That being said, I’m certainly not the person you should be asking if you can succeed. The only one who can answer that for you is sitting in your chair reading this reply. It’s a very difficult question to answer because there are so many factors.

I’ve heard people in the past say some ridiculous things like “You have to want it bad enough.” I don’t buy into that. You have to be so afraid of failing that you’ll do anything to not fail, including things like marketing or business development that you can’t stand and aren’t any good at, but need to do in order to survive. That’s how you succeed.

If you’re so afraid of failing that you will do anything to avoid failing, then you’ll eventually succeed. Also, don’t be afraid to change gears a bit. Even with my business, I’m in a much different place now than I thought I would be two years ago, but that doesn’t mean that things aren’t going well.

I have been working in Bank for the past 13 years: 8 years in retail credit, 4 years in risk management and controls, and 1 year in financial product development. In the past 7 years, I have been doing private money lending service on my private business.
I thought I knew a lot of things but I don’t know which of them will lead to paying customers. To set up the business, I need to create a web site with some expertise info. My common sense tells me that I should list all things I have done to increase the chance someone will find one of my skills to be interesting, but my MBA education tells me I should be focused as a small business.
I am a nigeria and these kind of service is not very common in the country. do you think i can succeed in in self employment because am being tempted to quit job as it does not give me the desired fulfillment.
thank you.

That last piece is important. You HAVE to ask. Only a very small percentage will do it on their own if you don’t ask. That trips up a lot of people from the engineering side of the world because they’re not used to schmoozing and asking for business leads.

IT recruiting companies are different than a consulting company because IT recruiting companies are not much more than glorified placement agencies. They don’t have a vested interest in the people they place beyond a contract that states their clients can’t hire them out from under them and cut the recruiting company out of the loop.

A consulting company, on the other hand, is full of “consultants” who work for the consulting company. They have a job to worry about. At my company, the consultants are full time hires, where at a recruiting company, they are merely contractors who don’t have a job after the current one is over with.

If my company can’t find work for one of my consultants, then I still have to pay them a salary, while a recruiting company wouldn’t have to. They’d say “Well, the job is over. You’re on your own again unless something comes up.” That’s why they get paid more and are paid on an hourly basis.

My employees are paid salary. Sure, they make less money than a consultant, but the pay is stable, or at least relatively so, and they don’t need to worry about whether they can put food on the table. Extra money is banked for slow times and used for new equipment, software, hardware, employee training, and toys.

You’re right about scalability and profitability of a traditional IT recruiting company. The straight consulting model I use is a lot less scalable, but my long term goal is not to become a recruiting company. It’s to do what I enjoy, which is software development.

I agree unix/linux skills can be a harder sell than Windows skills for the reasons you mentioned. It’s hard to find small projects using unix or even Java. And bigger companies tend to only work with known vendors not individuals. That’s actually the reason I have been semi-independent. Unless you know some decision maker, it is difficult to get on their vendor list. That’s probably what you meant by “in”.

Regarding the niche, I suppose it should be an industry rather than a specific skill set. The issue with industry niche is that the projects I worked on dealt with a narrow band within industry spectrum, i.e. the domain knowledge was often limited to the specific problems to be solved. It is not very transferable to other areas or companies and could limit the markability of the experience. However, if the niche is based on a skill set, it would seem hard to differentiate – there are a lot developers who have the kind of skill set.

I apologize that I didn’t state what I meant by “staffing company”. They are the IT recruiting companies. They are on the vendor list of the customers. Every time, the customer has a need for an employee/contractor, they help fill the position by finding the resource on the market and taking their cut (>30% of the rate for contractor). It seems the barrier to entry is the client list (or to get on client’s vendor list). After that, you are in business. You can scale up if you are able to get on more client’s list. In contrast, for a small IT consulting company, you subcontract the extra work you can’t do, but I doubt you can take 30% cut. And to scale up, you will have to land enough work for youself and for subcontractors. Otherwise, it would be in the self-employed mode, not much different from what I am doing now – full time project plus some side projects.

To answer your question about the website, I would definitely choose a niche market and go with it. I’m often amazed at just how many niches there are out there and how well they can be exploited by people with the right know-how and the gumption to do it.

That said, it’s not always easy to identify a niche if it’s right in front of you because you’ve been working with it for so long, you have a tendency to believe that the market is saturated with people with that skillset, or that it’s not in enough demand to be able to support yourself.

You should think back to the customers you have worked with, and why they hired you at all. Is there a pattern of any kind? Do they have other employees there who can do what you do? If not, then you’ve probably found your niche. The fact that you know Unix more than Windows leads me to believe that you need to look in the Unix world, which tends to be larger customers.

Smaller customers who use Linux use it because it’s free and they see it as better to pay employees to learn stuff than to pay for licensing that makes it easier to hire people. It’s a bit of a catch 22. You spend the money one way or another. In your case, your Unix skills probably put you in more on a mid-level to enterprise business. In a Unix world, that’s probably a harder shell to crack without an ‘in’ of some kind.

One way to create this ‘in’ on your own is to focus on a very narrow niche. Use Google AdWords to drive some of your traffic and pay for your leads. I know another consulting company that pays $5 per click but they use highly focused text in their ads and their click through rate is low, but the conversion rate is high and it is worth it for them to do it.

A consulting business is probably different from a staffing company in very subtle ways, and all of them are likely to be based on connotations. Thus at a root level, there’s not much difference at all.

On the surface, the implications of a staffing company are for unskilled or manual labor although I suspect that there are staffing companies out there who are geared directly at keeping high tech people on staff to outsource to software startup companies.

I’m not clear on one thing though. If you aren’t sure of the difference between a staffing company and a consulting company, how can you make the claim that a staffing company is likely to be more profitable and scalable than a consulting company? Until you nail down concrete definitions for a staffing company and how it is different than a consulting company, it is difficult to discuss why one or the other is more profitable and scalable.