I want to break free...

gorebrush

Well, I need some help and advice from you guys. Hopefully there is a diverse range of people out there who can cover what it is I am setting out to achieve.

Whilst I am more than happy with the progress I've been making with my career, I don't believe I will be 100% content until I am working for myself. I am fed up of working for big companies, however admittedly I am enjoy the job security. However, whilst I have this security, I want to go further, and set up my own business.

I believe that a successful business is one built on solid expertise, good real life experience, and one built with passion.

What I am setting out to do is nothing new - I want to become an IT Consultant selling expertise/consultancy to Small/Mid Enterprises of all shapes and sizes. What I want to try and do a little differently is pitch my skills not just to businesses themselves but to small IT departments as well - create free tutorials and video guides on how to perform common Systems Administrator type tasks - I did this for 6 years as a job so I think I know a thing or two

I've kept my hand in fairly well with Windows Server, got a fairly good working knowledge of VMWare ESX and I'm working on a CCIE. That's a fairly well rounded bank of experience/knowledge to draw on, and then there's all the soft skills I've learned - how to prioritise what is actually important, project management of small jobs/projects, designing/implementing of my chosen technologies etc.

So, that's the meat of what I actually want to sell out. I would like companies, who think they have an IT problem to approach me and ask if I can help them - I can then appraise what they are trying to accomplish and help out from there.

I cannot afford to give up my day job to do this at the moment - it will strictly have to be a side operation while I get it running, depending on how successful it is of course. The first goal would be to cover my monthly expenses with the income from this side venture. Once I know I can confidently cover that, then I know I can go ahead and run it full time. By that point I should know that anyway because I'd be making a lot to be able to do that.

Ideally I'd like to start this as a website based operation, it involves absolute minimum cost to start operating, can be accessible 24/7, and makes perfect sense to start here. I want to supplement this with youtube type videos that I can make to cover most things - these could be theoretical videos on topics such as "how to define a backup strategy" or actual instructional videos on "how to configure OSPF routing" or whatever.

The videos would serve as an advertisement of my knowledge, and an advert of what the buyer of any of my consultancy would get.

I could expand this into writing courses for things like CCNA/CCNP, charging a nominal fee (say, £50 for a video series, and I could write labs in GNS or some such...) Maybe even write courses on being a Systems Admin, or anything else in IT....

So, websites. I'm happy to write and host my own, but obviously this takes time. Where do I go for quick and easy website building and preferably cheap(ish) hostings?

What is the general consensus to my idea?

aftereffector

Anywhere but GoDaddy. Seriously. ANYWHERE ELSE.

Asif Dasl

Doing YouTube videos will do you out of a job and waste valuable time IMO, not everybody can be an Eli The Computer Guy. That guy has got people working for him. I would go contracting way before I would work with small businesses again. Do you like workgroups much? They're out there and they're annoying to come across too!

Contracting is guaranteed money and I think you would do well with Cisco work. Maybe you could consult for MSPs? I would advise against supporting businesses of "all shapes and sizes" - set a size of business that you'd like to support and nothing below that size (50 people companies & nothing below that). You could use something like Kompass to find leads and suitable sized business to market to. It's a rough market out there and it's no less full of head wrecking crap than any other part of IT.

gorebrush

Nice tips - I guess the Youtube thing would have been a good idea 5 years ago

If nothing else a CCIE would help with contracting so maybe that's what I should concentrate on chiefly and think about the other things afterwards?

Cerebro

Have you seen Eli the computer guy's videos on youtube? I think he was trying to do something similar and was not getting enough revenue and so went back to his old job. I know I would be interested in how to videos that are applicable to real life, real life troubleshooting on the job.

Asif Dasl

I think if you find out the contracting rate for CCIE's everything else will fall by the wayside, that and you'll be working with something you are passionate about (you've spend a lot of time to get to the pinnacle of IT). Windows and VMware skills are great but being a specialist is where the money is, I've learned that the hard way. UNLESS, you wanted to become a systems architect where multi-disipline is very good thing to be.

gorebrush

Systems Architect is something I'd really love to do, long term. Short term, contracting as a CCIE would be awesome, if I could pull it off.

Maybe I could flesh that out after a CCIE. I was actually thinking of refreshing my MCSE in Windows 2012, then looking at doing something VMWare - I've worked with it for over 10 years now. Not in a production environment, though I do actually own an ESX server at home which I run all my production servers on.

gbdavidx

1. buy a domain name
2. install IIS (i did this on server 2012
3. install wordpress
4. transfer name to server hosting wordpress, you can probably do all this in an evening maybe 1-2 hrs

I am currently hosting my own wordpress site in vmware at home

no!all!

I'm gonna have Queen stuck in my head all day now!