# Self employment



## Rodomantade (Apr 1, 2008)

I would appreciate some feed back on self employment. 

Background: I have a 2 year degree in IT, and I'm Network+ certified. I've been simultaneously studying for A+ and CCNA. I have experience troubleshooting PCs for family, friends, and I landed a 6 month spot at a local college last year doing part time tier 1. There is no IT market here. There are 0 jobs. I feel like more certs will be a waste of time without an entry level job. I have been extremely aggressive in looking for work. I went to the director of the biggest IT department in my little town and essentially asked for a job. I was shot down, but he suggested some part time work on my own.

To clear up one thing, I have a job, and I am not quitting my day job. I'm not relying on this as my income. I only want to try it out and see where it takes me. I thought of doing general PC repair, but I settled on virus/malware removal. I feel comfortable doing it.

Here's my marketing plan: I orded some nice business cards. I plan on saturating my entire town with fliers, cards, newspaper ad, facebook, and throwing together a cheap website and unleashing it all in one day. My second level of attack is word of mouth. Once I get going, I plan on treating customers like gold and telling them to refer me to others if they would.

Here's my technical plan: I plan on spending atleast 3 weeks reviewing sec+ videos on professormesser.com, reading articles on virus/malware removal, and putting together a list of programs. I have a terabyte external HD for backup, and I plan on putting as many free programs as I can on a flash drive for removal... MBAM, AVG, Avast, spybot SD, and of course a boot time scan. My fee will be $50 for everything(this is cheaper than the local shop by far). No fee for no fix of course. I won't begin until I feel techincally comfortable.

Again, if I make no money on this, it doesn't matter. I just want to do SOMETHING. So please, critique my plan! Thanks


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## Rodomantade (Apr 1, 2008)

Anyone else do this on the side? What type of business model do you follow? What programs do you use?


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## greenbrucelee (Apr 24, 2007)

All I can add is going self employed in this current climate will be challenging so you would be wise to keep your current job as you said..

Also going for the CCNA without cisco experience isn't a good idea just as going for security + without security experience isn't a good idea. Apart from the A+ and N+ certs are designed to show your real world experience.

Anyway no one is going to ask you to look at the cisco kit anyway, most companies will have a contract with someone who will do that or their telecom providers will do it.


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## Eric79 (Feb 25, 2012)

Rodomantade said:


> Anyone else do this on the side? What type of business model do you follow? What programs do you use?


A few months ago I thought about doing this on the side and keep my day job etc.
I was going to do malware/virus removal and then possibly upgrading customer's computers to their needs.
In a sense it's a good business idea since 90%+ of people don't know how to fix their computers or upgrade them. However it seems very hard to advertise this type of business besides Craigslist or referrals. And most of the time people will wait till their computer completely crashes to resolve the issue and then they will just go out and buy a new one when they could have spent $50 to get their computer "tuned" up.
If there is a great way to advertise this type of business I would jump on it immediately to get some much needed experience and be my own boss.:smile:
I would like to hear more input on this as well from other members and also Rodomantade, if you don't mind me asking, what area are you from? You from a big city or small town, this could really affect this type of business.


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## joeten (Dec 4, 2008)

Malware removal is a very specific area and needs a lot of training it is not something to run at with little to no training as some of the tools used in some cases can brick a machine faster than any piece of malware if you do not have the requisite training


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## BosonMichael (Nov 1, 2011)

It is also a bad idea to tell a customer that you can remove something that ultimately can't be removed. Meanwhile, you've either quoted a flat rate and are thereby making less than minimum wage, or you've quoted an hourly rate and are costing the customer more than the computer is worth. You don't want to put yourself in that situation.


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## Artydillo (Jul 17, 2012)

Hats off to you. Its an honorable thing to do. Remember your liability insurance. If you mess up a customer's system you could potentially be at risk of getting sued for larger amounts, and then your party would be over and you'd have to go back to sluggin 9-5 again. Don't quote me on this, but I think I read somewhere that Geeksquad charges 20% extra on whatever they do just to cover their insurance reserves in case something bad happens on another repair.


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