Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?
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Holy cow! Now THIS is what I was expecting!
Can someone please define a VAR for me?
I'll give an example. I do very few side jobs for people. Mainly friends. A friend with a small business comes to me and says, hey I need a new storage solution. From experience (and learning on places like here) I know that there really is no need to research a bunch of different products. the Synology will work great for them. I "sell" it to them (making a few bucks in the process), and then go over to their place and charge them a few hours labor to install it.
They don't want a whole report of recommendations. They trust me, and they just want it done. If I gave them a report and recommendation of 5 NASs (NASes?), they would say, just pick what you think is best. I don't want to deal with this crap, that's why I have you.
Am I a VAR?
Now, I am not saying this is the same for everyone. Obviously this isn't a model to make money. But to me it sounds like what @guyinpv is describing. That people trust him and just want his recommendation.
They want ME to pick something out and do the work. And trust me that I save them from getting screwed time and time again.
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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?:
Am I a VAR?
Yep.
I mean, it's not my business. I'm just saying if that is the work I did, that would be a VAR.
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At the same time some would say that whom ever hired you didn't do their job, which should be either a) do research themselves for the best solution for their situation, or b) hire someone to find the best solution for their situation.
Granted, there are situations, just needing some simple storage, for example, that perhaps you really don't need to "find the best solution" for, but we time and time again with projects that don't have to be a lot larger than that have huge failures because they just get what the VAR/sales person 'sells' them. Now - the thing to remember is, there is no real blame on the VAR/salesperson in this situation. Remember, the VAR/salesperson's responsibility is to their company - not the customers. It's their job to get the most money from the customer. It's what the company pays them to do.
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@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
At the same time some would say that whom ever hired you didn't do their job, which should be either a) do research themselves for the best solution for their situation, or b) hire someone to find the best solution for their situation.
Granted, there are situations, just needing some simple storage, for example, that perhaps you really don't need to "find the best solution" for, but we time and time again with projects that don't have to be a lot larger than that have huge failures because they just get what the VAR/sales person 'sells' them. Now - the thing to remember is, there is no real blame on the VAR/salesperson in this situation. Remember, the VAR/salesperson's responsibility is to their company - not the customers. It's their job to get the most money from the customer. It's what the company pays them to do.
And really (and this is something ML has helped me come to grasps with) often the person is looking for the cheapest way out. They know that knowing me, they'll get the cheapest solution, and I won't screw them. Even if I do make a few bucks in the process.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
And really (and this is something ML has helped me come to grasps with) often the person is looking for the cheapest way out. They know that knowing me, they'll get the cheapest solution, and I won't screw them. Even if I do make a few bucks in the process.
In that regard they are just lucky!
My friend - mentioned above.. had no idea what he really needed, other than he had an old server that they had $20K+ budget to replace with.
The VAR in this case, XXX, sold him a solution that worked, mostly, but was so not what he really needed and at 1/2 or less the cost.It definitely seems less likely to be taken to the cleaners by a small/one man shop versus large corporations.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
The assumption was that if I have 5 favorite products but an affiliate of one of them, this magically makes me a VAR instead of consultant.
Well fine, splitting hairs on definitions, it's what nerds do.It's what all people should do. Understanding what things "are" is our job in IT. Making things appear as things that they are not in the job of marketing and sales. There is no room for anyone who doesn't take semantics seriously in IT, IT (and most everything in life) depends on semantics. Splitting hairs is not what is going on, accuracy and clarity, is.
Yes, it makes you a VAR.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
My push back is that the one single affiliate product in my toolbox does little to influence me. If I accept that there is 100% bias toward that product now, ok, but it doesn't mean at ALL that simple work ethic and morals won't win out the day. At the end of the day, I still only want to do what's best for the client, not myself.
You have missed the point. No one is saying 100% bias... we are saying any bias. Unless you can 100% say that you don't care about the money and have zero reason to want to have the affiliate program and 100% don't care if you even get paid to consult, there is going to be bias from getting money for one product and not another. And everything in this thread is about how much you want that money... whether for doing a new job, being an affiliate, consulting, whatever. So that answers the bias question. Throwing out the need for bias to be 100% is total misdirection, even a Chevy salesman is not going to be 100% biased by getting paid 100% to sell Chevies, maybe 99%, but not 100%. If someone is looking for a boat, they will still almost always send them on to some other shop.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
http://dilbert.com/http://assets.amuniversal.com/93bb94703a3401349831005056a9545dThis is the thing we
dreadsee every day and don't want to happen. Hence the passionate replies.FTFY
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
My push back is that the one single affiliate product in my toolbox does little to influence me.
Of course, the question all comes down to .... how little, how much bias are you okay with, and how much bias is your customer okay with? It's double dipping... getting paid from one person to give an opinion in one way, paid by another to skew that opinion based on something other than the needs of the client. You've moved into a gray area of "biased, but when is it too much?"
And like I showed, it's easily 50 - 100% of the cost of the consulting for the items in question. That's a lot of money to not be biased by.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Scott's situation is naturally far different from my own. They are a provider, there are many layers, employees, contractors, whatever. affiliations are impossible to deal with. Who gets the money? The business owner, the CEO? If he gets it, will that influence how he trains his consultants and pushes them? Will he offer additional incentives to push those? If the consultants themselves get it, then the CEO has to worry about all that bias and whether his company is really neutral about things, maybe he won't want to allow it?
That's why we don't get commissions individually OR at the corporate level. Because we are not a VAR and you are right, doing that creates bias indirectly instead of directly. So specifically avoided. You are right to worry about how that would work.
It can help and it means that a person that is not directly consulting can create air gaps and policies to make the system blind. We've considered that a lot and feel that it can be done, and maybe someday we will do it with proper disclosures. But currently we do not, specifically for the reason(s) you mention.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
In my case, or the case of one person with a name in the phone book, it's not as complicated. I'm not talking about $30k commissions from VMAX. I'm talking about web hosting or some cloud service or a product purchase link. Very small amounts to be sure, but not as influential as $30k might be.
Of course, but we aren't talking about $30K of consulting either. If you are hired to do 15 minutes of deciding on which cloud host to use and one pays you $10 and one does not, and the 15 minutes of consulting is $20... that's 50%. 50% is influential, switching to just telling people to use your chosen affiliate could easily pad your bottom line over the course of a year to the tune of $30K, right?
You are looking at this as if it's $10... it's not. It's $10, for ten minutes of work, over and over again. It might be nothing, but it might be enough to pay the bills alone. It's not a one time thing and it isn't based on a large amount of consulting hours. It's minutes.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Or in the case where I sell an off the shelf solution or "package". Something like "hosting + install + this + that" is all wrapped up with the "service" options built-in, affiliates included. They aren't paying for consultant, they are paying for the end result, as long as it works!
Sure, but that's a VAR situation, not a consultant.
But no one in business depends on "as long as it works." That's a SW marketing phrase. In IT "it works" includes being a good price and not being risky. If you buy a solution that costs twice as much as it should, I deem that a failure and don't allow people to say that things "worked" since part of the job of IT is doing it at a proper price.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
So many different angles to this discussion. Absolutes should not be the conclusion. I think ethics, morals, controls, policies, etc, can mitigate simple bias.
Possibly. But you are working from a difficult position... adding in what we see as an unethical bias intentionally, and then hoping to mitigate that with more ethics. The discussion starts from a position of intentionally injecting questionable ethics, and then resolving the issue as being one that ethics can overcome? I think that that concept is self defeating in the context.
Ethics can only overcome the bias in a situation where the bias does not arise in this way.
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@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@JaredBusch said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Who gets the money?
The business of course
Seems odd that anyone else would even be in the running in a real business. Of course, Scott tells us that most small businesses aren't really real - I can't recall if he calls them more hobbies or not though
I generally use the term hobby. I've had people call their own businesses hobbies, actually. When @Minion-Queen and I used to do door to door sales, we actually found tons and tons of true hobby businesses (not just me calling them that.) An extremely common business that you don't think about, but that makes up one of the larger percentage groups of American businesses, is a bored housewife running a "business" that her husband pays for and is never intended to make money but is used as a tax shelter and hobby. So, example, a knick knack store in an old house by the side of the highway. They buy the house or rent it for next to nothing, do the work themselves to decorate it and fill it with, um.. junk, and she sells that all day. Almost no one comes in to buy anything, it's all her friends coming in to drink coffee and hang out. Once in a while someone actually buys something, but never enough to cover 10% of the rent and she makes zero salary as there is no money for that. It's just something to keep her busy or to make it sound good when she says that she runs a business.
That's an extreme, but super common, example. But lots and lots of SMBs are shades of gray with this. Maybe it is a full time business with an employee or two, but it is still just a joke business "for fun" and no one is intentionally running it to make money and very often, they don't. When the owner gets bored, they can't sell it as it is worth literally nothing. So these pop up and down all the time and they truly are hobbies.
THen there are people who "think" that they are running a business but do it at a hobby level and never take it seriously at all. I call these hobbies too, because it is important to make their owners understand that that's how they are treating it, even if they don't admit it.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Can someone please define a VAR for me?
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/09/types-of-it-service-providers/
Resellers and VARs: The first, largest and most important to identify category is that of a reseller. Resellers are the easiest to identify as they, as their name indicates, resell things. Resellers vary from pure resellers, those companies that do nothing but purchase from vendors on one side and sell to customers on the other (vendors like NewEgg and Amazon would fit into this category while not focusing on IT products) to the more popular Value Added Resellers who not only resell products but maintain some degree of skill or knowledge around products.
Value Added Resellers are a key component of the overall IT vendor ecosystem as they supply more than just a product purchasing supply chain but maintain key skills around those products. Commonly VARs will have skills around product integration, supply chain logistics, supported configurations, common support issues, licensing and other factors. It is common for customers and even other types of ITSPs to lean on a VAR in order to get details about product specifics or insider information.
Resellers of any type, quite obviously, earn their money through markup and margins on the goods that they resell. This creates for an interesting relationship between customers and the vendor as the vendor is always in a position of needing to make a sale in order to produce revenue. Resellers are often turned to for advice, but it must be understood that the relationship is one of sales and the reseller only gets compensated when a sale takes place. This makes the use of a reseller somewhat complicated as the advice or expertise sought may come at a conflict with what is in the interest of the reseller. The relationship with a reseller requires careful management to ensure that guidance and direction coming from the reseller is aligned with the customer’s needs and is isolated to areas in which the reseller is an expert and in ways that is mutually beneficial to both parties.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Can someone please define a VAR for me?
Reseller: Someone that sells products made by others.
VAR: A reseller that adds technical or business or logistical value of significance on top of reselling. Often this includes verifying compatibility, ensuring timely delivery, helping decide what parts go together, capacity planning, growth planning, etc. -
@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I'll give an example. I do very few side jobs for people. Mainly friends. A friend with a small business comes to me and says, hey I need a new storage solution. From experience (and learning on places like here) I know that there really is no need to research a bunch of different products. the Synology will work great for them. I "sell" it to them (making a few bucks in the process), and then go over to their place and charge them a few hours labor to install it.
They don't want a whole report of recommendations. They trust me, and they just want it done. If I gave them a report and recommendation of 5 NASs (NASes?), they would say, just pick what you think is best. I don't want to deal with this crap, that's why I have you.
Am I a VAR?
Yes, you are 100% a reseller and you are tacking on non-reseller expertise (installation) elevating you to VAR. Not even the slightest grey area, this is as VAR as VAR gets.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Now, I am not saying this is the same for everyone. Obviously this isn't a model to make money. But to me it sounds like what @guyinpv is describing. That people trust him and just want his recommendation.
The question becomes, is it really a recommendation at that point? Sure Synology is good, but if you are not doing an unbiased assessment of the specific needs in question, is it really a recommendation or just a sale? As long as you are openly a VAR, then the later is perfectly fine, there is literally nothing wrong or bad about doing sales.
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One of the things that amazes me is how you guys have all of these people, friends or businesses that you know that need recurring solutions like this. I literally know no one like this. There is no product that I could use in a way that you describe. I love Synology, but it applies to just about zero people that I know first hand and only a handful of businesses, like maybe 10%.
Same for hosted services like DO or Vultr. Only maybe 80% of businesses that I talk to need any solution like that, and of those it literally goes to a mix of DO, Vultr, Linode, Rackspace, Azure and AWS. Some are more popular than others, but all of them are in the mix. Maybe Vultr gets twice as much as anyone else, but it's still not a large percentage. I don't know of any customer where I could not go through and carefully select many factors to decide between them.
At best I could be an affiliate with all of them, but that's a bit to manage, and would still serve to influence me to potentially lean towards either selling to the remaining 20% when it is not appropriate or influence me to sell extra instead of only what is needed.
I'm definitely amazed that you guys find people of any sort (friends, businesses) that have recurring needs enough to be able to approach things in this way.
