Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?

guyinpv

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@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.

That's the takeaway?

I wish the takeaway were some actual definitions and viable business models!

Scott suggests that so much bad IT, so many bad companies, so many biased recommendations, are due only to partners and affiliates being used. And that many of these also "scam" because they don't disclose when they recommend something with a kickback.

I want to point out some things.

All these companies and vendors have affiliate programs for a reason. WHO are they meant for? They aren't meant for the end users, since they can't get kickback for buying their own products. They aren't for resellers, since I can't buy a Dell laptop and put it on my shelf and resell it with markup and affiliate bonuses coming back to me (in other words, stores).
The affiliate programs are precisely designed FOR IT people to use, and specifically for IT people who are implementing solutions FOR clients, i.e. clients making purchases through affiliate links/partner programs recommended by their trusted service provider.
We can't simply conclude that all these programs are just evil. This is what they are FOR, for IT servicing companies. It's FOR them. But if the company uses it, they are sleazy? Yes yes, they can disclose the kickback, but that doesn't change the opinion that they are still a sleazy company, mastered by affiliates, beholden to vendors and not their clients, they are not IT people, they are sales people, etc etc etc.

Apparently one cannot have it both ways, you cannot use an affiliate program and NOT be a salesman at the same time. I reject that idea though personally. I could easily be a salesman for a company even without a kickback. Maybe a friend works there? Maybe I'm trying to be impressive and get a job there? Maybe I just know the product the most and push for it by default? Maybe a lot of things non-monetary, I can still be a shrill for them. Likewise, if there is the presence of monetary gain, it does not necessarily mean I'm their salesman. Maybe I have the affiliate program because it's easy to sign up for, but I don't particular like the product and rarely push for it due to many other negative biases? But in the event it really is the best choice, the bonus happens to be there.

It almost seems like affiliate programs should not exist at all. Because their very presence, or availability, for IT companies to use (for which the programs are create for in the first place), automatically makes those companies sleazy sales companies. Just a VAR, picking through a catalog of affiliates pushing for the highest kickbacks. Nothing more.

There does not seem to be any wiggle room whatsoever in human nature or ethics for an IT company to use the affiliate programs created for them to use, but also be considered a fair, objective, quality IT company. They are automatically suspect, biased, serving two master, overselling, and dangerous. Maybe even illegal!

What option is left for a company to who wants to BOTH be a high quality IT company, AND be a "real company" who must think of profits, AND can do objective work, providing the best solutions, AND thus take advantage of affiliate programs clearly created exactly for them by almost every vendor, which is essentially just free money when those vendors are purchased.
What option is there for them to be respectable, quality, service providers?
How an affiliate kickback any different than aiming for a bulk discount? Group buy? Combo/bundle purchase? There are lots of ways to "save" money by being choosy about products and vendors, but none of those are thought of as so sinful over against affiliate commissions.

Will the world be a better place if vendors could not offer any commission programs?

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

Scott suggests that so much bad IT, so many bad companies, so many biased recommendations, are due only to partners and affiliates being used. And that many of these also "scam" because they don't disclose when they recommend something with a kickback.

Do I? Maybe I said or implied that, but if I did, I'll correct it. I'd say that so many bad companies choose to take kickbacks because they are already bad. They weren't going to (and often are not even remotely capable of) delivering competent IT consulting so are already working under questionable pretenses. They try to complete with better consultants by lowering the price, but find that they need (or want more money) so double dip. They are taking advantage of customers anyway, so why not take advantage more. Their advice is already bad.

The issue, in most cases, is that they are bad companies with ethics and skill problems from the beginning. The secret reseller thing is just a reflection of that.

That's not to suggest that becoming a reseller doesn't turn a good consultant bad. But the general case, I believe, is that the "consultants" is already not doing what he should and since that is the case, turns to the dark side because really, he's already there.

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

All these companies and vendors have affiliate programs for a reason. WHO are they meant for? They aren't meant for the end users, since they can't get kickback for buying their own products. They aren't for resellers, since I can't buy a Dell laptop and put it on my shelf and resell it with markup and affiliate bonuses coming back to me (in other words, stores).
The affiliate programs are precisely designed FOR IT people to use, and specifically for IT people who are implementing solutions FOR clients, i.e. clients making purchases through affiliate links/partner programs recommended by their trusted service provider.

THey are for anyone willing to get paid for pushing a product. It's no more complex than that. VARs, consultants wanting to double dip, internal IT running server buying scams on their bosses... legit or not, the vendors don't care. You sell on their behalf, they pay you. Easy peasy. Drug lords don't sell to local drug pushers to sell in specific ways or specific customers. They pay them for selling drugs. To whom, how or why isn't relevant.

You are implying that because one company will pay people to sell, that all people who sell are then blameless because someone paid them. That's like the argument that software must be legal for the assumed use case because someone was allowed to sell it, ignoring the fact that there is a perfectly legal use case that the users are just ignoring. The users were still stealing software.

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

Apparently one cannot have it both ways, you cannot use an affiliate program and NOT be a salesman at the same time.

Exactly. I read this as "Apparently someone can't be a salesman and not be a salesman."

Logically, that's correct. Calling someone an "affiliate" is not a thing, it's just another term for salesman.

JaredBusch

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

How an affiliate kickback any different than aiming for a bulk discount? Group buy? Combo/bundle purchase? There are lots of ways to "save" money by being choosy about products and vendors, but none of those are thought of as so sinful over against affiliate commissions.

No one but you has ever called this shit sinful. You are the only one locked up on this shit. Those other ways are all 100% on the vendor dime. Nothing goes in your pocket. The vendor is choosing to take less money per item for the large sale or less per item for the combo sale.

Will the world be a better place if vendors could not offer any commission programs?

Yes.

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

It almost seems like affiliate programs should not exist at all.

So MangoLassi is a marketing platform and has affiliate agreements with companies. It does not give advice or recommend anyone. It's not a technical entity. It's not in IT. It's exactly who affiliate programs are for.

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

Will the world be a better place if vendors could not offer any commission programs?

HOw did you get to that point? This is totally disconnected from our discussion of hundreds of posts.

scottalanmiller

There is one and only one problem being discussed. And that is...

Combining being a seller's agent with being a buyer's agent and not disclosing this to the parties.

That's it. If you think that being a consultant is bad, a seller is bad, affiliate programs are bad, mixing these roles while disclosing it or anything else is even hinted at as being bad.... you've totally missed what all of us have said. Completely.

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

What option is left for a company to who wants to BOTH be a high quality IT company, AND be a "real company" who must think of profits, AND can do objective work, providing the best solutions, AND thus take advantage of affiliate programs clearly created exactly for them by almost every vendor, which is essentially just free money when those vendors are purchased.

None. Why do you demand that that exact combination of conflicts of interests exist? What is driving you to this bizarre, nonsensical conflagration?

Why can't a company be a non-profit helping to rid the world of pirates while running an empire of pirating? They can't. You are coming up with two conflicting aspects of the world and trying to mash them together. You can mix a lot of things together, but being a good seller's agent and being a good buyer's agent is a conflict. You are opposing yourself, what is good for the client is bad for you, what is good for you is bad for the client. You are trying to create a paradox.

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

There does not seem to be any wiggle room whatsoever in human nature or ethics for an IT company to use the affiliate programs created for them to use, but also be considered a fair, objective, quality IT company. They are automatically suspect, biased, serving two master, overselling, and dangerous. Maybe even illegal!

Correct. So we are of an agreement. Without disclosure this is unquestionably unethical, likely illegal via breach of implied contract.

scottalanmiller

@JaredBusch said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

And if the insinuation is that if a client says "I need a server" and some places sell them a $20K server when they need a $2K server ... well, I have never seen that, and I have never done that. Though, I guess I have seen it because a lot of times I'll come in to help when they've been oversold already. But I would not do that.

I have seen that more than one time, personally. Let alone seeing all the threads implying it on SW.

Exactly. This is probably the most common scenario that I've seen. This is what "normal" looks like. And the pieces I mean are...

Customer is an idiot and goes to someone clearly not a real consultant, but willing to state that they are.
Customer things that they are getting free consulting and thinks that they are taking advantage of the consultant.
Customer doesn't ask for help but demands that they be sold something.
Fake consultant plays along and calls themselves a consultant, rarely discloses the sales piece.
Fake consultant doesn't look into needs, just sell the most expensive thing that they can get the customer to buy.

scottalanmiller

@JaredBusch said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

Or is this really all about semantics?

In that what @guyinpv is describing is a VAR, and there is nothing wrong with that?

I mean, do people not think someone is making money on the hardware? DO people think it all gets passed on for free? Like it costs DELL $250 to make the server, and that is what the client will pay? I think everyone understands markup and its place in business.

That is his issue yes. He is calling it black and white VAR is bad because sales. None of us have ever said that.

It's not even that VARs aren't bad. VARs are good! Good ones are, at least.

scottalanmiller

@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?:

And if the insinuation is that if a client says "I need a server" and some places sell them a $20K server when they need a $2K server ... well, I have never seen that, and I have never done that. Though, I guess I have seen it because a lot of times I'll come in to help when they've been oversold already. But I would not do that.

I have seen that more than one time, personally. Let alone seeing all the threads implying it on SW.

Yeah, I guess I am naive to think it doesn't happen. Just being here on ML (and of course SW) it seems to happen daily.

But, does that mean there cannot be a legitimate way?

A legit way to double dip and play the unsuspecting customer off of the seller? Is that what you are asking? Or what is it you are wondering if you can do?

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

I mean, when you go to a store, do they have to disclose their profit to you?

You've injected a new factor of no relevance. The DO have to disclose that they are sellers. They do NOT have to disclose the amount. One is important, one is irrelevant and you just started a completely new discussion that isn't directly connected to what we are discussing here.

What does a store or the amount of profit have to do with it? Are you saying that people are confused and think that stores don't sell things?

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

Ultimately a client has to choose consultant + salesperson or a VAR, basically. The final price is what they should be looking at.

No, they don't. You hired a consultant to do that, or might have. NTG certainly brings VARs with us. If you need to hire a VAR yourself, that is totally by your own choice, and nothing whatsoever wrong with that. But it is never something you "have" to do.

And no, final price is NOT what they should be looking at. Not really. That's actually something that sales people say because it's a good way to get people to buy the wrong thing.

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

I think there is a bit of insinuation that a VAR cannot be trusted to make a fair recommendation, or that they only best way is for a consultant to recommend first. I just do not know if I believe that.

Correct, I rank it as the number one, most important rule of IT or even of business... never get advice from your vendor (or reseller.) Ever. They have a job, and it is to sell you what you don't need. That's what they are paid to do. Call it a sales commission, kick back, salary, affiliate, whatever. Paid for only one thing.

If your salesman at your VAR DOESN'T try to sell to you, then he's being unethical to his employer, right? So you trust him to be ethical to you but not the person who pays him? That's insane. He'd both act unethical to someone who pays him, give up his own money but do so to be nice to you for no reason while being unethical? That's totally crazy. Think about what you are saying that person will do.

Even psychopaths don't act against their own self interests AND unethically just for the fun of it. You are literally getting into the serial killer profile category with your assumptions. Has someone, somewhere done it? Maybe. But there are serial killers too. It's a totally illogical behaviour profile.

I can't stress enough, there is no IT lesson more important or fundamental than understanding the source of your advice.

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

I think there are a lot of VARs out there that truly love and believe in the product(s) they sell. For example, maybe a specialized backup place that only sells one brand of backup appliance.

Sure, that's often what makes them good sales people. They become passionate about the product and people feel that emotional connection and want to buy it too. It's an emotional sales plea and very effective. They become sales people because the vendor offers them money for sales and then, magically, they make lots of money selling something that they are passionate about... plus they get the incentive of the money.

So they have both the fanboy bias and the sales bias and the ethics bias. The best sales people.

But what does that have to do with anything?

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

Is it possible the client could have saved money or gotten a better solution? Sure. Shoot we all argue daily about everything. That's IT. But is it also possible that the client really could get a great fit for them at a fair and honest price? I believe that.

Sure, no one is arguing that. The problem is... that it is not impossible that what they were sold was a fair and honest price doesn't seem to matter. Why do you feel that it does?

You think it is okay to scam someone as long as the final end result to them isn't "impossibly bad"?

Let's put it another way... is it okay to sell you a lotto ticket that is fake and has no chance of winning since you had little chance of winning with a real one? If not, why not, since that is astronomically better than what you just described.

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

Consulting isn't something you should just give away. You have an investment in the knowledge you already possess. Access to that knowledge shouldn't generally be free.

If you are hired to do Consulting - design a plan or several for the business to choose from, the time spent doing those things should not be free.

But if some guy just walks in and says, hey build me a server and this is what I need it to do, well - in that case, like my friend above, you're now a VAR, weither you really sell anything or not. You're just going to put a solution together based on what he told you he wanted. You're not going to spend extra time making sure it's the right solution for him, why would you? there's no money in you doing that. Just spend as little time giving he what he wants.

Now this is where a sales person differs from an IT person. The sales person who sold my friend doesn't really know IT. He's just been told.. hey, if someone asks for VMWare, well then they also need a SAN. So my friend said he wanted virtualization and was sold a SAN at the same time.

So the question is who's to blame for this SAN being sold to my friend?

Now - you being an IT person, you know you don't need a SAN just because someone asked for one server to run one VM on, so you're solution would be a single server with local storage.

But just because you would do that doesn't mean the sales person was wrong to sell my friend that other solution - he sold what he knew.

Another example: Let's assume you know that RAID 5 is bad.
A customer comes to you and asks you to spec a system - you spec it out with RAID 10 SSD, because as I stated above, you know that RAID 5 is bad.

Is this OK?

For a VAR, I say yes it is. Because you weren't paid to find the best solution, you were instead paid to use the knowledge you had to put something together with little to no additional research.

But, if they had paid you to consult on the best design for that system, it might have shows that since SSDs don't suffer the same problems as Winchester drives that you could have saved that customer a bundle by using RAID 5 instead of RAID 10.

And this is the risk that a customer takes every day when they don't pay for consulting when building out a project.

This is all very well said. The fault in engaging a VAR for the wrong purpose lies with the person engaging them.

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@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?:

Or is this really all about semantics?

In that what @guyinpv is describing is a VAR, and there is nothing wrong with that?

I mean, do people not think someone is making money on the hardware? DO people think it all gets passed on for free? Like it costs DELL $250 to make the server, and that is what the client will pay? I think everyone understands markup and its place in business.

That is his issue yes. He is calling it black and white VAR is bad because sales. None of us have ever said that.

Well, and also that is has to be disclosed.

Which I am not 100% on board with yet.

I mean, when you go to a store, do they have to disclose their profit to you? You shop around, and pick the best price.

Ultimately a client has to choose consultant + salesperson or a VAR, basically. The final price is what they should be looking at.

I think there is a bit of insinuation that a VAR cannot be trusted to make a fair recommendation, or that they only best way is for a consultant to recommend first. I just do not know if I believe that.

I think there are a lot of VARs out there that truly love and believe in the product(s) they sell. For example, maybe a specialized backup place that only sells one brand of backup appliance.

Is it possible the client could have saved money or gotten a better solution? Sure. Shoot we all argue daily about everything. That's IT. But is it also possible that the client really could get a great fit for them at a fair and honest price? I believe that.

A fundamental part of consulting is being lost - when you CALL yourself a consultant - it's that you are being PAID to provide an unbiased opinion. When you walk into a best buy, you don't get an unbiased opinion, you don't get any opinion at all. You just see a price on the shelf. The kids who work there are definitely not experts at what they are selling, heck, they barely know more than the average consumer, if they even do. There advise is worthless, or at least only has value within the product lines of what they sell. But like the car sales person, assuming commissions, they want to sell you the highest commissions items in the place.

They normally have bad advice and the price is normally jacked. Best Buy is actually a VRR (Value Removed Reseller.) You actually lose value going there versus buying blindly online or from Walmart, for example.

We should rename these roles...

Consultant: Buyer's Agent / Customer Agent
VAR: Seller's Agent / Vendor Agent