Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?

BRRABill

If you are getting money from a vendor or supplier, the. You are biased period. You cannot avoid that.

See, that's the part I do not fully understand.

I mean, I understand the bias, of course. But if I am an honest person, and I honestly think that ProductA (a Synolgoy NAS, for example, which is often recommended as the solution here) is the best product, that's what I would recommend. Now, if I can be a reseller for them, and make a little money off it, why not? I would never look at EVERY NAS in the world anyway. I'd have a selection of a few I know work well, and pick from those.

But to be honest, I am not in the business like you guys are.

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@scottalanmiller

Can a consultant also be a sales person?

No. Sales essentially overrides all other things. Sales pays you to anti-consult, you can't serve two masters in that case. You have to unethically fail to represent one party or the other if you mix the two together. Logically, you only mix the two when you intend to scam the customer, not to scam the vendor because under normal payment schemes you get nothing that way, vendors know better.

scottalanmiller

@JaredBusch said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@scottalanmiller

Can a consultant also be a sales person?

Yes, and it is something I strive hard to avoid.

I recommend solutions to clients. but to help ensure impartiality, I have zero partnerships and deals with vendors. I get nothing for any recommendations.

I mean not even referral agreements.I want zero reasons for someone to call me biased for getting a kickback.

Exactly. It's not that the two "can't" be mixed, it's that doing one means you aren't doing the other ethically. If your job is to do sales, you can't do honest consulting. If your job is to do consulting, you can't do honest sales. You can try to mix the two, but there is no way to honestly do at least one and possibly both. It's a conflict of interest. CAN you have a conflict of interest? Sure, but it is what it is... unethical. No one is 100% unbiased, but there is a big difference between trying to be as unbiased as possible and "getting paid to scam the client when the client is paying you to represent their interests".

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

The reason I asked that is because that was the initial crux of my discussion with him. I felt that if you did your due diligence, and wanted to recommend product ABC, why should it matter if you make some money off of it? I would never recommend a product that wasn't good JUST to make money. But why not be a reseller for the things I really like? And he basically said (I think) the two of them should never meet. (And there's also a reseller tag to add into this mix.)

So here are the points around that...

Unless you make totally equal money off of ALL possible solutions (or at very least all reasonable ones) how do you keep the money from influencing you?
How do you keep the money from influencing you to recommend doing things that don't need to be done at all?
If you really have zero influence from the money, then you aren't a sales person, I'd agree there. But I don't believe that a person can not be influenced by money. If you tell me that if I offer you $100 in order to tell someone to do something mostly reasonable (not like telling them to jump off of a cliff) that you will have literally zero influence from that, I simply won't believe you. If you are willing to get paid for doing sales, that means you are at least a little influenced by the money.
Nothing wrong whatsoever with being a reseller. The wrong is being a reseller but pretending to be a consultant.
You CAN hand the bias responsibility over to the customer... "I sell Dell and will be influenced by the fact that I'm a reseller, if you still want coloured advice from me... so be it." Then the bias is still yours, but the ethical issues with it are the customer's.

scottalanmiller

@JaredBusch 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 in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@scottalanmiller

Can a consultant also be a sales person?

Yes, and it is something I strive hard to avoid.

I recommend solutions to clients. but to help ensure impartiality, I have zero partnerships and deals with vendors. I get nothing for any recommendations.

I mean not even referral agreements.I want zero reasons for someone to call me biased for getting a kickback.

The reason I asked that is because that was the initial crux of my discussion with him. I felt that if you did your due diligence, and wanted to recommend product ABC, why should it matter if you make some money off of it? I would never recommend a product that wasn't good JUST to make money. But why not be a reseller for the things I really like? And he basically said (I think) the two of them should never meet. (And there's also a reseller tag to add into this mix.)

Most of the arguments in this thread seem to support the idea that, yeah, why not make money. But @scottalanmiller (and clearly you, as well) seem to feel that is not the case.

I definitely see your side, though.

It's a lot of the same argument with how the sales people from CDW really aren't helping you. They are either against you, or against their employer.

If you are getting money from a vendor or supplier, the. You are biased period. You cannot avoid that.

This ^^^^ I'm unaware of any way to have an exception to this. If you aren't biased, then why did you even care that they paid you?

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

I mean, I understand the bias, of course. But if I am an honest person....

But you can't be. See the dilemma? You can't offer consulting while being paid to sell the client things that they don't need and be honest. It just doesn't go together.

Unless you tell the client that you are biased and then whoever hires you is just foolish.

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

But if I am an honest person, and I honestly think that ProductA (a Synolgoy NAS, for example, which is often recommended as the solution here) is the best product, that's what I would recommend. Now, if I can be a reseller for them, and make a little money off it, why not? I would never look at EVERY NAS in the world anyway. I'd have a selection of a few I know work well, and pick from those.

So you seem to be saying that you weren't going to consult anyway but were going to act like a salesperson anyway, so might as well get paid for being one. I understand that I am taking this to an extreme, literally on one is going to consider EVERY option, but can you honestly tell me that you've investigated and would investigate all reasonable options, keep up to date on them, look for opinions on them regularly, would know the popular solutions, compare them, understand why some are good at some times and others at others, etc. but would still offer advice as if you were a consultant in that space? See the problem? You are not acting as a valuable consultant but acting like a Synology salesman from the onset if not... sure it's a good solution, easily the most common in a limited space, but it's certainly not the only great one, and only applies in certain scenarios (very few, actually) so the issue that I am seeing is that you are starting from a position of bias to a degree that sound unethical to me, and then failing to see why making a quick buck off of that ethical failure would be unethical..... because it is hidden behind an ethical problem already.

Does that make sense? Basically you aren't consulting, you know one product (in this example) and are selling it rather than doing your due diligence, doing your research and recommending what fits the customer's needs best (and offering all roughly equal solutions that you can find as equal). So you've introduced all (or essentially all) of the unethical behaviour of the salesman acting as a consultant before hand... hence why the ethical problems in the sales money don't crop up as an additional problem.

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

But to be honest, I am not in the business like you guys are.

As people who provide consulting as our business, we can't just have a single go to solution for anything. For example, I'm often asked to recommend servers. I always recommend several, often specific models, but from lots of makers. Even if the customer makes it clear what vendor they like, or I make it clear which I prefer, it's still "Dell has this model, HPE has this one, Oracle has this other one and SuperMicro will work with this configuration."

In your Synology example, even though I love Synology, I never have that discussion without ReadyNAS getting mentioned. And often QNAP, Thecus, Buffalo and others get mentioned with proper caveats listed so that the customer can make reasonable determinations and understand what non-sales biases I bring to the table.

Consulting means a lot of work on our side to do research and know the options, plus lots of self reflection as to our biases, plus a lot of disclosures to customers, etc. It's a complex world to do in a reasonably honest way.

scottalanmiller

I think that companies with really good processes and enough size can mix VAR and consulting in the same company, but it requires a lot of customer trust, good internal processes, top down oversight and dedication to the process and careful separation of duties.

For example, NTG could resell Synology as a VAR and recommend it as a consultancy. But it would require that the Synology resales team never have any influence on the consulting team. That's VERY hard to do. Consultants will always know that their decisions might help pay their coworker's bills. But you can do things like... not let the consultants even know what the VAR team sells! But that's hard, too.

You can never remove 100% of bias, but I believe that you can remove reasonable bias and that you can disclose proper bias to customers. NTG does no reselling (other than Webroot of which I am aware... if they do sell other things, that's how good the secrecy is) but I still have regular bias discussions with customers to help them understand where I might be bringing bias into the discussion (like I do tons of work with Scale, use it internally, have it in the lab, etc.... but neither I nor NTG get compensated for selling it, but I still disclose the strong working relationship because even though it is not a sales one, there is no way that I can't be influenced by the strong internal communications channels, heavy knowledge and experience on the product, etc.)

But some things that I think can be combined to have a VAR/ITSP mixed firm would be...

Top down management with a clear management of the separation of duties.
Separation of duties between VAR and ITSP functions with zero overlap of functions.
Zero direct compensation to ITSP functions from sales.
No bonus or profit sharing schemes.
Obfuscation of sales options from consultants.
Coverage of options via sales (for example, if you want to sell Synology, you might also sell ReadyNAS, ReadyDATA, SAM-SD options, Drobo and maybe one or two others.) If you cover all reasonable options, this minimizes bias heavily.
Existing biases are disclosed to customers.

guyinpv

@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@scottalanmiller

Can a consultant also be a sales person?

No. Sales essentially overrides all other things. Sales pays you to anti-consult, you can't serve two masters in that case. You have to unethically fail to represent one party or the other if you mix the two together. Logically, you only mix the two when you intend to scam the customer, not to scam the vendor because under normal payment schemes you get nothing that way, vendors know better.

I have some problems here.

"Sales overrides all the things" <--- huge assumption about human greed. Non-sequitur. It's entirely possible that a consultant cares more about the work they do and providing the right solutions, than about whatever paltry affiliate fee they might get from promoting a solution they must KNOW is not the best.

"sales pays to anti-consult" <--- Really? By offering an affiliate/commission system, the product automatically becomes the worst choice in all scenarios? It's very possible that the product BOTH fills the need perfectly, AND offers commission. Another non-sequitur.

"You have to fail to represent one party or the other..." <--- False dichotomy. You're assuming that if a product has a commission program, therefore it can never be a good solution for a client. Because either the client is somehow screwed, or the vendor is (if you don't promote/use them in a particular case).
OR the product actually IS a good fit, AND has commission. OR the product is not a good fit, so the consultant does their job well and recommends something else. This doesn't mean the other vendor is screwed, they simply weren't an option on the table, commission or not.

"you only mix the two when you intend to scam the customer" <--- Seems like another non-sequitur. How is it you can sell Synology to hundreds of clients with good success, but if you change and now receive a small commission, it becomes scamming? The very same customers would have been scammed rather than helped, by the inclusion of a commission?

This discussion does assume a lot about human nature, and it's NOT a matter of logic. It's entirely possible that a commissioned option is available for a particular customer, but the consultant ignores that option if it's not the best choice.
It's entirely possible that a consultant is honest enough to not push services the client doesn't need.
It's entirely possible that the small commission potentially made by a product is insignificant next to the entire job. If a consulting + labor job is going to be $2k or $3k or $5k, then a $100 finders fee from some service provider means nothing compared to doing the best job I can for $5k. $100 won't swing decisions one way or the other, and if the provider that I like so much I've signed up to be an affiliate, happens to work in this scenario, and I make $100, this is definitely not "scamming" the customer. I would have recommended the same product regardless.

My opinion is that in most cases, especially independents like me, the small affiliates I get from my favorite products are a simple value add, or bonus, for me. I would be recommending the product anyway.
I don't recommend the product because of the affiliate, I signed up for the affiliate because I like the product so much.

This entire things basically seems to come down to whether human natural greed always wins over simple human honesty and sincerity.

Where things fall apart are the grey zones.
The simple product would work, but my affiliate product which is a little more advanced and more than they need, will easily fit too, but hey I get paid!
The super quick job that might cost them $200, but where I could get a $100 bonus, that's a pretty hard-to-reject offer. It's 50% of the entire job!
However, the $5000 job, a $50 or $100 finder's fee is not very cloudy. Maybe one or two little poofy clouds, but mostly a clear sky.

Lastly, commissions are not the only thing can cloud someone's view. If the client is cheap and wants as fast as possible, you might be tempted to recommend products you are most familiar with and can work quickly with.
Or maybe the client themselves "know" about a product you already happen to have an affiliate for, they demand THAT product, and you get a bonus, you feel even better about it.
Or maybe you're being clouded by cloudiness! You can go with the non-commissioned simple product, but the client (and you) feel like maybe you should go with something more powerful in case of future growth or needs. But the more powerful option is an affiliate, so now you actively don't want affiliate to cloud your judgement, so you feel almost an anti-affiliate pull to not recommend it just so you don't feel guilty! lol

Anyway, interesting conversation. I'm not fully convinced that I should never do affiliations for products for which I already love and recommend, and have affiliate programs available. My loyalty is to the client and doing a good job, I view affiliate commissions as little more than happy bonuses should there be a sale.

IRJ

@guyinpv Everything you are saying is correct in theory.

Unfortunately, greed is part of everyday life and in the real world nice guys finish last. If you're too nice you get walked all over. We do that with open source software all the time. Even if it is way better than paid solutions. We will use everything we can for free, it's human nature.
All your potential clients care about is what they can get out of you with as little investment as possible. If you let them walk all over you they will.

You cannot by 100 unbiased if you get paid to sell software. There is NO way, you wont want to pad your pockets.

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

I have some problems here.

"Sales overrides all the things" <--- huge assumption about human greed. Non-sequitur. It's entirely possible that a consultant cares more about the work they do and providing the right solutions, than about whatever paltry affiliate fee they might get from promoting a solution they must KNOW is not the best.

Well, there are a few mistakes there. One is that the amount from sales is rarely paltry, it's often quite significant. Second, they are doing the work and doing the sales based on making money, the money is the purpose of the transaction. If you don't think that the money matters and is influential, you are confused about what business is and how it functions.

In the real world, this is so common and so dramatic that it's the top issue we see with companies - they think exactly like you suggest here and get screwed like you wouldn't. I literally believe this is by far the top issue in the SMB IT space... people thinking that they can get advice from someone who is paid by someone else to give them different advice and that the other person paying them won't influence them.

scottalanmiller

@IRJ said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

You cannot by 100 unbiased if you get paid to sell software. There is NO way, you wont want to pad your pockets.

And if you truly didn't care about the money, why bother taking the money when you'd be just as happy not getting it? The very fact that you would accept the sales commission means you are biased because of it.

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

"sales pays to anti-consult" <--- Really? By offering an affiliate/commission system, the product automatically becomes the worst choice in all scenarios? It's very possible that the product BOTH fills the need perfectly, AND offers commission. Another non-sequitur.

Absolutely, it just means that the consulting is corrupted. It says nothing about the solution. You are making an implication that was not said.

But why would someone pay for fake consulting when they could have gotten straight sales for free?

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

My opinion is that in most cases, especially independents like me, the small affiliates I get from my favorite products are a simple value add, or bonus, for me. I would be recommending the product anyway.

But this doesn't hold up in the real world. I see no problem from people more than this. We routinely see what is being recommended to people and get them to admit that they got false consulting from a sales people based on the obviousy scamming recommendations. You can say that you don't think that this happens, but it's so common that to me, it sounds like you've never met people in IT. This is so insanely common that almost nothing else exists from my experience. Many companies are to the point that they don't even know what actual consulting looks like because this is so common and so severe and so corrupt.

Maybe you feel that everyone is like you and able to 100% ignore the fact that you get money. But this is not even slightly mirrored in the real world. To the point that I don't even know where you could find an example of it.

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

This entire things basically seems to come down to whether human natural greed always wins over simple human honesty and sincerity.

It's not that simple. If you hide the fact that you are getting paid, you are not in the realm of honest. If you disclose the fact that you are getting paid, then your customers know that you are sales, not consulting, and you can be honest and still do the sales. I NEVER suggest that sales is dishonest, ever. That's something that people, having an emotional negative reaction. to sales people inject. But I never imply that. Sales is generally very honest. It is customers lying to themselves in the hopes of taking advantage of someone, but really knowing that they are taking advantage of themselves.

There is no greed vs. honesty in this scenario (until you don't tell people that you are doing sales, then it is obviously lying.) This is the false dichotomy here, believing that honesty and greed are opposing forces here. It's just not the case.

Dashrender

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

Do you sell it for the commission, or do you sell it anyway and a commission is just a bonus?

I don't see any problem with a little earned commission on selling things you already promote anyway. Just as long as those little commission benefits don't cloud your judgement about clients' needs.

How can it not?

And while you might not not allow it to cloud your judgement, as someone hiring you, I can't know that.

If my goal is to hire you as a consultant looking for the best option for me, it's in my best interest for you to only be getting paid by me and no one else (at least in relation to the products/project that I want your consultant opinion on).

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

"you only mix the two when you intend to scam the customer" <--- Seems like another non-sequitur. How is it you can sell Synology to hundreds of clients with good success, but if you change and now receive a small commission, it becomes scamming? The very same customers would have been scammed rather than helped, by the inclusion of a commission?

Well for one, selling isn't applicable. Hopefully you mean recommending.

Second, that it's been "sold" a lot is irrelevant to the conversation, so I feel like the desire for sales commissions is already clouding your thought process. What does "it worked for other people" have to do with the situation? What we are concerned about is if it is the right tool for the next customer, not that it was the right tool for the past customers.

So the issue of being paid to push one product instead of another remains the convoluted, unethical consulting practice that it always did. I just don't see how having recommended it in the past places any significant role when our goal as consultants is to determine the right products, approaches and fits for our customers, not to tell them "what worked for someone else that is different." It's just not meaningful to this discussion.

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

Do you sell it for the commission, or do you sell it anyway and a commission is just a bonus?

I don't see any problem with a little earned commission on selling things you already promote anyway. Just as long as those little commission benefits don't cloud your judgement about clients' needs.

How can it not?

And while you might not not allow it to cloud your judgement, as someone hiring you, I can't know that.

If my goal is to hire you as a consultant looking for the best option for me, it's in my best interest for you to only be getting paid by me and no one else (at least in relation to the products/project that I want your consultant opinion on).

Likewise, that partner is paying you to sell their product, rather than to listen to my needs. You cannot serve two masters. There is no way to "do right" by both, you have to pick. And one pays more than the other, and more consistently.

scottalanmiller

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

Lastly, commissions are not the only thing can cloud someone's view. If the client is cheap and wants as fast as possible, you might be tempted to recommend products you are most familiar with and can work quickly with.

I feel like you've never read my works on this. I cover this a lot.

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2016/05/understanding-bias/

All consulting is about bias. The question is, is it good bias that benefits the customer or is it bad bias where you are not helping the customer. Are you a buyer's agent or a seller's agent?

To put this into perspective, what you are suggesting is something that consultants like @JaredBusch and I avoid due to our professional ethics. We don't feel that what you are proposing is something that we are allowed to do, regardless of corporate policies (which for both of us mirror that ruling.) But in other realms, like real estate, what you feel is acceptable isn't just considered unethical, but is actually illegal. That's the degree to which this is frowned upon. Can you legally do it in IT? Yes, as long as you are disclosing that you are being offered money to act against the potential interests of the customer. But it's all on your shoulders to make it ethical.