Consulting

Bl8ckr0uter

How do you know if you are good enough to do some small business consulting?

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forkvoid

You don't. There's no benchmark. How does one know if they are good enough to be a senior admin? They don't until they do it.

Get some clients and see how it goes. You'll find out soon enough.

mikej412

You find enough people willing to pay you to do work for them so that it becomes your full time day job.

Bl8ckr0uter

I was just wondering how much cisco experience you need to start doing some basic consulting. I think I would like to do a little work on the side to keep using my cisco knowledge.

wolverene13

Bl8ckr0uter wrote: »

I was just wondering how much cisco experience you need to start doing some basic consulting. I think I would like to do a little work on the side to keep using my cisco knowledge.

I was a consultant for about 6 years or so. I started out with a few clients to supplement my income, just fixing some basic "Where's the 'any' key?" type stuff, then gradually moved into troubleshooting routing and switching issues. After a while (maybe a year or two), I quit my job and started doing it full time. I was designing networks for new office locations, configuring the gear, and installing it. Then I would fix stuff when it broke. But, when the economy went down the tubes, I had to go back to working for someone else. Consulting is awesome and I loved it. There was something new every day, you didn't have to show up to the same place all the time, you can work out of your home, and the pay was awesome. The only problem is that sometimes it was feast or famine. I'd make $3000 one week, then $200 the next. It's good for young single people, but if you're worried about supporting a family, I'd keep the day job for a long time until you get firmly established with the consulting gig. But to answer your question, all I really needed was a CCNA and about two or three years of real-world experience.

earweed

I do it part time and even that is feast or famine. I mostly deal with individuals but have had 2 small office setups. You will learn a lot and on occasion lose money if you go in a wrong direction. You'll be dealing with the lower eschelon of companies until you're established and they will always try to lowball you (or not pay what was agreed)
It's not something to enter into lightly.

it_consultant

When you can stand the heat. The CEO of an important client is looking over your shoulder and the Exchange store is jacked, log files haven't been truncated in months, you have worked with them for all of 2 weeks and haven't had time to look at there critical backups.

Lets see, last Friday some lady eradicated a RAID array when she rebooted a server and saw an error message and hit the wrong button, oops.

Same client, someone loaded outlook on the small business server to save licensing costs, we all know what happens when we load outlook on an exchange server.

Small business consulting makes you learn frickin fast. Its not a comfy corporate IT job. One day your working on a sweet juniper firewall and the next your working on a gnatbox. And you'll get them both working just fine. You get a big hardened, you deal with peoples' stupidity, you become unafraid of telling people what they need to here even if its not comfortable and no one else has had the balls to do it until you. Ultimately thats the best part of consulting, using your considerable expertise to un-screw years of bad IT and business decisions all the mean time making the client think it was all their idea.