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Advice on How to Start an IT Business (Video)
Lee Drake owns a small IT service and sales company in Rochester, New York, called OS Cubed. He was a cubicle denizen many years ago, and didn't like it. So he started his own business, first with a partner and later as the sole owner. Rochester may be part of the infamous "rust belt," but Lee seems to be doing well, to the point where he's happy to pass on some tips about how to start and grow your own IT business. While Lee's company specializes in "Microsoft solutions," his advice applies to almost any IT business -- and almost any other kind of business, too.
While Lee's company specializes in "Microsoft solutions,"
my biggest problem ...
Move to India.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I being dumb? Where is the effin' article?
Apologies for the extraneous A.
Where's the link for the mf video?
Make sure your web host can handle traffic before linking it on Slashdot.
I think you need to go over to slashdot deals and purchase it ;)
What the hell is wrong with you, Slashdot? Autoplaying video is incredibly annoying and an insult to your readers (who, by and large, know how to play a video they want to watch).
But, what's worse, you've managed to make it even more annoying than normal!
1. The video doesn't autoplay right away - there's a delay of several seconds, plenty of time for someone to scroll down to the comments only to then have the video start playing out of view.
2. With Flashblock on, the audio plays, but there's no video (mind you, in this case the video is largely superfluous)
3. There's no volume control
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
An 11 minute video with Roblimo and some tard selling Microsoft shit? No thanks...
One thing I'm very curious about is how his personal income has changed over time, relative to what he'd be earning as a typical IT employee. Owning a business has a lot of pros and cons, but for most of us, the extra hours are partly justified by higher income.
Yeah, I think this is my last slashdot visit. This places just makes me feel dirty now. Off to reddit boys....
For what it's worth, I've been co-owner of a small software-as-a-service business focused on libraries for the last five years. A week or so ago, I wrote a blog post on our experience and financial situation.
Basic summary: by keeping costs low and our expectations reasonable, we're thriving even without a huge revenue stream.
This video is pretty good, but his other video is rock solid:
http://youtu.be/SBioHq3aPsQ
The last thing they want is more competition, despite all their claims of worshiping the free market and risk.
I thought I was losing my mind, there was an odd voice telling me to start an IT company coming from behind my testing server. Thankfully it turned out to /. with an autoplay video. Seriously, this is not a Geocities site. Act like professionals make disable the fscking autoplay!
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Just common sense stuff like you have to be passionate about your business, when you have your own business sometimes you have to work more than when you were an employee, focusing on solutions for the client and the list of truisms goes on and on ...
It was a waste of time for me.
"Think globally, act locally".
Was the only solution I could come up with other than not looking at posts with video in them.
Can't see the link to it?!
I guess patch tuesday is just around the corner :)
I don't see a video at all.
Is there a solution on our end, aside from avoiding the story altogether? This is horrible. Is there is rational, logical reason to be so annoying? Is it really that effective? I hope they don't delete the pause/stop button, but at this rate, I won't put it past them. It's a shame to see this place succumb to spam tactics such as this. Bad, bad...
Mod up! Anyone selling a Microsoft solution is basically fucking you over to line their own pockets.
That's not how exponents work...
Agreed! Anti-kudos for that one. Mad panic for the volume slider.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm a lifelong business owner, and this guy is calling it exactly, giving good advice, and all you can do is complain about autoplay? Just be decent and don't complain about cubicle life, OK?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If you want to start your own company, then one thing matters: cashflow.
I ran a side business from about 2003 until 2010 when I decided to quit my job and go into full time business, where I still am today.
All the good ideas in the world don't matter for anything if you don't have income actually coming in, day by day. You can have the biggest profit on the balance sheet but if you don't have actual cash in the bank, you're dead. So you find yourself perpetually chasing debtors, chasing money and doing work you would rather not be doing because it pays immediately.
My advice is - start young, don't wait. When you're like me and you have kids in private school, cars, mortgages (and now staff), you can't have bad months. When you're 23 you can afford to eat noodles or whatever if it slows down, so start young when you're not already tied up with responsibilities. Make sure you have a couple of stable (couple - not one) customers, who can pay you some money each month, so you're ok and you can survive one of them going quite for a while - because they will.
Don't base your business on a dream of money coming in once you make something unless you have deep pockets (i.e. a start up) or no costs.
Don't base your business on one customer because a) as far as your government is concerned (at least most of them) that's not a business - that's being a consultant, which is not the same thing for taxation and b) if they hit a rough patch, you're screwed.
Diversify your customer base as fast as you can. Don't assume that a project on the horizon is going to happen because it my fall apart for reasons out of your control.
Minimise your outgoings, always. This goes for IT, rent and every other cost.
The bad thing about running a business is that you're running a business. If you love development or cloud or IT or whatever, if you start a business doing it, you wind up running a business. You have to chase leads, find money, do your taxes, pay staff, hire staff. Manage them when they're lazy or pissed off or bored or whatever. Pretty soon, you're not doing development or whatever - you're going to some shitty "business leaders breakfast" to hear a bunch of PHB bang on about their latest buzzwords because of the off chance you might get a meeting, which will allow you the privilege of spending 4 days making a detailed proposal (for free) to then give to someone so they can never bother getting back to you to even say "no thanks".
All that said, I wouldn't leave it for anything.
What!? And then Dice misses all those comments ;-)
Perl Programmer for hire
4. Clicking on the video picture does not pause the video (unlike just about every other video player out there!)
It's a pain in the butt, but /. clearly can't be trusted with javascript. So it's disabled now on 263 computers when they attempt to view slashdot. In fairness, only one or two of those computers visit here, probably. It's a work environment, so most of them are checking out Gawker and Drudge :(.
Just be like me and don't keep your flash player or browser up to date - thus avoiding both "beta" and videos like that.
So where is the video link?
... to starting a small business is accepting a vow of poverty.
Fucking Hell. I didn't even know the video was playing until I got to this comment and scrolled up. (Headphones plugged in, but not on my head.) Evil. If you are a slashdot editor, you are now complicit in working for evil.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
I get the bad feeling that Lee Drake has a problem interrupting people when they are doing other things, has social insensitivity, and has problems with appropriate behavior in an office setting. Oh wait, sorry that's just Slashdot.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Seriously, slashdot? I open the page and it automatically starts playing a video advertisement with no way to kill it except to close the whole page. You know better than that.
Where the heck is the video?
All I see is a link to Lee Drake's facebook page, OS Cubed home page and wikipedia about rust belt.
I have a different problem. I want to watch the video, but cannot for the life of me find it.
Tried it in all leading browsers including latest versions of IE, Chrome, Firefox and even Opera. What happened to a link or a player in the browser?
I concur. I don't come here often anymore, and now that I have, an ad starts playing that I can't stop without closing the webpage? FFS. That's it for me. Somegeek out.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..