This post was too dirty for Vladville…
From the mailbag (which due to the overload of everything I participate in nowadays with Facebook/Twitter/Newsgroups/Blah I have committed to only checking once a day):
If money can’t be made on infrastructure sales or support, where would you make it if you were me?
Interestingly enough, I spoke about this very thing with my wife yesterday. She’s pretty aware of what I do and how, so I explained my ten year plan to her:
"I’m going to be 30 this year. I intend to work to death over the next 10 years and at that point I’m done. I’m getting a new car and a new wife and I haven’t come up with the rest yet."
Then I put my hand on her tummy and said: "Kick if you’re with me!"
If you deal with reality and face your problems head on you start to find humor in your doom. No sense getting all down about things if they are bad, if you’re depressed how can you find your way out of it. I know what is in my plans but damn if I’m about to spill it here. What I think the reader asked was: "What would you do if you were me?"
If I were in the IT field, running a small business and made most my revenues from the product lines that are rapidly approaching zero (hardware commissions, SOHO tech support, smallbiz technology advising, desktop software support, hardware monitoring… basically everything that is either currently or soon will be done by someone for $0.85 an hour in India or $0.25 in China) I would sacrifice next few months of gravy train sales and pitches for a retraining in development of business solutions software. Actual training on development, not some bootcamp that teaches you how to add webparts to a SharePoint page or another regurgitation of Idiots Guide To ____.
Small businesses are getting, and rightfully expecting, more and more crap for free. And in that process of taking advantage of the lower cost of technology, they still have a huge overhead of monkeys running around like McDonalds employees around a fryer. Even a minimum wage earner is still a $20,000 hit to the payroll, so would you get a sit if your marketing read: "Are you really using the technology you bought? Give us an hour, we’ll save you $20,000"
Now I have an advantage because I already know how to develop software and I know a ton of people – but say you didn’t. Your first goal would be to find out who the regional MicrosoftBS rep is (I think they went away from MicrosoftBS because the name gave it away, I think its now Microsoft Dynamics). Track that person down and in your best reenactment of a cheesy porn movie go to their office and say the following: "I run a successful, profitable company and I want to be the biggest private sector whore for your products in this market."; One thing MicrosoftBS division has been able to do, as the name implies, is get a ton of marketing money for anyone that will promote their solutions. Remember the posts about "Sold you a dream" – MicrosoftBS is that! They have sold the upper management the dream that MicrosoftBS can be the next SAP/Oracle, they just need money. They already sold three Biztalks, with a few billion they might could sell the fourth. Go into the meeting with the same premise – "I AM the fourth Biztalk sale!" Sell that dream, baby!
Now you’ve got the cash, free training, Microsoft contact person.. time to look at what Microsoft Dynamics actually sells. Shit, nothing you can sell to the SMB. Ok, ok, new plan. We figure out how to make the crap these people already bought work better. Ok. I need a minimum wage monkey to function like a pedometer. Just tag one of the office workers and follow them for a week and find out wtf they do. Take notes. Here’s $100 if you try to get them in English. Woop.
Week later you got a $200 portfolio of savings you can produce by tuning their Office apps to move data along so they can process 5,000 widgets a week instead of 800. On the way out spill coke as you leave the office, let the business owner see his staff hanging around cleaning up the floor and dreaming about 5,000 widgets getting done on their own.
Keep on dreaming… all the way to the bank.
