In my experience, a service provider is the best way to start a business. The ramp-up is short. There is also the benefit that providing a service is an excellent way to do market research on a product. Some of the best product ideas I have come across grew out of lessons learned while providing a service.
For example, one of the first products I worked on was a library of tools that consultants put together as part of their daily work for clients. Those tools just needed some organization and refinement to turn them into a product. The market demand was already confirmed as these tools were solutions to everyday business problems faced in the field.
Service Provider Options
Here are some general areas that you can launch your service provider business today. Each one includes how the approach can boost your career and lead you to work that you love. A proper focus will improve your odds of success as we perform better when doing something we love.
The Teacher
We see this form of specialization with teachers that stick to a specific subject. They may struggle outside of that topic, but they become masters of what they teach. They have a foundation that they started with, and they have perfected that over time. The difference is that our foundation is evolving. We can stick to that topic, but we probably will grow as it grows and attempt to outpace it.
For example, Java has changed substantially over the years. The people that have been in it all along not only know the latest news, they also know how it evolved to get to this point. This historical knowledge can point to undocumented features, workarounds, and reasoning for the current approach. This data can be critical in migration projects where skills in the source platform have become rare.
A teacher can go the traditional route of working with a local school or college, but there are far more avenues to provide this service. A channel on YouTube or a similar platform is a way to provide regular content while working on your delivery. The monetization from classes may not be as high as other options, but it is easy to get started and can be an excellent platform for growth. Similarly, sites like Udemy and many others provide a way to create and deliver classes. These have varying rates of pay, but they do have a built-in audience and help you with marketing. Finally, you can do it yourself and run in-person classes, partner with local companies or build courses to deliver directly from your site.
The Consultant
Teachers drive the content they provide by selecting a topic to teach. Consultants are similar, but the content they produce is often determined by their customers. Consultants also have to provide much more specific information and work as part of their jobs. They do see a lot of the same pros and cons that teachers experience. A consultant can be a generalist. However, most of them go deep in at least one or more areas. Their work often utilities those deep skills while leaning on them for some general knowledge as well. Thus, consultants tend to grow to a broad skillset over time.
There was a time where being a consultant was often thought of as the same as being out of work. IT workers that were between jobs would list themselves as a consultant. That may still occur, but it is incredibly easy to pick up actual work through sites like UpWork, Guru, and the like. Thus, many IT workers can run a side hustle of consulting with only a little time spent hunting down work and responding to requests. Of course, once that consulting income and workload grow beyond a salary from a “day job” it makes the jump to working for yourself an obvious choice.
The great thing about this service is that you can always say “no” to a job. Therefore, your work is either what you want or at least what you are willing to do to pay bills. This includes restricting your work to specific platforms, specific project sizes, and even desired roles. A picky consultant may not stay very busy, but at least they can always be doing work they love.
Another good part of being a consultant is that they can do ad hoc work for customers or offer packages of services. For example, a consultant can provide an IT check-up service where they come in, review systems, and provide recommendations. This sort of packaged service can reduce your risk and time involved since the work can be templatized and even automated in some cases. This can allow you to scale your services beyond an hour of your time for every hour that is billed to a customer.
The Mentor
This option is becoming flooded but is still valid. You do have to distinguish yourself from the crowd. A mentor is somewhat like a consultant but guides more than does. This is a service that has practically no startup costs. You need to have skills and offer to mentor others. This is why so many mentors are out there. Every niche has the opportunity of someone that masters it and mentors others. You can mentor on building WordPress websites, shell script programming, or even developing enterprise systems. The options are endless.
A mentor may stay broad in their skills. However, this is rare. Most mentors will be very deep in their areas of expertise and are a mix of academic and pragmatic in their ability to apply those skills. Although a mentor does not often do the work for their students, they still can do so. This is a difference from being a teacher in that the students help drive precisely how to utilize the knowledge of the mentor. It is a pull relationship for the student more than a push of content that teachers provide.
Each of the service types mentioned may also include activities like speaking engagements, presentations to customers or authoring books and white papers. They can serve a purpose of being a product for sale, or as marketing and sales materials for your services. Once again, this is where our options in the IT world are plentiful and easy to try out to see what we truly enjoy.
