Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?
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@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.
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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.
Storage certainly is the last place that you do that. Nothing is as critical to a business as storage within the IT space. Networking gear, desktops, monitors, chairs, desks, servers, CPU, memory, cabling, access points, racks... all less important normally.
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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?:
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.
Yup, if the term budget ever happens, someone is heading out to get screwed. Only sales people want to know your budget, only people looking to get sold something mention one.
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@scottalanmiller said
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/09/types-of-it-service-providers/
Man is there ANYTHING you don't have an article written about?
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@scottalanmiller said
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/09/types-of-it-service-providers/
Man is there ANYTHING you don't have an article written about?
Yes.
How to write short, succient statements which don't overload and crash web servers.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@scottalanmiller said
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/09/types-of-it-service-providers/
Man is there ANYTHING you don't have an article written about?
Yes.
How to write short, succient statements which don't overload and crash web servers.
I did write that, but it was so long and well thought out that the Internet imploded and you can't find it anywhere,
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@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Breffni-Potter said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@scottalanmiller said
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2015/09/types-of-it-service-providers/
Man is there ANYTHING you don't have an article written about?
Yes.
How to write short, succient statements which don't overload and crash web servers.
I did write that, but it was so long and well thought out that the Internet imploded and you can't find it anywhere,
So. Much. Snark. LOL.
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@scottalanmiller said
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.
You (and most here that I have seen) just tend to ignore them.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@scottalanmiller said
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.
You (and most here that I have seen) just tend to ignore them.
But even just friends at home, not ones that I consult for, don't have any needs like these, either.
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@scottalanmiller said
But even just friends at home, not ones that I consult for, don't have any needs like these, either.
What do your friends who own small 1-5 person businesses do?
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@scottalanmiller said
But even just friends at home, not ones that I consult for, don't have any needs like these, either.
What do your friends who own small 1-5 person businesses do?
He pushes them all to the cloud. Why does a 1-5 person company need onsite resources? (of course there are exceptions)
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@Dashrender said
He pushes them all to the cloud. Why does a 1-5 person company need onsite resources? (of course there are exceptions)
Most of them already have them, and are resistant to move.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@scottalanmiller said
But even just friends at home, not ones that I consult for, don't have any needs like these, either.
What do your friends who own small 1-5 person businesses do?
Well, a lot of things, hence the complexity.
But some....
- Put all of their systems on Office 365, including storage.
- Put all of their systems on Google Apps, including storage.
- Use a hodge podge of systems including ownCloud on Vultr, for example.
- Use Azure, DO, Vultr, Linode or Rackspace (yes, all of those in different cases.)
- Use a NAS in house (this is the least of the above.)
- Just store on the desktops. AetherStore can make this viable for business cases easily.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Dashrender said
He pushes them all to the cloud. Why does a 1-5 person company need onsite resources? (of course there are exceptions)
Most of them already have them, and are resistant to move.
So they aren't looking for consulting, but a reseller to placate them and make them feel like they got consulting. Good place to make a quick buck providing feel good services. I totally get that. I don't have many friends like that, though. Most either don't ask for advice or actually want it.
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We do have small customers (1 man shops). But very rarely are they not fully cloud based for everything. I know we have one that has a ReadyNAS and another with a Synology. But most everyone is fully in the cloud with everything. We have one client that had some local stuff and we encouraged them to go to the cloud for everything. Now they only call to chat once in awhile :). They love the solution and the lack of IT issues they have now.
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@Minion-Queen said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
We do have small customers (1 man shops). But very rarely are they not fully cloud based for everything. I know we have one that has a ReadyNAS and another with a Synology. But most everyone is fully in the cloud with everything. We have one client that had some local stuff and we encouraged them to go to the cloud for everything. Now they only call to chat once in awhile :). They love the solution and the lack of IT issues they have now.
Cloud is definitely the way to go.
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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?:
We do have small customers (1 man shops). But very rarely are they not fully cloud based for everything. I know we have one that has a ReadyNAS and another with a Synology. But most everyone is fully in the cloud with everything. We have one client that had some local stuff and we encouraged them to go to the cloud for everything. Now they only call to chat once in awhile :). They love the solution and the lack of IT issues they have now.
Cloud is definitely the way to go.
But even then, not "always", just most often. There really isn't any single solution. If there were, there would be no need for IT or consultants and we could all quit and go be musicians and painters. It's because every business (and even nearly every family) is unique that IT needs to much knowledge, experience, options and consideration.
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Actually I think that I just hit on an important point...
Once we feel that we can simply select a single solution and just use that (I realize that the goal here was not one solution, every time) IT simple evaporates. IT only exists and only has value when we are providing the guidance as to how to approach problems. If one solution more or less fits everyone, you don't need IT for anything. Once someone is coming to us as IT pros, the bases has to be that they believe that there is potentially value there.
