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?:
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.
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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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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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?:
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?
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@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?
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@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.
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@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.
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@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?
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@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.
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@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.
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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?:
@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 -
@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
But why is it inconceivable that a VAR could also recommend the best solution?
No one said that it is. No one suggested this, either. But the important question is: why do you think that it matters that this is possible?
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
In that situation, I'd recommend SSDs in a RAID5. Just like how I built my own systems. Why would I do anything I knew wasn't the best?
Because there is no universal best option for anything in IT. There are some unthinkably bad things that you never do, but there is nothing that you always do.
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@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.
Or if you need a server. Or what your needs are.
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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?:
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.
No one ever said that a company can't get a great product at an honest price from a VAR - we've said it time and time again, VARs are not unethical. We say this because we know that VARs have one job - to sell you a product/service at the highest price they possibly can. And you as someone buying from a VAR should know that that is what a VARs job is. And as long as you know that, which granted is mostly on you, the buyer, to know. Not the VAR to expressly advertise.
Right, all the VAR has to let you know is that they are a reseller, affiliate, or whatever. That's it. The rest is obvious and at the customer's discretion.
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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?:
@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.
I'll expand upon that.
If you know exactly what you need in a server - then a VAR can help make sure you don't forget any parts that make it work.
But if you only know you have a problem, and aren't sure what server will solve that problem, you don't go ask a VAR, because a VAR will sell you the biggest baddest thing they can get away with. Now you personally might not do that, but just looking at SW and you will see that happens ALL the time!.
And a VAR works for the compatibility piece because they are accountable for it. If the parts don't work, you don't owe them money. They need it to work or they lose money. They need to know what they can get delivered, or they don't get paid. VARs are governed by money and are extremely simple and obvious to work with because there isn't any hidden agenda.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
His customers come to HIM and say "I want a server". They trust him to pick the best solution for them.
That's a foolish notion to have in a situation where they didn't trust him to tell them if they needed a server at all.
