the need. They take a solution and see if they can make it work, rather than looking for what is best for the client.
So if you word it the way that you do, it sounds reasonable. If you look at it in the real world, it's totally crazy,
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
So, isn't it possible that a person in a smaller shop (or independent) really could provide honest advice, help the customer, and also get an incentive?
I don't see how they could reasonably do so. If they disclose the incentive, then it's perfectly ethical. But the customer is an idiot. If they want "advice" from a VAR, that should be free. Why pay a consultant to act as a VAR?
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I, personally, do not think I understand what a true consultant delivers. I mean, if I go and ask for a server, correct, how many different types of servers are there?
If you ask for a server, you've already misunderstood how to engage with IT (or any advice driven group.) You are proposing their advice and telling them what to tell you. That's not good. Tell them your problem, let them solve it. Don't lead with the solution.
So how many types of solutions are there? Endless. Servers alone range from $300 to millions. And they come in all shapes, sizes and styles from many different vendors. They come hosted and on premises. They come with different storage, CPU, memory, for factor, purchasing, controller, power supply and other options it's crazy. Many different architectures.
There is realistically nothing in IT that is cookie cutter enough to feel like you could have a stock solution, ever.
