Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
The situation is that I have a family and kids and not really interested in hugely risky business types. I live in a small-ish town of 40k people with another town 20 miles away with another 40k people. The type of business I do can't depend on living in huge cities to make it work.
Somewhere in the consulting space is where I see myself. Consulting has a specific niche though. If a business is large enough or complicated enough, they will have their own IT staff already. If the business is a cut-n-paste business, they already have an IT blueprint and use local providers.
Is the in-home IT business dying too? Am I better off trying to work for a large company? Beside mom-n-pop "computer repair" companies, what else can a guy do?Become an expert in your "area" whatever "area" that might be. Go deeper than anyone else, be more knowledgable, be hungry for that knowledge, be passionate about the topic. If you are THE guy who knows about topic X and you develop a reputation and a name based on that, you can be a consultant specialising in that topic. Takes takes a long time...
Don't go mom and pop route, that's a dying/closing market. Now I provide tech support to home users but they are not the spend peanuts, nickle and dime. They want that 1 to 1 high end service and everything to work at business level, they want all the stress taken away.
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@travisdh1 said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Minion-Queen said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I just looked it up. I have talked to about 175 restaurants over the last 4 years. Usually they need an hour of our time to put up Access Points. That's it. Any aspect of IT is not something they worry about. Small town single location least of all. Sure once in awhile one will call to ask a quick question. But Staples is cheaper and they aren't paid by their customers because of IT stuff. They are paid to cook food. IT is the lowest thing on the list.
One of the biggest chains we talked to (international and over 400 locations world wide). They have an IT department, 1 guy can handle it all. He calls on us for consultations for infrastructure upgrades. But one guy can handle 400 locations and he isn't even full time IT. He also handles new product purchasing (choosing new craft beers for locations etc).
I was going to do a public wifi system for one of the local restaurants. Planned to get 3 APs in and configured in 2 hours at most, and with Ubiquiti the entire quote was $500. Would've covered the entire place, and most likely the parking lot as well.
Instead of me spending an evening putting this stuff in, the local cable company did it for free. Of course they only put a single AP in, so only about 1/2 of the restaurant actually has a signal, with 1/3 of the space actually having a usable signal. Yeah, great advertising for your cable company, especially when someone like me realizes that runs on a DSL connection (really, what were they thinking?)
Hmmm.
In some spaces, I wonder what the cost of a Ubiquiti access point is and offering a free managed wifi service? In exchange for a captive portal with advertising potentially...
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I pretty much equate Restaurants to working with consumers (aka not businesses). You are always going up against free or Staples.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@travisdh1 said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Minion-Queen said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I just looked it up. I have talked to about 175 restaurants over the last 4 years. Usually they need an hour of our time to put up Access Points. That's it. Any aspect of IT is not something they worry about. Small town single location least of all. Sure once in awhile one will call to ask a quick question. But Staples is cheaper and they aren't paid by their customers because of IT stuff. They are paid to cook food. IT is the lowest thing on the list.
One of the biggest chains we talked to (international and over 400 locations world wide). They have an IT department, 1 guy can handle it all. He calls on us for consultations for infrastructure upgrades. But one guy can handle 400 locations and he isn't even full time IT. He also handles new product purchasing (choosing new craft beers for locations etc).
I was going to do a public wifi system for one of the local restaurants. Planned to get 3 APs in and configured in 2 hours at most, and with Ubiquiti the entire quote was $500. Would've covered the entire place, and most likely the parking lot as well.
Instead of me spending an evening putting this stuff in, the local cable company did it for free. Of course they only put a single AP in, so only about 1/2 of the restaurant actually has a signal, with 1/3 of the space actually having a usable signal. Yeah, great advertising for your cable company, especially when someone like me realizes that runs on a DSL connection (really, what were they thinking?)
Hmmm.
In some spaces, I wonder what the cost of a Ubiquiti access point is and offering a free managed wifi service? In exchange for a captive portal with advertising potentially...
We've totally thought about that and our guess is... worthless. But, you never know. But it would be hard to got get confused with the ISP.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@travisdh1 said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Minion-Queen said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I just looked it up. I have talked to about 175 restaurants over the last 4 years. Usually they need an hour of our time to put up Access Points. That's it. Any aspect of IT is not something they worry about. Small town single location least of all. Sure once in awhile one will call to ask a quick question. But Staples is cheaper and they aren't paid by their customers because of IT stuff. They are paid to cook food. IT is the lowest thing on the list.
One of the biggest chains we talked to (international and over 400 locations world wide). They have an IT department, 1 guy can handle it all. He calls on us for consultations for infrastructure upgrades. But one guy can handle 400 locations and he isn't even full time IT. He also handles new product purchasing (choosing new craft beers for locations etc).
I was going to do a public wifi system for one of the local restaurants. Planned to get 3 APs in and configured in 2 hours at most, and with Ubiquiti the entire quote was $500. Would've covered the entire place, and most likely the parking lot as well.
Instead of me spending an evening putting this stuff in, the local cable company did it for free. Of course they only put a single AP in, so only about 1/2 of the restaurant actually has a signal, with 1/3 of the space actually having a usable signal. Yeah, great advertising for your cable company, especially when someone like me realizes that runs on a DSL connection (really, what were they thinking?)
Hmmm.
In some spaces, I wonder what the cost of a Ubiquiti access point is and offering a free managed wifi service? In exchange for a captive portal with advertising potentially...
Being me, I'd never do something for free trying to get advertising revenue. At least the cable company is doing it to advertise their service, even if they apparently send interns with no clue to install every one of the things.
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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?:
@travisdh1 said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Minion-Queen said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I just looked it up. I have talked to about 175 restaurants over the last 4 years. Usually they need an hour of our time to put up Access Points. That's it. Any aspect of IT is not something they worry about. Small town single location least of all. Sure once in awhile one will call to ask a quick question. But Staples is cheaper and they aren't paid by their customers because of IT stuff. They are paid to cook food. IT is the lowest thing on the list.
One of the biggest chains we talked to (international and over 400 locations world wide). They have an IT department, 1 guy can handle it all. He calls on us for consultations for infrastructure upgrades. But one guy can handle 400 locations and he isn't even full time IT. He also handles new product purchasing (choosing new craft beers for locations etc).
I was going to do a public wifi system for one of the local restaurants. Planned to get 3 APs in and configured in 2 hours at most, and with Ubiquiti the entire quote was $500. Would've covered the entire place, and most likely the parking lot as well.
Instead of me spending an evening putting this stuff in, the local cable company did it for free. Of course they only put a single AP in, so only about 1/2 of the restaurant actually has a signal, with 1/3 of the space actually having a usable signal. Yeah, great advertising for your cable company, especially when someone like me realizes that runs on a DSL connection (really, what were they thinking?)
Hmmm.
In some spaces, I wonder what the cost of a Ubiquiti access point is and offering a free managed wifi service? In exchange for a captive portal with advertising potentially...
We've totally thought about that and our guess is... worthless. But, you never know. But it would be hard to got get confused with the ISP.
It depends on the venue and who you are targeting.
If I go into a conference centre which is aimed at businesses and said "here's a bunch of APs on loan, you already have the cabling, we'll put it in, all we ask is users fill in a captive portal which has our branding on it"
Compared with the cost of traditional advertising which is really high price for low return, I wonder how targetted things like that would work...
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@travisdh1 said
Being me, I'd never do something for free trying to get advertising revenue.
No no, not revenue. Advertising for your services. Literally you are the advert on that space. Nothing spammy or horrible, just a classy simple 1 page.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@travisdh1 said
Being me, I'd never do something for free trying to get advertising revenue.
No no, not revenue. Advertising for your services. Literally you are the advert on that space. Nothing spammy or horrible, just a classy simple 1 page.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, if I were going to consider actually advertising for outside work, that would make sense.
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At the end of the day...
In home repair is not horrible if you have clients with money and care for their stuff.
I just did a job yesterday for a guy on a $2k custom computer who wanted his Win7 to Win10 upgrade. He had two SSD drives and a partitioned platter drive. He was nervous about all the drives and doing backups and how Win10 would work on the SSD etc etc. In the end it was 4 hours of basically explaining lots of stuff and letting him watch me all the way through.Regardless, that is just one 4 hour job. I would need two of those every day for a decent living and it would take all my time when adding in driving time and note taking and billing and so forth.
In a small town where mom-n-pop shops seem to come and go, I'm not sure I could work up at least 5 hours of billable time every day. Not only that but you can't charge any less than $60/hr if you have any hope of hiring other people and having free time. Even in my small town $75/hr is the minimum for the experienced pros to do in home. Over $100/hr for business work.
MSP is an interesting concept. I don't want to limit myself with negative thoughts but I just have to think, why would some company that has been chugging along for 10 years suddenly needs hundreds of $$ a month in IT services when they never needed it before?
I assume you will tell them how awesome it is, how they will have tech when needed, discounted services, better security, a proper network layout, maintenance work, remote help abilities, etc etc etc. But if they say "never needed before, so no thanks." What then?
Many IT services are just back-end things, hard to directly correlate with an increase in profit which is all the business owner wants to see.That said, how many clients can one person manage with MSP anyway? It's a lot more work I assume, more parsing logs, more allotted time slots for maintenance, more phone calls and emails from clients. We talking 5 clients? 10? 50?
If I can only manage 10 decent-sized MSP-style clients, they need to pay at least $500/month for services. Preferably $800 or even $1000 (not sure what standards costs are). How many useful services can I pack in an $800/month package to make it worth while?
I'd rather manage 10 clients at $800 a month than 50 clients at $160 a month, even if it's fewer service offerings. It's just less overhead and paperwork.If I split $800 into $60/hr that's 13.33 hours. If I schedule 140 work hours a month, there is only support for 10 clients using this math. I couldn't give them more hours or they would have to pay more and I'd need fewer clients. You get the idea.
How viable is it to have $800 a month in MSP services provided by one person? Maybe it's too much? If I can only provide $300 worth of services, I need to spend far less than 13 hours a month, and find more clients!Web design and online services are another venue. Speaking of restaurants, they always need websites with fancy pictures, menus and occasional specials and deals posted. Managing a website could be part of a service package. Just bundle in their design, updates, maintenance, hosting, and everything else into $100/m or $200/m or whatever with dedicated hours and I pay all the necessary fees to run it.
I hate that all this is so bespoke and random. I mean, if you want to do in-home massage, it's pretty straightforward. But if you want to run in-home IT, it's like, there is 100 ways to try and niche out the business, there is no just "standard" thing an IT person can do. Do you add web? Printers and copiers? Servers? Consulting? Security audits? Wireless? Physical wiring? Infrastructure? Repair? Training? Monitoring/logging/access tools? Contracts or hourly? Laptops, mobiles? Focus on small biz, startups? Do sales/affiliates for certain product installs? Sales? Storefront?
There is no cut-n-paste, rinse-repeat business model for IT I guess.
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There is no cut-n-paste, rinse-repeat business model for IT I guess.
That's for sure!
I'm a general. I have to do everything in order to get the work. But I love it!
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Regardless, that is just one 4 hour job. I would need two of those every day for a decent living and it would take all my time when adding in driving time and note taking and billing and so forth.
Yup, if you had a steady stream of work that was somehow able to schedule two of those every day without any interrupts nor with any overlaps, you'd STILL have to spend 10-12 hours working every single day to make things work out. That's crazy. And that is just for the work and the documentation, billing, driving, etc. That's crazy. And that is assuming impossible scheduling (you figure at best that you can pull off half of that because of logistics) and that doesn't address how you would find the roughly 5,000 necessary clients that it would take to need that kind of service on a routine basis (with 5K clients, you'd hit each one about once every computer buying cycle. And that is still a best case scenario. But what does it take to find 5,000 clients? You can't pull that off while doing the work, too.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
That said, how many clients can one person manage with MSP anyway?
As a true MSP? Zero. You can't run a good MSP for any clients with only one person. An MSP, with only the rarest exception, requires more coverage, skills and resources than any one person can provide. It's just not possible. Doing it, at best, means you are putting your clients at risk, relying on you for coverage but having you not have the necessary resources to provide the coverage that they are assuming or expecting. Sure you could set expectations, but are you really an MSP at that point?
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
In a small town where mom-n-pop shops seem to come and go, I'm not sure I could work up at least 5 hours of billable time every day. Not only that but you can't charge any less than $60/hr if you have any hope of hiring other people and having free time. Even in my small town $75/hr is the minimum for the experienced pros to do in home. Over $100/hr for business work.
Nowhere in America or Canada (or probably Mexico) is $75/hr an experienced pro. Anything less than the $110/hr of Geek Squad means you are a scrambling, semi-unemployed bench tech. Geek Squad sets the "floor" price in North America, fall below that, and why would anyone, consumer or otherwise, think of you as a "pro"? And GS employees are not even remotely at the level to be called IT or a pro, they are bench workers at the lowest bar of bench work. Good bench people earn double their takehome with much better conditions working for good companies and don't deal with consumers. Even bench gets good salaries when they are good at their jobs.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Many IT services are just back-end things, hard to directly correlate with an increase in profit which is all the clueless likely to fail soon business owner wants to see.
FTFY
Crappy businesses don't make good customers because they rarely can pay their bills, when they do it is rarely promptly and they tend to go out of business often leaving you scrambling to find new customers way too often which are costly to acquire.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Web design and online services are another venue. Speaking of restaurants, they always need websites with fancy pictures, menus and occasional specials and deals posted.
"Need" might be a strong term here. Sure, we think that they "need" them, but they don't. Just like we've talked to a lot of restaurants about IT, we've talked to them about websites and marketing too and you know what... generally they couldn't care less about that, either.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I hate that all this is so bespoke and random. I mean, if you want to do in-home massage, it's pretty straightforward. But if you want to run in-home IT, it's like, there is 100 ways to try and niche out the business, there is no just "standard" thing an IT person can do. Do you add web? Printers and copiers? Servers? Consulting? Security audits? Wireless? Physical wiring? Infrastructure? Repair? Training? Monitoring/logging/access tools? Contracts or hourly? Laptops, mobiles? Focus on small biz, startups? Do sales/affiliates for certain product installs? Sales? Storefront?
You are mixing IT and bench services, which I think adds confusion. Bench is relatively standard, not totally, but a bit. IT by definition is not standard as it is core business... nothing in core business is cookie cutter or profits would be predictable and investments would be basically a guarantee. IT, being a business item, is almost totally bespoke. Bench, however, is not, as it is like car repair and can be done pretty predictably.
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@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
In a small town where mom-n-pop shops seem to come and go, I'm not sure I could work up at least 5 hours of billable time every day. Not only that but you can't charge any less than $60/hr if you have any hope of hiring other people and having free time. Even in my small town $75/hr is the minimum for the experienced pros to do in home. Over $100/hr for business work.
Nowhere in America or Canada (or probably Mexico) is $75/hr an experienced pro. Anything less than the $110/hr of Geek Squad means you are a scrambling, semi-unemployed bench tech. Geek Squad sets the "floor" price in North America, fall below that, and why would anyone, consumer or otherwise, think of you as a "pro"? And GS employees are not even remotely at the level to be called IT or a pro, they are bench workers at the lowest bar of bench work. Good bench people earn double their takehome with much better conditions working for good companies and don't deal with consumers. Even bench gets good salaries when they are good at their jobs.
Interesting perspective. I assume retail locations like Best Buy charge that because of all the overhead and employees. The whole point of avoiding that and going with a mom-n-pop or road warrior technician is you can assume lower costs. Where GS charges $110, the guy in the Honda hatchback is probably $60.
Do you really think the average person is basing their decision on price in this way? Like "GS charges $110, but this traveling guy is $75, what? Why so cheap? I'm going with the more expensive option cause they just HAVE to be better!"
I think people will choose the cheapest, with almost no concern for quality. Average people I mean. They will find the cheapest option they feel safe with.I also mentioned earlier, it just isn't practical to charge $100/hr for granny who can't figure out the Win10 start menu or how to find the email icon. She has a 9 year old computer that cost $299 on sale. She ain't paying $200 for me to comfort her.
It's hard to NOT do those jobs either. How do you advertise services and say "lonely cheapskates need not apply"?
I don't mind those jobs but I just feel really really bad when it comes time to show the bill. -
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I hate that all this is so bespoke and random. I mean, if you want to do in-home massage, it's pretty straightforward. But if you want to run in-home IT, it's like, there is 100 ways to try and niche out the business, there is no just "standard" thing an IT person can do. Do you add web? Printers and copiers? Servers? Consulting? Security audits? Wireless? Physical wiring? Infrastructure? Repair? Training? Monitoring/logging/access tools? Contracts or hourly? Laptops, mobiles? Focus on small biz, startups? Do sales/affiliates for certain product installs? Sales? Storefront?
You are mixing IT and bench services, which I think adds confusion. Bench is relatively standard, not totally, but a bit. IT by definition is not standard as it is core business... nothing in core business is cookie cutter or profits would be predictable and investments would be basically a guarantee. IT, being a business item, is almost totally bespoke. Bench, however, is not, as it is like car repair and can be done pretty predictably.
But how viable is bench as a career?
You need to fix 2 to 5 computers a day with at least 5 billable hours at $75/hr.
That's 1300 billable hours a year for gross $97,500. Sounds good but take away tools, accountant, taxes, secretary or intern part time, whatever. You might make an OK $60k give or take.
But if 1300 billable hours is split into an average of 1.5hr jobs, I need 867 clients a year, 72 a month, 18 a week. These are hard numbers.
Not only that but just processing 18 people a week, the documentation, billing, phone calls, followup calls, inevitable customer support calls, emails, etc. 5 billable hours a day easily becomes a 10, 12, 14 hour day.I'm not saying working 12 hours a day is bad, or even that fixing 18 computers a week is all that difficult. The hard part is trying to get 18 clients a week! And even then, getting them all to bring computers in is annoying for them.
If I do onsite work, 18 a week becomes much harder.Anyway, I know people who do it, but it takes a long time to get established, and then a lot of work becomes repeat clients over the years.
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Decent auto mechanics charge quite a bit more than $75 an hour. Now that is somewhat skilled profession (not as skilled as IT), but even when we look at non-skilled professions such as pest control, landscaping, etc. they still charge more than $75 an hour. Hell getting a truck or van out for anything costs more than $75.
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PC Repair is dead. You may find the well off client that has a $2k machine once in awhile, but when you can get a PC for $200-300 new or a tablet for $40-100 you are virtually eliminating that market.
You should certainly work for a MSP before even considering starting one. You have no clue what they go through with client acquisition, quoting, businesses that don't want to pay, etc.
