Becoming self employed in IT?

fmitawaps

I've been doing IT support work for several years, and while it has been ok, I am not sure I'd want to do it for the next 20 years. I'm studying for my first CCNA now, and plan to try to get into junior network admin or data center noc jobs in the next 6 months to a year.

I sometimes think about becoming self employed in IT, but I'm unsure of what I could do. Be an IT consultant? I'm sure I don't have enough experience for that. Run my own PC repair business? Yes, I already do, but it doesn't have the steady, long term income potential I will require.

I'd like to run my own data center, a small one at first, but I don't have the startup cash, and even if I did, I know enough to know that I don't know enough to do it on my own. And having the money to hire a CCNP Data Center person to work for me is also not going to happen anytime soon. Then there's the whole marketing side, to get customers for the data center, and I have ZERO experience in that. I am not a salesman.

I'd like to hear from people who have become self employed in IT, or if they know someone who has. Maybe hearing what others have done can give me some new ideas to work with.

Priston

If I was going to become self employed and I already had my own PC repair business I would add to the list of services I offered. First I would add PC refresh / deployment services and I would look into becoming a re-seller of a specific PC brand. I would target small offices and companies with a lot of small stores/offices. If you find yourself with deploying PCs in offices that just got remodeled or built. I would look into offering structured cabling services and phone system services.

si20

A friend of mine set up his own IT Support business on the side whilst he had a full time job. He was earning decent money for around a year until the recession hit. He had to pack up and continue working 9-5 for his employer. He hasn't ever set up again - I think the experience put him off for life. I joined him on 2-3 jobs because at first, he thought he could tackle it all on his own, outside of working hours.

He quickly found that he needed to give up his full time job and invest significantly in the business, and hire people (which involves contracts and legal work) or just leave the idea alone. He decided to juggle his full time job and call me out if he was stuck. As I say, it lasted a year before he found himself with no calls and very, very little profit from it. I'd love to work for myself, but unless you've got a massive amount of startup money and a solid business plan, IT Support wont cut it anymore - people are too tech-savvy these days.

fmitawaps

Yes, I have found that some home users are getting to know too much for their own good about their computers, which reduces my profit potential. But when they THINK they can do something and screw it up, I get calls!

I tend to be busy for a week or two, then slow for a week or two, and it goes back and forth. It is nice extra cash money, but it's not enough to live on all by itself, and it isn't reliable.

I could expand into doing network setup for small businesses, but most of them seem to already know someone for that, plus there wouldn't be many calls on it.

I wonder if there are any companies that employ contractors, and when they had calls for work in my area, I'd be on the list of people to call to consider doing the job. Again, that's not my ideal situation, but I'm just thinking out loud here.

One of my ideas for a data center would be advertising to store backups of peoples' data, but with USB attached external hard drives becoming more popular, any halfway knowledgeable home user would do that, and most people don't place a high priority on backup copies anyhow, in my experience. And if I did have a small data center, and some company came to me for a quote, and said "Why should I trust you, the new guy, instead of the 15,000 square foot data center 10 miles away who has been in business for 10 years?", then my only response would be "You're right, why would you trust me?".

1. Win lottery
2. Retire
3. Profit.

That's the best plan I've found yet!

OctalDump

Something sort of like the data centre deal, is reselling hosting. You could use VPS or a cloud service (IaaS), and provide some kind of hosting. The other thing is to look at getting rack space in a co-lo. You just buy x RU of space, put in your own gear, and then sell the services on top of that. It is something that you can work up from.
All of that depends on how much value you can add to it.
If you want to get super dodgy, then get a fast internet connection (10mbit ps up would probably be the minimum) into your home and do hosting out of your home.

Also looking at any niche you can find. Repair PCs? Why not expand out to laptops, Macs, tablets and phones? Tech support for small (very small) companies. Setting up companies with Google Apps or Office 365. Whenever someone asks can you do x, just say yes and then Google it. Most of them won't realise what a bad job looks like, so won't care. There are thousands of grossly underqualified computer "technicians" out there providing "Managed Services", the bar is pretty low. Eventually you will get good enough at it that you can pick and choose.

stlsmoore

I just can't imagine making any sort of profit with the consumer market. I would think you would have to sell a niche service to small-medium sized businesses to make any coin to go the self employed route. That and the business model would have to be scalable enough to eventually bring in at least $8K (profit) a month or more for me to make it seem worthwhile. Toyed with the idea a bunch of times myself but not really in the position yet.

fmitawaps

I had a brainstorm this afternoon at work for about two hours.

It started with the idea of getting a used server, throwing in some new hard drives, and co-locating it in a local data center, and selling storage space on it. But I didn't know how I could break up the disk space into certain sizes, like 20 GB and 50 GB, and split it up so anyone who bought storage from me could log in and Copy and Paste their files to their storage space without seeing anyone else's space. Anyone know how that could be handled?

Then a coworker briefly mentioned using a NAS at home with a faster connection speed, then we got onto talking about Google drive.

And after thinking about it for a while, I realized I could buy 100 GB Google Drive accounts for $1.99 per month and sell them to customers for say maybe $15 per month for 20 GB, or $25 per month for 50 GB, and if they wanted to upgrade to 100 GB of storage, I could simply do nothing and charge them more money, like $40 a month for 100 GB, and tell them I enabled their account for more space.

Google had a 20 minute hold time when I called to ask how I could do this, and could I change whatever was on the monitor, so that when someone logged in to their account, they wouldn't know they were on Google Drive and were instead going through me?

Then I did some calculating, assuming what I thought were optimum conditions of 30 customers paying $15 each for 6 months at a time, minus the cost of the Google Drive accounts, and it came out to me making something like $2340 each 6 months, and that was nowhere near enough to be worth all the hassle involved. That is less than 3 weeks of my current paycheck!

So I scrapped that idea pretty quickly.

si20

As others have said, the question is: "Is it worth it?". As you've realized, backing up user's data wouldn't be worth it. But look who you'd be going up against - iCloud, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, Mega etc. These companies have millions and millions of $ at their disposal. Storage isn't the way to go at all.

So where does that leave us? Any form of IT support (unless it's networking) is going to be null and void. You'd get calls, but the majority can google a problem and many can fix it or know someone who can fix it. My only suggestion is a networking job where you can cable up SME's as a contractor. But even then, why would they pick you over a company/other contractors who have done this kind of work for years?

I'm not trying to put you off at all, I wish I could come up with a good idea that I could use to be self-employed. Unfortunately, the big corporations have got most aspects of IT covered.

Kinet1c

Self employment brings with it the following: marketing, financial management, sales, credit control and a host of other items. These are the reasons I shut down my business. I want to work with tech and while I have to write the very odd report or do a presentation, it's nowhere close to what I was doing when self employed.

Also, chances of being exposed to cutting edge technology is dramatically reduced as with SME clients, they're worried about budget and nothing else.

joelsfood

Self employment definitely takes more work and investment from you to make the same amount you might make from a standard employment gig. But it can give you more freedom, more choice, and exposure to more technologies and vendors. It's not a choice to be taken lightly though. Proper insurance, taxes, etc all add up.

thronetm

The way I see it, you'll be faced with a difficult task if just doing the standard IT Support i.e. small business, laptop repair, PC builds etc.

I've an idea to specialise so much in a technology even the IT Pros will want to bring you in, because you have that specialist, enterprise level experience in said Technology i.e. VMWare, Citrix, Cisco. Large companies need specialists. I've toyed with this idea for a while now, I can see myself trying it out in the future as I become more tired of working for someone, and become more specialised in my chosen area.

ccnpninja

Calculate the risks and go for it, if you have enough spared money to sustain the tough months, or even years..

TheFORCE

You will have a better luck if you can create an app that people can use and charge them .50 cent than trying to build a brick and mortar business these days. You will also have a better luck in converting your instagram account to an "ad" where you get paid for promoting different tools, products etc. You will also have better luck in setting up a youtube channel were you review products, create how to video tutorials and receive proceeds from google for the ads placed in your channel. You will also have better luck in creating a blog similar to the above.

Any implementation of the above and the sky is the limit. Now you will face competition in those areas as well but the thing is, you will be exposed to a bigger customet audience and it will run without any of the infastructure costs. We live in the age of information. Information is value. Monetize information and you will make money.