Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?
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@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@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
If it is your job, you should be getting paid.
In order to get paid, you have to bill people.
In order to bill people you have to not do things for free.Agree 100%. I mean, a 5 minute discussion is OK, I think, but anything more needs billing.
NO one said sell them something they do not need. It was stated that they came to you for a server. So sell them the server they asked for, verify the basics, yes. You are a VAR, that is your job.
So if a 3 person non-profit church comes in and wants a $5K server. No questions asked you just sell it to them? Not me. Because I know they do not know what they need. They know the term server, but have no idea what it means, and what it is for. And how for 1/100th or less of the cost they can have a much better solution.
Who are you to say any of that is true? You would have to ask several questions, none that have anything to do with the server itself to come close to knowing that's true. So you start your relations as follows:
Customer walks in:
Customer : Hi I want to buy a server, here are the specs.
You: oh hold on a second, do you really need a server?
Customer: yes
You: are you sure? how do you know?
Customer: because I know what servers are and I know I need one.really, how could it have started much different from that? How did you learn they are a three person shop? You're questioning their server purchase without other information first just seems odd.
now if it went more like this:
Customer: Hey I'm a three person shop, we have 150 GB of data on my laptop that I want to share with the other two, I've heard I need a server, what do you think?
Now you can question them, but really, now you should also be on the clock.
Just look at typical SW posts. They go like the former and people get pretty upset if you start to question them. But on SW, there is a context that questioning is the purpose. In a VAR, there is not.
yeah when they get upset, we just ask - why are you here then? You already made your decision, why are you having problems now.. you already answered all of these questions before you purchased anything, didn't you?
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
So......
Being a VAR is fine, and ethical, and you can still help the customer. But the world knows the system, and thus the customer should know you are giving (potentially) non-impartial advice.
Absolutely. The VAR is totally ethical and important and knowing that they are a reseller tells a customer everything that they need to know about how to properly interact with them.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I can't help but think in the real world case that I AM doing some level of consulting, AND some level of VARing. They need me to research and discover their needs and help them navigate options, but at the same time I already know they are going to end up buying something like a NAS one way or the other.
This statement is a great example of how the system turns you into a VAR. How does "going to buy a NAS" ever come up as a common, expected result? And how does any single NAS vendor come up as the single, almost always the answer? You have two layers of "this isn't how consulting would work" at least here. Because if doing real consulting... NAS would be not uncommon, but anything but expected. And that a single NAS vendor would be the right answer would also not be very common. Maybe one is 50% of the time, maybe. But not even that, in my experience.
Only a VAR thinks in terms of "the answer is nearly always the same." The answer only looks that way when you approach it from a VAR perspective. A consultant wouldn't see the world in cookie cutters. It's the affiliate programs that create the illusion of one size fits all. And it is the VAR emotions that make it seem reasonable to think that the consulting is a farce and that the same basic answer always results.
If you approach this as a consultant without the sales angle, you quickly see those things evaporate. There is no means of having one main solution.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Sure I could purify myself and never use affiliates, no skin off my back, but the reasons for doing so are weak at best. I don't feel any particular obligations or drive to push one thing over anything else, you can claim this is impossible all you want but it's true for me and it's disclosed if ever used.
You say no skin off your back, but try to downplay the pretty significant issues that we've brought up. As long as you are disclosing, nothing wrong with that. But you are not acting like it's trivial, you keep acting like it is pretty dramatic. Which is exactly how we see it too, non-trivial. So that makes sense to us.
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What further discussion is there to this?
This was at 400 posts at 5pm when I left the office, it's now 11pm and what has been achieved? Has any progress been made?
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@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@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
If it is your job, you should be getting paid.
In order to get paid, you have to bill people.
In order to bill people you have to not do things for free.Agree 100%. I mean, a 5 minute discussion is OK, I think, but anything more needs billing.
NO one said sell them something they do not need. It was stated that they came to you for a server. So sell them the server they asked for, verify the basics, yes. You are a VAR, that is your job.
So if a 3 person non-profit church comes in and wants a $5K server. No questions asked you just sell it to them? Not me. Because I know they do not know what they need. They know the term server, but have no idea what it means, and what it is for. And how for 1/100th or less of the cost they can have a much better solution.
Who are you to say any of that is true? You would have to ask several questions, none that have anything to do with the server itself to come close to knowing that's true. So you start your relations as follows:
Customer walks in:
Customer : Hi I want to buy a server, here are the specs.
You: oh hold on a second, do you really need a server?
Customer: yes
You: are you sure? how do you know?
Customer: because I know what servers are and I know I need one.really, how could it have started much different from that? How did you learn they are a three person shop? You're questioning their server purchase without other information first just seems odd.
now if it went more like this:
Customer: Hey I'm a three person shop, we have 150 GB of data on my laptop that I want to share with the other two, I've heard I need a server, what do you think?
Now you can question them, but really, now you should also be on the clock.
Just look at typical SW posts. They go like the former and people get pretty upset if you start to question them. But on SW, there is a context that questioning is the purpose. In a VAR, there is not.
yeah when they get upset, we just ask - why are you here then? You already made your decision, why are you having problems now.. you already answered all of these questions before you purchased anything, didn't you?
Right, often they are hoping that the common social convention of never upsetting the vendors, resellers and IT people not doing their jobs will work in their favour so that they can just get a bunch of pats on the back or something. Then when it turns out that people actually are questioning their decision and looking much deeper than they did they get upset and what they thought was going to be a circle jerk of unmitigated support turns into a shame fest of "didn't you even put thought into this huge project before committing to it and why are you asking us after it is too late instead of yesterday before you made the decision".
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
If a VAR is a salesman who tries to sell as much as possible, oversell, and pushes only their things, but I do none of that, how can I still be a VAR? You can't define a VAR as a car salesman, then start applying the term to people who are not car salesman.
A VAR is ANYONE that sells while providing some additional amount of advice or insight.
If you sell, you are a reseller (sell = resell, affiliate, kickback, anything involving money from the vendor.)
If you add services to it, you are a VAR.
Car salesmen are VARs because they normally offer maintenance services and such. They are more VAR than most IT VARs, actually.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I can't help but think in the real world case that I AM doing some level of consulting, AND some level of VARing. They need me to research and discover their needs and help them navigate options, but at the same time I already know they are going to end up buying something like a NAS one way or the other.
Not quite. What you are doing is some level of selling with some amount of consulting. Those combined elevate your sales to a VAR. You can't be a VAR without the added services. So yes, you are mixing two things, but the mix is what makes you a VAR. That's why VAR is the perfect term and exactly for what you are describing.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
What further discussion is there to this?
This was at 400 posts at 5pm when I left the office, it's now 11pm and what has been achieved? Has any progress been made?
No idea, I'm not up to post 400 yet.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Again, I only reject the label of VAR because it keeps being defined as "pushy car salesman whose only job is sell as much as possible but also be smart about how products work". Since this doesn't describe me, I can't call myself that. My job is not to sell as much as possible, my job is to accomplish the goals needed by the client. So what then? Maybe I'm just a bad VAR? I don't know.
But no one is defining it that way. Maybe in your mind that is what VAR means, but not to anyone else. VAR means you do sales and add services. No one has suggested anything different than that except for you. The definition of VAR is extremely clear and well understood. It's exactly what you describe as wanting to do, exactly. It's also exactly what most car dealers do, they do sales and they add services (repair, cleaning, tune ups, check ups, parts replacement, etc.)
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
People who call me are always some mix of "I want that" and "can you help me make the right decision though". It's never pure consulting, or pure VAR. They never call and say "I need precisely a Synology with 4 bays using WD Reds of 3TB with RAID10 partitioned in 4 parts of these exact sizes". Instead they say something like "I want some shared storage we can all use, I've heard of Synology, Staples has a Buffalo on sale, Costco has a ReadyNAS, I don't know how much storage I need, can you help me?"
Absolutely, that's why you are a VAR, not a reseller. You say "mix of consulting and VAR", but that's part of the confusion. You mean to say "mix of consulting and reseller." When you mix reseller with something, like you describe here, your base reseller turns into a VAR. You are exactly describing a VAR scenario. You help with sizing, you help make sure that the desired solution is big enough, fast enough, etc. But at the end of the day, they are going to get what they came in to buy. You aren't kind of a VAR, short of CDW you are the stereotypical VAR. As VAR as VAR can be.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Not only that but but these definitions cannot be applied universally. They can only be applied on a client-by-client basis. If I disclose to a client that they can use my partner link and I'll get a bonus for their signup and they are ok with it (they always are) then that is one situation. But my very next job at 4pm might be a person who doesn't need anything for which I'm affiliated, so no sales pressure, so it's not VAR?
No, always a VAR because the incentive is always there. Not everyone that walks into a deal buys a car, but the salesman is still a salesman even when he doesn't make a sale.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Everything I do is based on client needs, what are they wanting from me? So it seems quite unfair to universally stamp me as a VAR when I may not be doing that with any given client. Salesman at CDW or the car dealership work sales with everybody, all day. They are VAR 100%. I don't work "for" anybody in the same sense, each client is different.
VAR is what you are if you do VAR work. Do you sell, yes? Do you have value add? Yes. Even if sometimes you only sell, you don't stop being a VAR and turn into only a reseller. And just because sometimes you only value add doesn't mean that you stop being a reseller. A VAR is the meeting point of the two things, and once a VAR, you remain a VAR until you stop doing one of the two things.
CDW might be extreme in their sales approach. But most VARs are not like that and do a lot of things that don't involve sales. I'd say that 90% of VARs do non-sales work about 40% of the time or more. That's expected.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Why would it have to be disclosed?
A store doesn't disclose profit.
You don't know what your Happy Meal cost McDonald's to produce.
What does that have to do with disclosing that you do sales? I see no connection.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
It is correct, we don't know each other, you don't really "know" the consultant you just hired. So do you ask them before any work is done, "if you are on commissions or use affiliates, I can't work with you?"
It's good to ask, but it is required that they tell whether someone asks or not in a situation where it applies.
For example, what if I resold Netgear equipment. I do consulting and I recommend Dell equipment. I need not disclose that I had a bias away from Dell. I probably should, but I don't have to. But if I consult and recommend Netgear, I must disclose that I'm getting paid to make that recommendation. I can explain why I'm not overly biased by that, but I must tell them, every time.
Disclaimer: I do NOT sell Netgear. It's an example.
But, a consultant, you'd expect to be looking at the wide range of everything.
A VAR (that I trust), I'd expect to have a great knowledge of things they support for whatever reason (probably money) and always recommend those things.
Sure, which is why you never go to a VAR for advice, only for final oversight of configurations, prices, logistics, etc.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
You have no guarantee you'll ever see that affiliate fee come pay day, so how much is it really affecting your consulting?
Some... and that is all that matters.
In reality, customers use those links or whatever almost always, even if you don't know which customer is the one that will make you the money, you know that X percentage will. So the money flow is there.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Wouldn't that be a VAR?
Correct and correct. People who are compensated through sales are salespeople. Whether they make sales by buying you a drink, showing some cleavage, knowing their product, having a low price, being in the right place at the right time or adding in some incentivized advice... they are sales people.
The assumption here is that the commission is their SOLE income, commissioned sales is not the sole income of someone who occasionally offers affiliate links. The pressure to upsell/oversell push the highest priced stuff only makes sense when the commission if the main source of income.
No, you keep saying this and we keep correcting it. The assumption is that it is some of their income. No one but you is assuming anything more than that.
No one cares about "all" the money, we care about "any" of the money.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
But I don't see myself as the "reseller" part. I don't resell, I just throw out a link and tell them this is my partner link, if you want to give an extra tip. No pressure.
This is how I read this....
I don't see myself as a reseller. I just resell.
Um... what?
I read the term "resell" as that I buy the product myself and resell it to the customer, perhaps with markup. Or that I use white-label products and rebrand it, resell, with markup.
I don't see how an affiliate link is "reselling".
It just is.
Reselling is used to mean: "Any compensation for moving a product."
I know that it isn't strict reselling and is buying and then selling again, but affiliates is the primary form of reselling in the IT industry. It's far from all, but it's gotta be over 50%. Anytime anyone in IT uses the term reseller or VAR, what you call affiliate is what they mean to include, always. Everyone uses it this way. Because that's how the majority of official partner "resellers" are compensated. It's just a means of handling the reseller system.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I don't see any wiggle room for "consulting + implementing" as this breaks the absolute unbias rule, thus it's not consulting, just VAR and biased opinions. Therefore, either someone is consulting, or they are a VAR, with no grey areas.
Not a VAR since there is no reselling involved.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
What option is there for them to be respectable, quality, service providers?
Just don't do the reselling portion
Like you said, it's trivial money, no skin off your back. So just skip it, problem solved.If you want to go the complex route, disclose everything. But you are getting into big company problems, not one man shop problems. You are trying to wear a lot of hats.
NTG does this by being bigger, having resources, lots of contacts and an array of VARs and vendors with which we have strong relationship and influence, but which we do not sell, allows us to broker relationships, leverage influence, keep an eye on interfaces and provide all of the value of going to a one stop shop, while not having the conflict of interest that comes from being the company doing the sales.
