Trying to do contractor work after working full time 10 years in the same company

[techperson]

Hi everyone, I've been working for the last 10 years for one single MSP where I picked up every opportunity I had from 1st line support all the way to directing the company for the last 3 years while juggling my technical role at the same time. It was a small 20 people company so you need to wear many hats.

I got really bored and decided to leave to form my own MSP 2 months ago, but as you may know the beginning is quite difficult getting new customers on board as you are building trust with them (I'm not taking old clients on board due to 6 months clause on my contract to approach them) and networking.

My idea is to do some short term contracts helping other companies out with technical and soft skills that I've in IT, but some friends told me the contractor industry works differently and you tend to get 1 or 2 year contracts. I was hoping I could get shorter contracts let's say do an Office 365 migration, implement document policies in Sharepoint, mobile device management. Perhaps on the soft skill side as well helping with IT strategy for a few days getting SME up to speed with what they should be doing, migrating legacy stuff to cloud systems, etc..

Am I wrong to assume there are companies offering this kind jobs out there that only require a few days/weeks to implement and few days/weeks to train people?

Thanks!

[cojak]

This is for small clients? The big big boys work differently. You need to be clear with your offerings and your prices, and what sort of customer you’re going for. Write out a business plan before you do anything else.

[techperson]

This is for small clients? The big big boys work differently. You need to be clear with your offerings and your prices, and what sort of customer you’re going for. Write out a business plan before you do anything else.

I'm thinking about small companies to begin with, but I'm not sure there is such type of work out there for contractors as all the roles I find on jobs search are for long contracts asking for a very specific vertical. I'm after some small jobs first to see how it feels like, the idea to do some migrations for small companies is what I had in mind first but I'm not sure there is such work out there.

[Old Greg]

I'm thinking about small companies to begin with, but I'm not sure there is such type of work out there for contractors as all the roles I find on jobs search are for long contracts asking for a very specific vertical. I'm after some small jobs first to see how it feels like, the idea to do some migrations for small companies is what I had in mind first but I'm not sure there is such work out there.

There are contractors who do 3 month to 3 year contracts. They are people who do freelance small scale web design. There may be an opportunity to do the kind of thing you're talking about.

[PermieToContractorAndBack]

Smaller organisations often don't have the money to engage contractors. If they don't have the permanent staff to do this sort of work already, they probably don't have the confidence to jump into a migration project and will keep buying off the self solutions. They will only save money through these migrations on larger scales anyway, if they are small, the cost of any kind of solution may not make that much difference, especially if they have to then employ different skillset and pay for that on top of everything else.

Larger companies contract large consultancies that have the bodies to do the grunt work.

The problem with your plan is that it's not specialist enough. A lot of large organisations do this already, it's their bread and butter. You are competing with cheap Indian labour.

It's not really a business plan you are supposed to start with, it's market research. then business plan.

[techperson]

I'm at the moment doing some small jobs for other IT companies that I met through events and friends, so they are outsourcing some of their work to me for example Office 365 deployments, migrating VMware environment to a private cloud provider and so on. I was hoping I could do some of these jobs directly to the customers, but indeed that doesn't seem to be how the market works.

I'm planning to deep dive in O365 world and stop doing VMware stuff and focus more on Azure. I would like to have my own clients and just run my company, slowly expanding. The idea of doing these contracts would be to fill the gap in between and be exposed to different industries while doing some cool work.

I was doing Aribnb hosting a few years ago and I hosted a person that was doing some IT contractor work upgrading/installing software for about 2 weeks. I never got into detail back then so I'm planning to contact the chap and get some more info. That is the kind of stuff I was hoping to find for the time being until my other work becomes more consistent.

I'm all ears, pretty fresh here from 10 years working for a small MSP has narrowed down my field of view....

[PermieToContractorAndBack]

I'm at the moment doing some small jobs for other IT companies that I met through events and friends, so they are outsourcing some of their work to me for example Office 365 deployments, migrating VMware environment to a private cloud provider and so on. I was hoping I could do some of these jobs directly to the customers, but indeed that doesn't seem to be how the market works.

I'm planning to deep dive in O365 world and stop doing VMware stuff and focus more on Azure. I would like to have my own clients and just run my company, slowly expanding. The idea of doing these contracts would be to fill the gap in between and be exposed to different industries while doing some cool work.

I was doing Aribnb hosting a few years ago and I hosted a person that was doing some IT contractor work upgrading/installing software for about 2 weeks. I never got into detail back then so I'm planning to contact the chap and get some more info. That is the kind of stuff I was hoping to find for the time being until my other work becomes more consistent.

I'm all ears, pretty fresh here from 10 years working for a small MSP has narrowed down my field of view....

Azure is a very good idea. I am an AWS specialist and my day rate is around £600 and I've only been doing this for a couple of years (my background is very data heavy though and I have some high value certificates).

More importantly, there is a TON of work.

Speak to as many people you can even if just to discard some ideas. Figure out your market, what you think will be worth your while medium term (probably impossible to plan long term with certainty).

Azure is becoming a strong competitor for AWS, especially in the Enterprise space.

[malvolio]

Just remember that even small companies hire people who can do the job and have done the job for other companies successfully enough that those other companies will tell them that. In this market, no matter how big the potential client, generalists are not wanted nor needed.

But I agree with the others. First work out what you are selling, or perhaps what you can sell is a better phrase. then find out if anyone wants to buy it, and if they do can you make enough money at it to make it worthwhile for you. Then go look for the work.

[PermieToContractorAndBack]

The advantage of having skills in more recent technologies (such as AWS or Azure) is that there are far far fewer people with a lot of experience or having the ability to judge that experience. At the same time there is a lot of demand.

Which you can turn to your advantage if you are smart. Practice pitching, anticipate questions. You are not looking at your traditional contracting market where you would only get work if you had delivered exactly the same solution for the past 5 years. Partly because there is so much variety even in similar solutions.

Figure out where it's safe for you to blag it, basically.

[techperson]

Azure is a very good idea. I am an AWS specialist and my day rate is around £600 and I've only been doing this for a couple of years (my background is very data heavy though and I have some high value certificates).

More importantly, there is a TON of work.

Speak to as many people you can even if just to discard some ideas. Figure out your market, what you think will be worth your while medium term (probably impossible to plan long term with certainty).

Azure is becoming a strong competitor for AWS, especially in the Enterprise space.

Just out of curiosity, how long normally does your contracts last? Are these jobs always sort of long term like several months? Maybe I had the wrong impression that there would be jobs for a few days/weeks?

Just remember that even small companies hire people who can do the job and have done the job for other companies successfully enough that those other companies will tell them that. In this market, no matter how big the potential client, generalists are not wanted nor needed.

But I agree with the others. First work out what you are selling, or perhaps what you can sell is a better phrase. then find out if anyone wants to buy it, and if they do can you make enough money at it to make it worthwhile for you. Then go look for the work.

I've been a generalist for a long time, from being cisco engineer, account manager, sales, vmware, datacentre engineer, storage engineer, cyber sec, you name it. I've done pretty much anything a sysadmin can do, that has kept me as a generalist and over the last few years I've focused a bit on office 365, but again that was just another thing added to my list of generalist. I guess me running my own MSP now won't make things much better in this aspect, but I'm hoping to deep dive in Office 365 and Azure as it is the stuff I feel most comfortable working with and then I'll get my customers to use these technologies.

The advantage of having skills in more recent technologies (such as AWS or Azure) is that there are far far fewer people with a lot of experience or having the ability to judge that experience. At the same time there is a lot of demand.

Which you can turn to your advantage if you are smart. Practice pitching, anticipate questions. You are not looking at your traditional contracting market where you would only get work if you had delivered exactly the same solution for the past 5 years. Partly because there is so much variety even in similar solutions.

Figure out where it's safe for you to blag it, basically.

Are you just contracting for other bigger companies then as part of bigger jobs? Would you mind sharing a bit more about your experience doing this please?