Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?
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To be fair here, nobody has ever hired me for pure consulting. I have a feeling this is only something larger companies do who are facing huge budget, big ticket items and don't want to be screwed. Projects which may span pages and pages of requirements and require a ton of business intelligence and research.
This leaves me with only one conclusion to all this mess.
On one side you have pure, unadulterated "consulting" which must be absolutely objective and bias free in every way possible. Also, where the consultant or consulting company will not be implementing the solution or selling/reselling/linking to the products.
On the other side, is EVERYTHING else, which must needs be called VAR since they are no longer consulting, but are being paid to implement solutions and fix problems.
Am I on track here? Consulting, and VAR are the only two options? Perhaps "solutions provider" could be thrown in as a synonym?
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.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
To be fair here, nobody has ever hired me for pure consulting. I have a feeling this is only something larger companies do who are facing huge budget, big ticket items and don't want to be screwed.
Nope, we get it from small companies all of the time.
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We have small companies that hire NTG for consulting.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
On one side you have pure, unadulterated "consulting" which must be absolutely objective and bias free in every way possible. Also, where the consultant or consulting company will not be implementing the solution or selling/reselling/linking to the products.
Implementation is part of consulting in most cases. There IS a conflict of interests, but it is not the same as the reselling one because it is a preselected vendor scenario. There is nothing to hide, there is no means of hiding it.
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Those same companies also hire us to implement about 50% of the time. This does not include selling them anything. We always lay out choices for them this is the one we like and here's why. This is a lesser option and this is our least favorite option. They pick they purchase we install/migrate etc.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Am I on track here? Consulting, and VAR are the only two options? Perhaps "solutions provider" could be thrown in as a synonym?
We actually rarely use consulting as a term. We call ourselves an ITSP. We outsource all the IT functions... which are consulting and implementation.
That's actually a key differentiation... what does an internal IT person do? They tell the business what is needed and they implement it, right? Does the internal IT staff also resell to the company that they work for? Do they use affiliate programs? No, they do not. So it makes for a pretty obvious line as to what is the "IT" tech functions and what is the reseller/VAR functions.
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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...
Many companies hire consultants ONLY for the implementation piece. There is plenty of wiggle room because it is all the same IT function.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
On the other side, is EVERYTHING else, which must needs be called VAR since they are no longer consulting, but are being paid to implement solutions and fix problems.
There is no good term for the "everything else" piece when sales is included. And it is the majority of the market. IT suffers from this. The average company like this, by far, is horrible. They don't really consult, they are outright scams and they have destroyed the IT industry. There are some that are good, but I'm not sure that I've ever met one. We spend our careers cleaning up after them. The "average" and "majority" positions in this realm are not good places.
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There are two base functions in discussion. IT and sales. They are easy to separate because we all know what IT does. And we all know what sales does. It's paying IT folks via sales channels that makes things complex.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I'm wondering how does this conversation even happen? Where is this information disclosed? How is it stated and yet still appease doubts about bias? Is it from the first minute?
Client: "Hi, I need some consulting, do you do that?"
Me: "Yes, I can help you out, but be aware I might make a finders fee on solutions I recommend, should you use me to implement them."This seems quite....intense.
That's what we do, almost exactly. We make it ridiculously obvious. We make them acknowledge that they understand.
In fact, it works the opposite of how you are imagining. Instead of being like "oh, I can't use these guys" they tend to say "awesome, I'm sure everyone else does that too and just doesn't tell me."
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Dashrender said
and Scott has said that this is what NTG struggles with all the time. A huge difference there is that they have consultant, Scott, and they implementors, Gene, etc. Keeping these roles separate enables the consult to remain a bit more unbiased as long as he doesn't know who or what is an affiliate with the company.
But that is ridiculous from the sales side. (If there IS a sales side.) If you were running the sales department, and 4 out of 5 recommendation is from Company ABC, why wouldn't you want to become a reseller?
For that matter, why not get kickbacks from every possible vendor possible?
If sales is completely removed from the consulting process and recommendations, why shouldn't the implementers who are told "do this stuff" use all the kickbacks they can get? Now that the bias part is removed?
Well, I think you have been reading my stuff but forgetting it
I mentioned this before, both how it helps and how it doesn't.If you are going to get kickbacks, you want them from all over (if you are going to consult along with it.) So, like I used in a previous example) if you are doing Cloud IaaS you might do DO, Linode, Vultr, Rackspace, Azure and AWS... right? You don't have to do ALL. You can explain to clients that you don't use Cloud@Cost, for example, because they are crap and you could never recommend them anyway. You don't have to resell everything, just everything reasonable. This eliminates a certain aspect of bias, but only a little bit.
What it doesn't fix is:
- The bias towards selling something, instead of nothing (this is the biggest bias problem we see, the vendor selection bias that we fixed above is trivial in comparison.)
- The bias to sell bigger solutions that necessary.
- The bias to sell the one with the biggest kickback.
It removed a secondary or tertiary bias, so that's good. But recommending a vendor isn't all that important in IT. Think about it, no one pays you to tell them to buy HPE or Dell. That's ridiculous. They pay you to tell them if they need a server at all and reselling all servers doesn't change the fact that you only get the kickback when you sell something, anything.
We see this with storage. Someone might sell 100 different things, but SANs make so much commission that no matter what problem you have, they think that a SAN is the solution because selling one SAN earns so much money that nothing else matters. We often estimate that losing 90% of your clients, but managing to sell SAN to the remaining 10% is a huge financial win for most companies.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Dashrender said
because it's counter to one of your primary business cores - being a consulting company that gives unbiased opinions.
How can you possibly say you're unbiased if your company sells one of the products you're recommending?Well, in theory these sides never meet. But what I am saying is if the consulting side recommends DELL 80 out of 100 times, and the sales side says, holy cow, we sell a lot of DELL, we should get a kickback, then what's the difference?
Yes, the consultant TECHNICALLY doesn't know if they are a reseller on the sales side, but of course it would make sense.
I would think the a consultant should NEVER sell, or have anyone else associated with them selling.
This would work, I feel, in a situation where you could maintain total air gaps and that the consultants could not find out that you had a sales side. Like if NTG had a secret sales team that would transparently grab sales mid-stream and inject themselves without the engineering team ever finding out. That would be great. But reality is.... customers would mention it, we'd find out and we'd be influenced by the knowledge. Maybe not a lot, but a little. Maybe a lot, depends on the person, I guess.
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@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.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I would think the a consultant should NEVER sell, or have anyone else associated with them selling.
That's the idea. I think consultants should often have good VAR relationships, but not always. But that's a way that we often handle it. You need the value that a VAR brings to the table, but you don't want to be the one benefiting from the money. But you do want to benefit from the clout and volume. And you want to pass that to the customer (we get better service from Dell than normal consultants, for example, because they know us even though we are not a reseller, for example.)
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@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Dashrender said
because it's counter to one of your primary business cores - being a consulting company that gives unbiased opinions.
How can you possibly say you're unbiased if your company sells one of the products you're recommending?Well, in theory these sides never meet. But what I am saying is if the consulting side recommends DELL 80 out of 100 times, and the sales side says, holy cow, we sell a lot of DELL, we should get a kickback, then what's the difference?
Yes, the consultant TECHNICALLY doesn't know if they are a reseller on the sales side, but of course it would make sense.
I would think the a consultant should NEVER sell, or have anyone else associated with them selling.
This would work, I feel, in a situation where you could maintain total air gaps and that the consultants could not find out that you had a sales side. Like if NTG had a secret sales team that would transparently grab sales mid-stream and inject themselves without the engineering team ever finding out. That would be great. But reality is.... customers would mention it, we'd find out and we'd be influenced by the knowledge. Maybe not a lot, but a little. Maybe a lot, depends on the person, I guess.
So NTG has NO sales side?
Someone said it did, and that's what I thought was weird since you are so anti it.
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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?:
@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.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
and Scott has said that this is what NTG struggles with all the time. A huge difference there is that they have consultant, Scott, and they implementors, Gene, etc. Keeping these roles separate enables the consult to remain a bit more unbiased as long as he doesn't know who or what is an affiliate with the company.
So Gene can use all the affiliates he wants from the list?
If this is a generic example, yes. NTG has no affiliates of that nature (except as we said, Webroot) so it wouldn't apply to Gene specifically. But as a general idea, it would help to some degree, I suppose.
In the real NTG world, we have an anti-affiliate list, vendors we can't work with, but nothing more. Like Lenovo we can't recommend on ethical and security grounds. But that's just to maintain professionalism, things that we trust we would never have to say, but just to be sure that everyone is aware of vendors so bad that they could never offer them.
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
So NTG has NO sales side?
Correct. There is no sales system or process. No one gets commission. The one odd piece is that we do resell Webroot, and we disclose that heavily and it's really trivial and no consultants get money. People want AV, we offer it, we don't push Webroot or do AV consulting but if people ask for it, it's offered. It's outside of our consulting scope and we happily work with other vendors (and often do) but some customers want AV through us, and it's there. So we are an AV VAR with Webroot.
I forgot, we also do backup. This is because we feel that backup is so ubiquitous that we would never be influenced to "sell backup where it is not needed", and backup capacity planning is very regimented - meaning we couldn't reasonably oversell it. And again, no one makes commission so no one is individual incentived to sell it. And, like @guyinpv had mentioned, we sell all reasonable options (Unitrends, Veeam, StorageCraft, etc.) so to level the "vendor bias" field. There might be differences in how much the company earns from different solutions, but as an engineer, I have no idea what that is. The air gap is pretty good, there.
In the past we sold other things, we've since dropped reselling (or affiliating) Google Apps, Office 365, Rackspace and more as they just didn't make sense to continue. (To be sure, you can still get Office 365 from us and I encourage you to do that, we still deliver better service than MS direct, but we do not get any payment for that, so nothing like reselling.)
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@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@Dashrender said
But like the car sales person, assuming commissions, they want to sell you the highest commissions items in the place.
OK, so let's take a specialized car salesman. My mom is disabled, so I have some experience with customized vans and whatnot. Now, these guys are still salesman, but I honestly believe most of them are in this line of work because they care, and are really looking to get the handicapped person the best possible vehicle for them.
So, this customized van salesman is ... a VAR?
A VAVR (Value Added Van Reseller
If they are providing real value add, then a VAR. Sounds more likely to just be a normal car salesman, though. What's the Value Add?
And that they might or might not like getting people the right thing really isn't relevant.
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NTG uses a VAR when needed to get things for our customers, but they never purchase directly through us, they purchase from the VAR.
