Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?
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At the end of the day...
In home repair is not horrible if you have clients with money and care for their stuff.
I just did a job yesterday for a guy on a $2k custom computer who wanted his Win7 to Win10 upgrade. He had two SSD drives and a partitioned platter drive. He was nervous about all the drives and doing backups and how Win10 would work on the SSD etc etc. In the end it was 4 hours of basically explaining lots of stuff and letting him watch me all the way through.Regardless, that is just one 4 hour job. I would need two of those every day for a decent living and it would take all my time when adding in driving time and note taking and billing and so forth.
In a small town where mom-n-pop shops seem to come and go, I'm not sure I could work up at least 5 hours of billable time every day. Not only that but you can't charge any less than $60/hr if you have any hope of hiring other people and having free time. Even in my small town $75/hr is the minimum for the experienced pros to do in home. Over $100/hr for business work.
MSP is an interesting concept. I don't want to limit myself with negative thoughts but I just have to think, why would some company that has been chugging along for 10 years suddenly needs hundreds of $$ a month in IT services when they never needed it before?
I assume you will tell them how awesome it is, how they will have tech when needed, discounted services, better security, a proper network layout, maintenance work, remote help abilities, etc etc etc. But if they say "never needed before, so no thanks." What then?
Many IT services are just back-end things, hard to directly correlate with an increase in profit which is all the business owner wants to see.That said, how many clients can one person manage with MSP anyway? It's a lot more work I assume, more parsing logs, more allotted time slots for maintenance, more phone calls and emails from clients. We talking 5 clients? 10? 50?
If I can only manage 10 decent-sized MSP-style clients, they need to pay at least $500/month for services. Preferably $800 or even $1000 (not sure what standards costs are). How many useful services can I pack in an $800/month package to make it worth while?
I'd rather manage 10 clients at $800 a month than 50 clients at $160 a month, even if it's fewer service offerings. It's just less overhead and paperwork.If I split $800 into $60/hr that's 13.33 hours. If I schedule 140 work hours a month, there is only support for 10 clients using this math. I couldn't give them more hours or they would have to pay more and I'd need fewer clients. You get the idea.
How viable is it to have $800 a month in MSP services provided by one person? Maybe it's too much? If I can only provide $300 worth of services, I need to spend far less than 13 hours a month, and find more clients!Web design and online services are another venue. Speaking of restaurants, they always need websites with fancy pictures, menus and occasional specials and deals posted. Managing a website could be part of a service package. Just bundle in their design, updates, maintenance, hosting, and everything else into $100/m or $200/m or whatever with dedicated hours and I pay all the necessary fees to run it.
I hate that all this is so bespoke and random. I mean, if you want to do in-home massage, it's pretty straightforward. But if you want to run in-home IT, it's like, there is 100 ways to try and niche out the business, there is no just "standard" thing an IT person can do. Do you add web? Printers and copiers? Servers? Consulting? Security audits? Wireless? Physical wiring? Infrastructure? Repair? Training? Monitoring/logging/access tools? Contracts or hourly? Laptops, mobiles? Focus on small biz, startups? Do sales/affiliates for certain product installs? Sales? Storefront?
There is no cut-n-paste, rinse-repeat business model for IT I guess.
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There is no cut-n-paste, rinse-repeat business model for IT I guess.
That's for sure!
I'm a general. I have to do everything in order to get the work. But I love it!
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Regardless, that is just one 4 hour job. I would need two of those every day for a decent living and it would take all my time when adding in driving time and note taking and billing and so forth.
Yup, if you had a steady stream of work that was somehow able to schedule two of those every day without any interrupts nor with any overlaps, you'd STILL have to spend 10-12 hours working every single day to make things work out. That's crazy. And that is just for the work and the documentation, billing, driving, etc. That's crazy. And that is assuming impossible scheduling (you figure at best that you can pull off half of that because of logistics) and that doesn't address how you would find the roughly 5,000 necessary clients that it would take to need that kind of service on a routine basis (with 5K clients, you'd hit each one about once every computer buying cycle. And that is still a best case scenario. But what does it take to find 5,000 clients? You can't pull that off while doing the work, too.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
That said, how many clients can one person manage with MSP anyway?
As a true MSP? Zero. You can't run a good MSP for any clients with only one person. An MSP, with only the rarest exception, requires more coverage, skills and resources than any one person can provide. It's just not possible. Doing it, at best, means you are putting your clients at risk, relying on you for coverage but having you not have the necessary resources to provide the coverage that they are assuming or expecting. Sure you could set expectations, but are you really an MSP at that point?
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
In a small town where mom-n-pop shops seem to come and go, I'm not sure I could work up at least 5 hours of billable time every day. Not only that but you can't charge any less than $60/hr if you have any hope of hiring other people and having free time. Even in my small town $75/hr is the minimum for the experienced pros to do in home. Over $100/hr for business work.
Nowhere in America or Canada (or probably Mexico) is $75/hr an experienced pro. Anything less than the $110/hr of Geek Squad means you are a scrambling, semi-unemployed bench tech. Geek Squad sets the "floor" price in North America, fall below that, and why would anyone, consumer or otherwise, think of you as a "pro"? And GS employees are not even remotely at the level to be called IT or a pro, they are bench workers at the lowest bar of bench work. Good bench people earn double their takehome with much better conditions working for good companies and don't deal with consumers. Even bench gets good salaries when they are good at their jobs.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Many IT services are just back-end things, hard to directly correlate with an increase in profit which is all the clueless likely to fail soon business owner wants to see.
FTFY
Crappy businesses don't make good customers because they rarely can pay their bills, when they do it is rarely promptly and they tend to go out of business often leaving you scrambling to find new customers way too often which are costly to acquire.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Web design and online services are another venue. Speaking of restaurants, they always need websites with fancy pictures, menus and occasional specials and deals posted.
"Need" might be a strong term here. Sure, we think that they "need" them, but they don't. Just like we've talked to a lot of restaurants about IT, we've talked to them about websites and marketing too and you know what... generally they couldn't care less about that, either.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I hate that all this is so bespoke and random. I mean, if you want to do in-home massage, it's pretty straightforward. But if you want to run in-home IT, it's like, there is 100 ways to try and niche out the business, there is no just "standard" thing an IT person can do. Do you add web? Printers and copiers? Servers? Consulting? Security audits? Wireless? Physical wiring? Infrastructure? Repair? Training? Monitoring/logging/access tools? Contracts or hourly? Laptops, mobiles? Focus on small biz, startups? Do sales/affiliates for certain product installs? Sales? Storefront?
You are mixing IT and bench services, which I think adds confusion. Bench is relatively standard, not totally, but a bit. IT by definition is not standard as it is core business... nothing in core business is cookie cutter or profits would be predictable and investments would be basically a guarantee. IT, being a business item, is almost totally bespoke. Bench, however, is not, as it is like car repair and can be done pretty predictably.
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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?:
In a small town where mom-n-pop shops seem to come and go, I'm not sure I could work up at least 5 hours of billable time every day. Not only that but you can't charge any less than $60/hr if you have any hope of hiring other people and having free time. Even in my small town $75/hr is the minimum for the experienced pros to do in home. Over $100/hr for business work.
Nowhere in America or Canada (or probably Mexico) is $75/hr an experienced pro. Anything less than the $110/hr of Geek Squad means you are a scrambling, semi-unemployed bench tech. Geek Squad sets the "floor" price in North America, fall below that, and why would anyone, consumer or otherwise, think of you as a "pro"? And GS employees are not even remotely at the level to be called IT or a pro, they are bench workers at the lowest bar of bench work. Good bench people earn double their takehome with much better conditions working for good companies and don't deal with consumers. Even bench gets good salaries when they are good at their jobs.
Interesting perspective. I assume retail locations like Best Buy charge that because of all the overhead and employees. The whole point of avoiding that and going with a mom-n-pop or road warrior technician is you can assume lower costs. Where GS charges $110, the guy in the Honda hatchback is probably $60.
Do you really think the average person is basing their decision on price in this way? Like "GS charges $110, but this traveling guy is $75, what? Why so cheap? I'm going with the more expensive option cause they just HAVE to be better!"
I think people will choose the cheapest, with almost no concern for quality. Average people I mean. They will find the cheapest option they feel safe with.I also mentioned earlier, it just isn't practical to charge $100/hr for granny who can't figure out the Win10 start menu or how to find the email icon. She has a 9 year old computer that cost $299 on sale. She ain't paying $200 for me to comfort her.
It's hard to NOT do those jobs either. How do you advertise services and say "lonely cheapskates need not apply"?
I don't mind those jobs but I just feel really really bad when it comes time to show the bill. -
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
I hate that all this is so bespoke and random. I mean, if you want to do in-home massage, it's pretty straightforward. But if you want to run in-home IT, it's like, there is 100 ways to try and niche out the business, there is no just "standard" thing an IT person can do. Do you add web? Printers and copiers? Servers? Consulting? Security audits? Wireless? Physical wiring? Infrastructure? Repair? Training? Monitoring/logging/access tools? Contracts or hourly? Laptops, mobiles? Focus on small biz, startups? Do sales/affiliates for certain product installs? Sales? Storefront?
You are mixing IT and bench services, which I think adds confusion. Bench is relatively standard, not totally, but a bit. IT by definition is not standard as it is core business... nothing in core business is cookie cutter or profits would be predictable and investments would be basically a guarantee. IT, being a business item, is almost totally bespoke. Bench, however, is not, as it is like car repair and can be done pretty predictably.
But how viable is bench as a career?
You need to fix 2 to 5 computers a day with at least 5 billable hours at $75/hr.
That's 1300 billable hours a year for gross $97,500. Sounds good but take away tools, accountant, taxes, secretary or intern part time, whatever. You might make an OK $60k give or take.
But if 1300 billable hours is split into an average of 1.5hr jobs, I need 867 clients a year, 72 a month, 18 a week. These are hard numbers.
Not only that but just processing 18 people a week, the documentation, billing, phone calls, followup calls, inevitable customer support calls, emails, etc. 5 billable hours a day easily becomes a 10, 12, 14 hour day.I'm not saying working 12 hours a day is bad, or even that fixing 18 computers a week is all that difficult. The hard part is trying to get 18 clients a week! And even then, getting them all to bring computers in is annoying for them.
If I do onsite work, 18 a week becomes much harder.Anyway, I know people who do it, but it takes a long time to get established, and then a lot of work becomes repeat clients over the years.
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Decent auto mechanics charge quite a bit more than $75 an hour. Now that is somewhat skilled profession (not as skilled as IT), but even when we look at non-skilled professions such as pest control, landscaping, etc. they still charge more than $75 an hour. Hell getting a truck or van out for anything costs more than $75.
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PC Repair is dead. You may find the well off client that has a $2k machine once in awhile, but when you can get a PC for $200-300 new or a tablet for $40-100 you are virtually eliminating that market.
You should certainly work for a MSP before even considering starting one. You have no clue what they go through with client acquisition, quoting, businesses that don't want to pay, etc.
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@guyinpv I know I come off as ripping on you, but it isn't my intention. I think you are good guy with awesome intentions. Unfortunately things don't work out they way they should. I used to think like you and tell myself I am going to offer everyone a decent price and be good to my customers and they will be good to me.
What I found out in the real world, is it's survival of the fittest. Your customers will dump you in a heartbeat no matter how good or cheap you are. They will do it to save a couple bucks . Then since you don't charge enough to cover losing anybody you get yourself in real trouble.
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@IRJ said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
PC Repair is dead. You may find the well off client that has a $2k machine once in awhile, but when you can get a PC for $200-300 new or a tablet for $40-100 you are virtually eliminating that market.
You should certainly work for a MSP before even considering starting one. You have no clue what they go through with client acquisition, quoting, businesses that don't want to pay, etc.
For every hour of billable work there is at least 2 up to 100 to gain a client, keep a client, get paid by a client etc. I have had a client take me up to 2 years of developing a relationship before landing them as a client. Then it takes 5 hours at least to get a solid contract written for them (we have a basic template but every client is different and is treated as such). Then you have your account administration duties, I call this the Toddler Whys? Then you have the billing (which you know that onsite you did last week how many hours was that? how far did I drive, what parts did I buy? UGH why didn't I write this down when I did it?) yeah that. Then you have the notes that SHOULD be done for all the work you did. We say that takes a minimum of 15 minutes per item. Oh now that has to be re-written for the client so they can understand it. Oh now you have to do the Toddler Whys again about your email. Then you have the bill: Why did you charge me for explaining the email you sent? What do you mean I get charged for all communication?
So where are you storing all that documentation for your client? Oh you are being cheap and using your own desktop? Awesome! OH now the hard drive died? Where's all the documentation? Seriously IT people sometimes try to cut corners too much and then spend too much time trying to redo the things they yell at clients for. There is always your own infrastructure to deal with.
Not to scare but this is the honest truth. No matter how organized you are or how much you promise yourself you will stay organized or get there if you are now it never really happens.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
But how viable is bench as a career?
Not great outside of the enterprise space. Most viable bench work is datacenter.
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@IRJ said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Decent auto mechanics charge quite a bit more than $75 an hour. Now that is somewhat skilled profession (not as skilled as IT), but even when we look at non-skilled professions such as pest control, landscaping, etc. they still charge more than $75 an hour. Hell getting a truck or van out for anything costs more than $75.
Yup, if you are getting someone to come on site, it's $100 for unskilled, skilled goes up from there.
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@IRJ said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
PC Repair is dead. You may find the well off client that has a $2k machine once in awhile, but when you can get a PC for $200-300 new or a tablet for $40-100 you are virtually eliminating that market.
This. And good clients are taking backups and doing a full restore is fast and trivial. No need for repair.
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@IRJ said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv I know I come off as ripping on you, but it isn't my intention. I think you are good guy with awesome intentions. Unfortunately things don't work out they way they should. I used to think like you and tell myself I am going to offer everyone a decent price and be good to my customers and they will be good to me.
What I found out in the real world, is it's survival of the fittest. Your customers will dump you in a heartbeat no matter how good or cheap you are. They will do it to save a couple bucks . Then since you don't charge enough to cover losing anybody you get yourself in real trouble.
Exactly. PC Repair / Consumer service / bench is a drive to the bottom. Everyone loses.
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All the above is my opinion too.
@irj You aren't ripping at all. I need opinions from people who've been there.My last bench job was over 10 years ago, even then it was about $13/hr after 6 years at the place!
My last job interview for bench/repair/onsite general tech at "the" local "big" shop was just a year or two ago but they maxed out around $17 or $18/hr even for an onsite tech who does business clients.
I've never seen a general tech position in my local cities anywhere over basic $10 to $14/hr. It's pathetic.
The highest paying IT job I ever found/applied for was for city government which was about a $45k job with full benefits, maxing out around $70k ish.
Even hospitals and town governments pay around $40k-$50k tops.If the very best I can do in my city is government at $50k, there has to be something better I can do on my own. I just don't know what that niche is, what it looks like, what is my value/offering.
OK so if traveling technician is out, and MSP it out due to complexity and lack of experience, what other niches are there?
It seems obviously to cater to business rather than consumer, though there may be a small niche of consumers worth going after too.
Businesses must have a need for IT but not big enough to afford their own part time or full time staff. And not small enough where they just have one or two Walmart PCs and a inkjet.Maybe I just need more examples of what people actual DO if they run their own IT business, and how much can be made doing it. I might as well not leave the 9-5 if going my own way increases work load by 40% and only make a few hundred more a month! Or I can keep applying for government jobs. eww.
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@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
All the above is my opinion too.
@irj You aren't ripping at all. I need opinions from people who've been there.My last bench job was over 10 years ago, even then it was about $13/hr after 6 years at the place!
My last job interview for bench/repair/onsite general tech at "the" local "big" shop was just a year or two ago but they maxed out around $17 or $18/hr even for an onsite tech who does business clients.
I've never seen a general tech position in my local cities anywhere over basic $10 to $14/hr. It's pathetic.
The highest paying IT job I ever found/applied for was for city government which was about a $45k job with full benefits, maxing out around $70k ish.
Even hospitals and town governments pay around $40k-$50k tops.If the very best I can do in my city is government at $50k, there has to be something better I can do on my own. I just don't know what that niche is, what it looks like, what is my value/offering.
OK so if traveling technician is out, and MSP it out due to complexity and lack of experience, what other niches are there?
It seems obviously to cater to business rather than consumer, though there may be a small niche of consumers worth going after too.
Businesses must have a need for IT but not big enough to afford their own part time or full time staff. And not small enough where they just have one or two Walmart PCs and a inkjet.Maybe I just need more examples of what people actual DO if they run their own IT business, and how much can be made doing it. I might as well not leave the 9-5 if going my own way increases work load by 40% and only make a few hundred more a month! Or I can keep applying for government jobs. eww.
I would say an MSP isn't impossible, but you should probably work for one for a few years first to understand everything required.
