Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?
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Been another year and a half, anything worth updating?
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Little late to this thread, but some of the businesses that seem to do well in my area (population 75k) are security systems/home automation and phone systems.
One of the main guys here who does security systems does them for individual homes and well as school systems or other businesses. Many of these are tied into alarm systems and have a residual revenue. Additionally, as home automation is growing, he's branched into setting up full systems for people. He stays busy and does very well.
I know @scottalanmiller @JaredBusch do FreePBX phone systems and that in reality they can be deployed/managed from anywhere, but in the South, people still want to know who they're dealing with and know that if they call Johnny, he can be on-site if necessary. EVERY business needs (wants) phones, and therefore if you can get really good at a phone system that will save businesses money but can also create some residual income for yourself, that could be another option.
The primary phone systems company in my area deploys Samsung systems. I've thought very seriously about trying to get into this business because I know a FreePBX or similar offering would likely save these people a good amount of money and would be a semi-easy sell compared to their current offerings. My phone system knowledge is limited however and I'm trying to grow it as I get time.
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Winning the lottery, liquidize your assets, mega millions really works!
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@zachary715 said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I know @scottalanmiller @JaredBusch do FreePBX phone systems and that in reality they can be deployed/managed from anywhere, but in the South, people still want to know who they're dealing with and know that if they call Johnny, he can be on-site if necessary.
Just a long winded way of saying the south isn't business savvy. In reality, most companies aren't savvy and cater to their own emotional desires and ignore business benefits. That's universal and not unique to the south. The south just isn't exempt from it.
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I haven't updated this in a while, this is a fat thread!
I've stuck with freelancing so far, got some good regular clients, working much less in my day job, hopefully will be leaving some time this year for good.
Also, it appears since my last post, I had another baby, lol. This complicates things even more. But also, I noticed after having a 3rd kid, the family needs me as much as the day job does. So many times I have to come home, illnesses, hospital visits, whatever. Working from home would be a huge plus at this point in my life. I need to be more available and set my own schedule more.
The challenging part now is organizing my little business, it's still just me doing everything, and this is already hurting as it pertains to savings and record keeping and taxes and all the junk I have to do that is unpaid time. I know, there are personal assistants that can do this stuff, but I have no extra cash for paying anybody anything yet, not even a tax man. We got hit with over $3000 in taxes due. On one hand this is good cause it shows I had a lot more freelance income this year, but I never tried to calculate for any pretax payments or whatever. There is SO much stuff to keep track of and balance and prepare for.
What I have to do is reverse engineer our income needs and then figure out how to make that. At this point, if I'm charging, say, $65/hr for freelance work, I would have to be billing 6 or 7 hours each weekday to get the income where it needs to be. But I find this goal not very tenable. Freelancing is really hit and miss as far as when there is work to do, and I can only attempt balancing so many active clients.
With 10 clients there can still be two weeks with nothing to do. But if 2 clients have heavy projects and tight deadlines, I'm suddenly swamped. It's very stressful sometimes, there is really no way to just have a nice constant flow of work for a clean 6 hours of billable daily time. Everything is random.Also, this income will top out eventually. I mean, even if I can bill $65/hr and get 8 hour days, this limits the top end of my income, so I have to scale somehow. I can charge more, which might make finding clients harder. Or I can try to find some flat rate work at much higher amounts. A single $10k job that takes me a month is nice, but can I get one of those a month consistently? Doubtful.
A huge job for $20-$30k without a tight deadline is something I can trickle out over 6 months or the whole year, but where would I find that work if I'm not at the top of my field? These types of clients aren't typically looking for small town freelancers. That isn't really my market.
So basically my challenges are:
- Consistent clients/work and/or finding large cost jobs that even out my income over time.
- Streamline and make very efficient the record keeping and billing/taxes/receipts crap that wastes my time.
- Expand marketing to find clients from more networks (currently still on Upwork and word-of-mouth only). I'd like clients to find me and reach out to me, versus me spending lots of time trying to find them and sending proposals that take a lot of time to write.
- Figure out how to scale income to get past natural limits of hourly-labor work.
- Still need to quit the day job. It's still a surprisingly stressful and big decision when I've got 4 people depending on me. If I leave that job, I would not be able to find another in this town with decent wages in any decent amount of time, we'd be screwed. I have to make freelancing work, period! But on the other hand, this last billing cycle I only made from them about $330 a week, which is like nothing for having to show up there three times in those weeks.
- Education is always on the list. I have like 200 books on subjects relating to my craft and skills and business and marketing and all things between. Plus I'm registered in about 30 online courses with similar subjects from programming to web design to graphics and marketing and business management. Nobody pays me to take my course and read, so they don't get high priority. Making money always gets priority, and everything else starts falling apart.
So goes the journey!
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Whoa! Sudden update appears!
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Also, it appears since my last post, I had another baby, lol.
You should look into that and verify for sure, LMAO.
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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?:
Also, it appears since my last post, I had another baby, lol.
You should look into that and verify for sure, LMAO.
Confirmed. I wake up every day with it scratching my face off and biting me.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
$65/hr
Just no.
The billed rate for our part time (primarily helpdesk) person at the lowest rate for any client is $80-$85. Forget their exact rate.
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@jaredbusch said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
$65/hr
Just no.
The billed rate for our part time (primarily helpdesk) person at the lowest rate for any client is $80-$85. Forget their exact rate.
Help for what?
There is a difference between charging $80/hr for 20 minute calls, versus $65/hr working 4 to 7 hours strait.
There are certainly web devs that charge up to $100/hr. And programmers are typically $80 to $200/hr depending on the languages and project.
An agency I work for does charge $100/hr but they get their work by being seen as an agency. So as a simple freelancer, I either need to be a household name in web dev, top of my game, or appear bigger than I am, or something else.
Keep in mind that in the web dev space, I compete with 3rd world countries who charge $10/hr and claim to do all the same stuff.Heck I'm not saying I'm not worth more. I only started freelancing 2 years ago and started at $40/hr, so I do plan on getting higher, but hourly rates do top out eventually. I have to scale in other ways too. And small towns just don't charge as much as "big city" agencies and corporations.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
There is a difference between charging $80/hr for 20 minute calls, versus $65/hr working 4 to 7 hours strait.
Actually no.
And she is on site 4-6 a day 2 times a week plus other work form home time.
On average we bill one client 15-20 per week for her work.
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@jaredbusch said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
There is a difference between charging $80/hr for 20 minute calls, versus $65/hr working 4 to 7 hours strait.
Actually no.
And she is on site 4-6 a day 2 times a week plus other work form home time.
On average we bill one client 15-20 per week for her work.
For a help desk person? I think I'm missing the bigger picture here. You're talking about MSP and business management of technology right?
For me, at least until I run in bigger circles, my clients tend to be mom-n-pop sites who cringe at a new feature costing more than $100.
That's part of the problem, I need to get a foothold into networks with bigger ticket clients. People who have custom sites that need unique and specialized features.
Any time I run into work and it's just some person with a goofy Wordpress site, they don't have $80/hr for 15 hours weekly. That's for sure!
But to the point. Are you saying you wouldn't bat an eye at hiring a developer to work on a website for $80/hr? And do you realize that general developers can be found on Craigslist for $10/hr? You can definitely penny-pinch in this game if you wanted!
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
There are certainly web devs that charge up to $100/hr. And programmers are typically $80 to $200/hr depending on the languages and project.
These are often rates broken down for salaries. When consulting, you can normally be way higher than salary rates. $200/hr would be amazing for a developer on salary, of course. But when you consider that salaried people have insurance, taxes, etc. getting $200 on a 1099 is only "so" good vs. a salaried $250K salary with vacation and benefits on W2.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
And do you realize that general developers can be found on Craigslist for $10/hr? You can definitely penny-pinch in this game if you wanted!
You really can't. Someone listing themselves as a developer and being one isn't the same. I work in development (not as a developer) and hiring at $100K salary in low cost areas is a struggle. Real developers with skills and some experience are in super high demand.
Logically, no one is offering $10/hr on Craigslist when there are $100K positions with benefits that can't even get reasonable interviews. Development is definitely anything but a penny pinching game.
Sure, developers struggle to compete with offshore work. But to get any quality offshore work you can't pay by the hour, you are hiring for years on salary. You can get lower hourly rates that way, but you can't do it hour to hour.
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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?:
And do you realize that general developers can be found on Craigslist for $10/hr? You can definitely penny-pinch in this game if you wanted!
You really can't. Someone listing themselves as a developer and being one isn't the same. I work in development (not as a developer) and hiring at $100K salary in low cost areas is a struggle. Real developers with skills and some experience are in super high demand.
Logically, no one is offering $10/hr on Craigslist when there are $100K positions with benefits that can't even get reasonable interviews. Development is definitely anything but a penny pinching game.
Sure, developers struggle to compete with offshore work. But to get any quality offshore work you can't pay by the hour, you are hiring for years on salary. You can get lower hourly rates that way, but you can't do it hour to hour.
The key here is to find the people not looking at the 10/hr people on Craigslist. Sure there are SMBs that do that - and likely end up spending tons more paying someone else down the road to fix what the cheap people broke/couldn't do - but you don't want to deal with those customer anyway.
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@dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
but you don't want to deal with those customer anyway.
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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?:
And do you realize that general developers can be found on Craigslist for $10/hr? You can definitely penny-pinch in this game if you wanted!
You really can't. Someone listing themselves as a developer and being one isn't the same. I work in development (not as a developer) and hiring at $100K salary in low cost areas is a struggle. Real developers with skills and some experience are in super high demand.
Logically, no one is offering $10/hr on Craigslist when there are $100K positions with benefits that can't even get reasonable interviews. Development is definitely anything but a penny pinching game.
Sure, developers struggle to compete with offshore work. But to get any quality offshore work you can't pay by the hour, you are hiring for years on salary. You can get lower hourly rates that way, but you can't do it hour to hour.
I would probably kill both my neighbors for a chance at one of these hard-to-get-interviews-positions.
Maybe you're talking about tech towns, Silicon Valley, NY, L.A., but in small town USA Bill Gates couldn't get a job here for more than $30/hr.
I do love where I live and want to work remotely but I guess it's like I said, I'm just not rubbing shoulders with the kinds of people who fill these sorts of positions. But then again I'm not a top tier programmer, I'm a web dev, I know a couple languages but I couldn't program a new MS Windows if you follow.
Where I live with a family of 5, take home pay of anything near $100k would be quite comfortable. And here I am pannicky over leaving my job for 3 or 4 hundred a week. It's pathetic.
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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?:
And do you realize that general developers can be found on Craigslist for $10/hr? You can definitely penny-pinch in this game if you wanted!
You really can't. Someone listing themselves as a developer and being one isn't the same. I work in development (not as a developer) and hiring at $100K salary in low cost areas is a struggle. Real developers with skills and some experience are in super high demand.
Logically, no one is offering $10/hr on Craigslist when there are $100K positions with benefits that can't even get reasonable interviews. Development is definitely anything but a penny pinching game.
Sure, developers struggle to compete with offshore work. But to get any quality offshore work you can't pay by the hour, you are hiring for years on salary. You can get lower hourly rates that way, but you can't do it hour to hour.
I would probably kill both my neighbors for a chance at one of these hard-to-get-interviews-positions.
Maybe you're talking about tech towns, Silicon Valley, NY, L.A., but in small town USA Bill Gates couldn't get a job here for more than $30/hr.
No, talking small (well medium) sized town Georgia for the specific example I dealt with this week.
I know rural NC having the same price range issues.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I'm a web dev, I know a couple languages but I couldn't program a new MS Windows if you follow.
Not sure what Web Dev means here. Most web devs are full stackers and are near the highest pay ranges. Windows desktop apps are the bottom of the barrel in price, that's legacy work that doesn't attract good companies or programmers. It's needed some times, not knocking it as a thing, just it's not where the big money goes.
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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?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
And do you realize that general developers can be found on Craigslist for $10/hr? You can definitely penny-pinch in this game if you wanted!
You really can't. Someone listing themselves as a developer and being one isn't the same. I work in development (not as a developer) and hiring at $100K salary in low cost areas is a struggle. Real developers with skills and some experience are in super high demand.
Logically, no one is offering $10/hr on Craigslist when there are $100K positions with benefits that can't even get reasonable interviews. Development is definitely anything but a penny pinching game.
Sure, developers struggle to compete with offshore work. But to get any quality offshore work you can't pay by the hour, you are hiring for years on salary. You can get lower hourly rates that way, but you can't do it hour to hour.
The key here is to find the people not looking at the 10/hr people on Craigslist. Sure there are SMBs that do that - and likely end up spending tons more paying someone else down the road to fix what the cheap people broke/couldn't do - but you don't want to deal with those customer anyway.
Yup, people who are looking there aren't really looking for anything serious. And those aren't recurring. It's a one shot deal for basically no money. Those customers aren't getting any real work done, either.
