Services business & freelancing as an engineer

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription – Now let's start talking about specifically what kinds of businesses you can do with your background with your engineering background in a service business where you program things do technical tasks for other companies individuals is a very easy transition for you so let's talk about the pros and cons of it the biggest con is that you're probably at least partially trying to get out of doing programming for other people that's why you might be thinking oh maybe I'll stop doing tech and I'll start doing business and so I'm kind of putting you hey right go right back into business so if that's a problem okay maybe this video is not for you but it is very very very simple to make that transition so it's worthwhile to think about because it's similar but the difference is that it can give you the freedom that you want the difference is that you're not stressing out what your of what your boss is gonna think of what you're you know that the head management is gonna want but you're gonna it's gonna be working on your own business and so it's actually more motivating more fun and that just might be enough to make that difference another Pro is that this business is scalable you can hire the engineers later once you get enough clients and once this is stable and over time once you know hey I'm getting like a good influx of clients on a regular basis you can hire other engineers to do the actual work and you just become the manager and the sales person which is essentially you're just doing the business of this business which is kind of what you wanted to do anyway and this is fantastic because a service business really thrives on like really lives and dies by the margin of like let's say you hire people to do work for $10 an hour but you sell that work for an unknown number it can be $11 an hour it can be $500 an hour it's totally up to you so as you become better as a sales person your margins and profits will increase so this business is a deal to start practicing sales marketing presentation branding so that you can start telling premium looking services and that people pay premium prices for so there's a lot of business savvy in that of course another good thing about this business is that you can start it early there's you can literally start promoting it today this has a very low barrier to entry you already have the skill set if you're technical so you just have to start promoting how do the marketing marketing is challenging here because precisely because it's an easy business to get into there's a low barrier to entry a lot of people are providing the services so it's at times going to be competitive ideally you would get clients from search but search is going to be so competitive search is people who already are searching for it already want you so that's gonna be very competitive because you're gonna have you know similar people with similar skill sets to you already who started promoting this earlier and so what you're gonna do is look at other places to get leads some good places for leads are freelancing sites like fiverr.com upwork.com and similar sites you can also create YouTube videos other content and even run some ads I'd be careful about running ads because it's very hard to run them profitably and you end up losing your own money in the process especially if you're just getting into this so this is essentially the business of services you already have if you're thinking of it in terms of the three-sentence business plan you already have that first sentence the business the the service you're providing the marketing is somewhat clear it's just a lot of legwork and effort to try to do it and the financials are also very clear about this all you have to do is just you know check you charged per hour per job so the that part is clear and you just have to get clients doing the programming technical services that you already know how to do.