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?:
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
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.
Well yes, trivial. Like maybe the tune of $400 in the last few years? Thus I've only thought of it as bonus money, pocket money, lunch money, coffee money. Not something that changes my entire business model, focus, and how I go about working for people.
Well, but define trivial. How much were you paid for that specific advice during the same period? For example...
If you are paid to consult on a project and one piece of that project is picking a cloud host. How many minutes did you bill for that decision versus how much were you compensated by Vultr?
So for example, did you spend one minute, ten minutes, one hour, ten hours determining the best host for the client in question? Pretty typically with a client I'll spent 20 minutes to an hour on that kind of decision. And I don't get any affiliate money for doing so. So if I make $20 or $200 on that decision, I'm paid to dig into it.
But if you spend under, say, thirty minutes on that one aspect of decision making, the money from Vultr is a non-trivial percentage of the whole. It's trivial in absolute terms ($5 or $10) but it is non-trivial in relative terms (20%, maybe 50% of the pay for that one decision.)
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@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
That situation you're talking about might be a one off, so they MIGHT need that. But most SMBs don't. Most SMBs aren't based in tech, they need email, some data storage for spreadsheets/documents, etc and a CRM. Those things don't require the services of AWS or Azure in most cases.
You can't look at a single case and suddenly assume that's the norm.Of course.
Company I work for still doesn't have CRM. I've never been able to figure out how to properly integrate it to all our relevant services. In the end, CRM would just mean a ton of manual labor updating records with no real automation.
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@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
If you are paid to consult on a project and one piece of that project is picking a cloud host. How many minutes did you bill for that decision versus how much were you compensated by Vultr?
To be fair, I've never been paid to be a pure consultant. If it's understood what that means and that's what the client is after, it changes the whole conversation. If a consultant is NOT the implementer, then commissions and affiliates don't mean anything anyway.
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
It's trivial in absolute terms ($5 or $10) but it is non-trivial in relative terms (20%, maybe 50% of the pay for that one decision.)
Only the absolute matters to me. $10 isn't much. $10,000 sounds like real money. If somebody sends me an email out of the blue "hey who is good webhost for a blog?" then out will pop my affiliate link, I have no problem with it.
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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?:
If you are paid to consult on a project and one piece of that project is picking a cloud host. How many minutes did you bill for that decision versus how much were you compensated by Vultr?
To be fair, I've never been paid to be a pure consultant. If it's understood what that means and that's what the client is after, it changes the whole conversation. If a consultant is NOT the implementer, then commissions and affiliates don't mean anything anyway.
Implementation has nothing to do with procurement which is what that other stuff is.
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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?:
If you are paid to consult on a project and one piece of that project is picking a cloud host. How many minutes did you bill for that decision versus how much were you compensated by Vultr?
To be fair, I've never been paid to be a pure consultant. If it's understood what that means and that's what the client is after, it changes the whole conversation. If a consultant is NOT the implementer, then commissions and affiliates don't mean anything anyway.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Implementation is a standard part of consulting. The attempt to totally separate them isn't useful here and is just cloudying the waters.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Only the absolute matters to me.
I thought only Sith cared about absolutes
Why does only the absolute matter to you? If that's true, then why are you doing the work since the customer isn't paying enough for the effort if you only deal in absolutes. The payment from the customer is only useful when it is relative. If the customer only pays $10, is that enough to justify your totally neutral opinion and makes it totally worth never considering the vendor's money? It doesn't appear to be enough.
I don't think that anyone can say that they only look at the absolute. It's still 50% of the money. What makes the absolute of value or not of value is the relative.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
$10,000 sounds like real money.
I will only believe this if you didn't do this kind of consulting. But if you are consulting on what cloud provider to use and/or willing to even look at an affiliate program, you definitely care about the $5 or the $10. We all do, that's how we make our money, little bits add up. But you can't say that you don't care about the relative when the relative is what drives your desires for both sides here, the consulting AND the affiliate.
Saying that only $10K sounds like real money to you can't be the case.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
If somebody sends me an email out of the blue "hey who is good webhost for a blog?" then out will pop my affiliate link, I have no problem with it.
Sure, because they are not paying you to be a consultant and you get to earn your money as a VAR. Nothing wrong with that. Someone not paying for advice can only expect sales as a result.
The problem is just getting you to be happy with what the name of doing sales means... that you are a VAR. Actually, in that case, you are not a VAR, just a reseller.
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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?:
If somebody sends me an email out of the blue "hey who is good webhost for a blog?" then out will pop my affiliate link, I have no problem with it.
Sure, because they are not paying you to be a consultant and you get to earn your money as a VAR. Nothing wrong with that. Someone not paying for advice can only expect sales as a result.
The problem is just getting you to be happy with what the name of doing sales means... that you are a VAR. Actually, in that case, you are not a VAR, just a reseller.
Isn't he also giving advice?
Or rather, making money from giving his advice (recommendation)?
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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?:
If somebody sends me an email out of the blue "hey who is good webhost for a blog?" then out will pop my affiliate link, I have no problem with it.
Sure, because they are not paying you to be a consultant and you get to earn your money as a VAR. Nothing wrong with that. Someone not paying for advice can only expect sales as a result.
The problem is just getting you to be happy with what the name of doing sales means... that you are a VAR. Actually, in that case, you are not a VAR, just a reseller.
Isn't he also giving advice?
Or rather, making money from giving his advice (recommendation)?
Sure, advice in a sales capacity. Advice representing the vendor's interest, not the customer's. If you consider sales to be advice, then yes. If you are consider advice to be an evaluation of the customer's need with absolutely no influence from a vendor, then now. We call that sales once a vendor has influence monetarily. ANd in this case, it's the only influence. (Where it is just an email for a name and a sales response with the link.)
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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?:
If somebody sends me an email out of the blue "hey who is good webhost for a blog?" then out will pop my affiliate link, I have no problem with it.
Sure, because they are not paying you to be a consultant and you get to earn your money as a VAR. Nothing wrong with that. Someone not paying for advice can only expect sales as a result.
The problem is just getting you to be happy with what the name of doing sales means... that you are a VAR. Actually, in that case, you are not a VAR, just a reseller.
Isn't he also giving advice?
Or rather, making money from giving his advice (recommendation)?
in that case that's like saying the guy at Best Buy is giving advice.
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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?:
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
If somebody sends me an email out of the blue "hey who is good webhost for a blog?" then out will pop my affiliate link, I have no problem with it.
Sure, because they are not paying you to be a consultant and you get to earn your money as a VAR. Nothing wrong with that. Someone not paying for advice can only expect sales as a result.
The problem is just getting you to be happy with what the name of doing sales means... that you are a VAR. Actually, in that case, you are not a VAR, just a reseller.
Isn't he also giving advice?
Or rather, making money from giving his advice (recommendation)?
in that case that's like saying the guy at Best Buy is giving advice.
Which they do, they advise you to buy whatever makes them commission or whatever they are told to sell. That's advice, but not good advice. BB are vendor reps, not customer reps.
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This is different from this thread, but I still think that I can trust someone who gets financially rewarded.
For example, I would trust clicking the ads here on ML. Assuming ML is not out to get me.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
This is different from this thread, but I still think that I can trust someone who gets financially rewarded.
For example, I would trust clicking the ads here on ML. Assuming ML is not out to get me.
ML IS out to get you, as much as any sales person. ML is paid to show you advertising. The difference is, ML never pretends that it is giving you advice. They are just ads, period. They aren't recommended, they aren't advised. They are just shown. There is no conflict of interest because ML is not a customer representative.
So you CAN trust that the ads are just ads, not advice. Trust is a really weird term to use in this situation. Like you can trust your local drug pusher to try to sell you drugs. Of course you can trust him, that's how he makes his money, selling drugs.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
This is different from this thread, but I still think that I can trust someone who gets financially rewarded.
For example, I would trust clicking the ads here on ML. Assuming ML is not out to get me.
Why? Why do you trust the ads here more than the stuff on the shelf at BB?
I would say I would only trust the ads at ML slightly more because I know the community. But only barely. What I do trust is the interaction between the vendors who participate in the threads themselves, that has nothing to do with the ads.
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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?:
This is different from this thread, but I still think that I can trust someone who gets financially rewarded.
For example, I would trust clicking the ads here on ML. Assuming ML is not out to get me.
Why? Why do you trust the ads here more than the stuff on the shelf at BB?
I would say I would only trust the ads at ML slightly more because I know the community. But only barely. What I do trust is the interaction between the vendors who participate in the threads themselves, that has nothing to do with the ads.
I totally trust the ads... to be ads. They are exactly what they come across as. I can vouch for them, as I physically place them there. None are malware, if that is what you are concerned about. ML ensures this my hosting plain images, not applications that look like images, and linking to sensible URLs.
I find the idea of trust very odd here. Best Buy, I mostly trust to have the real products on the shelves and not Chinese knock offs and stuff like that. Is that what people mean by trust?
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I trust that the community I trust would never knowingly point me in a direction that would harm me.
Perhaps I am too trusting.
This is CLEARLY where my issue with all of this is. (Not the whole thread, just my part of it.)
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@Dashrender said
I would say I would only trust the ads at ML slightly more because I know the community. But only barely. What I do trust is the interaction between the vendors who participate in the threads themselves, that has nothing to do with the ads.
What are you "trusting" in this case?
Sounds like that's a pretty dangerous road to go down.
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@scottalanmiller said
I find the idea of trust very odd here. Best Buy, I mostly trust to have the real products on the shelves and not Chinese knock offs and stuff like that. Is that what people mean by trust?
I trust that if I go to my doctor, and they have an ad for XYZ on the wall, that it isn't going to kill me if I take it.
Is there more than one XYZ? Sure. Is it possible XYZ could be bad for me? Sure.
But if I am looking for something like XYZ and my doctor is recommending it, I think it's pretty safe to trust.
That's what I mean.
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@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I have no idea what you are talking about. Implementation is a standard part of consulting. The attempt to totally separate them isn't useful here and is just cloudying the waters.
What? Seems like this is exactly what we've been going around about. The pure consultant only provides "recommendations" about what to do, and wouldn't normally be involved in the actual implementation in order to avoid all bias.
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I thought only Sith cared about absolutes
The path to the dark side is a slippery one.
Arguments lead to fear, fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I don't think that anyone can say that they only look at the absolute.
Hello. My name is Zack.
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Saying that only $10K sounds like real money to you can't be the case.
Unless affiliate income is not the business model and thus not required to stay afloat.
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
The problem is just getting you to be happy with what the name of doing sales means... that you are a VAR. Actually, in that case, you are not a VAR, just a reseller.
My problem is apply VAR to my entire life and business after such a recommendation.
To the point, that specific job was a VAR role. But it could very well be 20 minutes later I take a consulting job where I apply a totally different tactic and role that is not a VAR type.
