welcome to the dear SQL DBA podcast and YouTube show
I am Kendra Little from SQLWorkbooks.com. On today's podcast
our topic is: Dear SQL DBA - I want to work for mysel. For the Dear SQL DBA
podcast I take questions from folks -- database administrators and developers
usually -- and they give me all sorts of questions. This one is someone who said: I
currently work for a larger corporation as a consultant.
There are lots and lots of processes and all of the tickets I work on are
emergencies and I'm getting really burnt out. I have an IT focus. Is it possible to
get a job like a freelance developer but with an IT focus? This is a question that
it's a great question and more and more freelancers find different ways to their
jobs but freelancing isn't easy I will mostly be focusing on working for
yourself in the United States today there's different people who do this
around the world and with different healthcare systems and different tax
laws it does it does vary my experience with this is all in the United States
and in the United States freelancing isn't easy I don't get the impression
that it's super easy anywhere but we do have some of our specific challenges one
of the big things to look at first when you're thinking about starting to work
for yourself is three big questions what are the products or services I'm gonna
sell when I say products here I really mean what am i selling they may be all
service based there may be some product I actually deliver something but what am
I gonna sell Who am I going to sell it to and then how will I go about running
the business so we're gonna dig into each of these three things because
before you get started you really need to know what you want to do with all of
these what do I want to sell will I build some
tools that I will need to do my services or am I going to sell these tools to
people what types of processes do I need to build my services even for an initial
consulting job what kinds of scripts do I want to use I can't just use anyone's
code from the internet I need to look at their licensing so what kind of tools do
I want to use for the product that I'm offering how long is it going to take me
to set up that initial offering what what are these products cost and are
there products I can sell that once I build them first they will continue to
make money for me without me actively being involved in them this isn't always
the case but sometimes there are products you can build where for an
initial effort those products could continue to generate money with
relatively low maintenance or input on your part where all of the work is done
by a tool you built perhaps it could be a variety of different things but you're
not gonna have to be personally delivering the product sometimes that'll
be a yes sometimes that'll be a no but you really just want to know the answers
for these and then in terms of who you're gonna sell them to there's
different ways to to find your customers some businesses run on customers that
find them and come to them and maybe this works based on a blog or maybe
there are free tools that are given out for instance these days I write a free
quiz every week I have quizzes on my website I also blog on my business
website I give away some courses for free doing these things so that when
people are having a problem and they search and a search engine on the
internet you want to have them finding blog posts by you or finding tools that
you have if you want to have this type of relationship where the customers
start using your tools and then there's perhaps something else that they can
upgrade to that cost money with you it takes a while of course you build up a
following so that enough people are finding you right
we have to start and we have to build this up there are some businesses
however where its marketing is done by okay we're gonna identify the customers
we're gonna purchase a mailing list from someone or we're gonna purchase a list
of potential customers for someone and then we are going to reach out to these
people of course we have to figure out how are we going to identify with them
who is going to be going out and engaging with them how much time is that
gonna take and then we design after we figure out
okay who are our customers and how are we gonna connect to them we have to
design a sales pipeline because we want to qualify our sales prospects depending
on what you're selling them and in fact I would say in general there's very few
businesses where you want to sell your product to just anyone you want to sell
your product to people who are going to find it useful because you know selling
something to someone that's totally useless for them is going to get you bad
reviews and unhappy customers so you need to have a process for your your
customers that you've identified to help say is this right for you and we are
gonna bring you down through the pipeline you also want to think about
when you're working for yourself one of the inherent problems with working for
yourself especially if you're doing something like consulting is are you
trying to land really large projects or are you trying to work on a lot of
different projects how many customers do you want to have if you want to do the
kind of business where you're working really with one or two customers at a
time the problem with running a company like that is that you become really
really dependent upon those customers and this isn't just tiny companies I
worked for a software company with a hundred people at one point where most
of our revenue came from one really large customer and when that customer
says jump it's really hard to say it's not a good idea to jump right now
because if they leave there go is a huge amount of your revenue stream it can be
done it puts you into different situations in
terms of your relationship with that customer and these are all things that
we're talking about you can change these over the life of your business what
we're talking about here is saying for the initial offering that I want to set
up what do I want to do there's also a lot to think about just as to what
business do I want to form am I gonna have partners how am I going to
incorporate this legally in the United States you can do this as an LLC you can
do this as an S Corp there's a lot at firm ways put some time into researching
what these different things mean and figuring out what you want to do you
also have to decide how much money you want to invest to get started because
especially if this is something you're gonna jump into full time without a
customer pipeline you're gonna burn through money at a pretty you're not
gonna have a lot of income coming in unless you get really really lucky so
you have to figure out how much am I gonna invest in how much risk will I
tolerate even in small business where as things are going well and you do have
good income for a while there can be these dry spells it may be based on time
of year depending on the industry you're using it may just be a coincidence I've
actually seen in the consulting business that there are seasonal tips in
consulting where people are like oh well it's summer vacation and everybody's
going out with their kids we don't want to do a lot of research into changing
things we're just keeping a staff around just to keep things steady if you are
providing more sustaining regular services for people that might actually
be your hire period if people are out of the office and they want you there to
help sustain things so depending on what your industry is there are gonna be
periods where things wax and wane and you you do need to work that into your
risk calculation when you're working for yourself you can't count on always
getting the same paycheck for the right amount command do you want to have
people who contract as your employees do you want to have employees especially in
the initial years of your business it's a big decision and then just how am I
gonna run things how will I keep track of who my customers are their contact
details how I have engaged with them how likely
I think they are to buy a service there's tools you can use for this you
may want to start using something simple and then grow depending on what kind of
potential customers are starting with you may need a more complex tool if you
actually already have a good base of prospects that maybe you've purchased
from someone or have some way to access need to find ways to invoice people and
to track our expenses very important we need to do bookkeeping and accounting
and there's just a lot of mundane little things that come with you in your own
thing like not only invoicing people but following up and saying hey I need to
get paid so there's lots and lots of different things to start with just on
running the business side how do I get to this path though right there's I need
to think about my products I need to think about my customers I need to think
about how to run the business but ok how do I even get the ability to attract the
customers there's a couple different paths that I've seen folks take to this
and I'm gonna outline two of them we have a question that fits right in with
the first path the question is how do you stand out from the other more
experienced consulting folks so let's talk about this in the path to the
expert one way to become a successful freelancer is to figure out ok these are
the products I want to solve or the problems I want to solve these are the
products I want to sell and my customers will want to buy them because they want
to do something faster or there's something they can't do that I will
enable them to do or they won't have to have Ismet you know they will be able to
say costs in some way once you identify what this what this really is you can
work towards becoming an expert and really focus on especially these things
that you want to offer now you're not gonna dive in with this path folks
following this path tend to say ok I want to work for myself one of the first
steps to doing that is I need to learn how you're gonna run this business I
need to learn how to attract these customers so I'm gonna find a small
all to medium-sized business doing something similar to what I want to do
at least in that industry and I want to work there for a while I want to learn
from them how they are running and growing that business and what works and
what doesn't and while I work there I am going to build up a personal blog and a
lot of my own intellectual property and when I'm doing this on my own time this
is not part of the company this thing I'm doing on my own time when I'm doing
this I'm really going to focus about building up information that is related
to the services or products that I plan to offer that intellectual property that
you're building up speaking at conferences doing that blog is what is
going to set you out once you eventually strike it it's going to set you apart
rather once you eventually strike out upon your own as an expert and it's
really that focus on exactly what you offer and your approach to it that is
going to set you apart so you want to have some personality in there and you
want maybe this is going to give you a depending on what you want to deliver to
people maybe this is gonna give you a focus on okay let all includes some
short video clips so they if I want to do consulting so they get a sense of
what it's like to talk to me for example or if you're gonna offer something more
automated maybe you want to start building small example services or
building small examples of the types of things that you want to do there are
things we have to really look out for in this path and you have to be careful
though when you're working at a small to medium
firm mean most of the times there's gonna be an agreement that says hey if
you leave us you can't take our customers with you and I mean I'm not
gonna get into arguing about legal enforceability you really don't want to
be stealing customers anyway I'm not saying to get a job at one of these
small businesses so that when you go work on your own you can take the
clients because usually that is gonna just light a giant bridge on fire and
cause a ton of problems I would be pretty open in the interview with a
company like this saying I I would perhaps because at this point when
you're getting the job for the company you haven't you don't know
I mean you may find that you really like working at this little company or you're
like I don't need to go work for myself this is actually so rewarding I don't
want to deal with all that accounting and bookkeeping this is better but I
would be open if you are look thinking about maybe doing something yourself
someday I would be actually open about that and honest about that because in
your relationship with that employer you don't want to have a big giant secret
that you're hiding in my opinion also that opens up the door to have a
conversation with them and it says if I'm writing blog posts on my own time
who do those belong to that's you want it to be very clear if you're on the
side building up a presence for yourself you want it to be very very clear that
you own that intellectual property same thing with talks that you write for
conferences you want to know exactly which ones you own in exactly which ones
your employer owns because if there's a point where you do set out on your own
and you start using these materials you really don't want to get hit with legal
problems at that point when you're just starting out your own company so I would
negotiate for is it okay for me to own this intellectual property that I write
who owns that and is it I would raise the question and make sure you clearly
know the answer to is it okay for me to moonlight on something can I take on
clients on my own in hours outside of working hours that are totally separate
can I do work on my own and get paid for that this includes even can't like if
you do say a pre-conference session at a conference these are paid engagements
and so knowing that even helps work yes you're taking on outside employment is
that is that something that they don't allow because if so you may not want to
work for them if you really are setting the stage to go work on your own so
that's path a or path one stick with the numbering system
the second path is the side hustle because right on path one we're really
we're doing some blogging in our spare time but we weren't really doing
moonlighting in our spare time maybe it comes up when it
comes to conference socks but we weren't really working a second job the second
pass where this isn't really becoming an expert the second pass for this is
working a lot to make it happen and by a lot I do mean a lot there are folks who
do this starting a second business in your spare time and scoping your
products to fit it to make sure that okay I am working multiple jobs if my
customer needs me and I'm working my main job I need to have a way that
that's okay where they don't need an immediate response or maybe I have some
job where I can stop working it for a while most IT jobs aren't like that that
are full-time jobs right we usually we commit to these certain hours but you
need to find some way to make sure that for your side gig that okay I'm only
available during a certain time or there's a long enough response time
along enough service level agreement for you to not be available right away
typically so you start off doing something nights and weekends you scope
your products to fit with that and you use that experience to figure out to
refine your products and figure out what works really well to build up
testimonials from your customers to get all your processes set to get your
accounting sex you're doing this in your spare time and you're just as you're
scaling up your business you're saying I'm gonna get to a certain point where I
can leave that original gig and do this side gig full-time again with this one
you really have to make sure that you're not secretly doing that work because
your employer is gonna find out the more successful your side gig gets then but
you also need to be able to be open about this you need to be able to have a
website and say hey you know I'm I this is what I do and this is how I do it
well to be open with not only your existing customers but to have a way to
communicate with potential customers the the biggest problem with this is also
that it's really hard it's really time consuming because we're dependent upon
the revenue from our initial job while we're building up the new one we are
literally you know rebuilding our career as we are working it
I've had some folks ask me also what about contracting can contracting be a
stepping stone to make this process easier I personally have been a
contractor before I was a contractor at Microsoft and these terms were folks
outside the United States these terms might work a little bit differently in
the United States typically a contractor works for an agency the agency has a
bunch of clients and they hire on contractors for short to medium term
engagements the contracting company takes a cut of your income and typically
in the United States you earn an hourly rate you may or may not get any benefits
for this so you may still be buying your own health insurance separate from that
the thing about my contracting gig is I actually for me it ended up in me
getting a full-time job at Microsoft at that time in my career what I really
wanted was a quote unquote real DBA job I wanted to be a full-time DBA working
on production systems I'd essentially been a junior DBA and only gotten to
work in non production systems up to that point and I got this contract gig
and I also was like I wasn't sure what it would be like to work at Microsoft I
wasn't sure if I'd like it so it was kind of you know like a good short term
opportunity to do that and I could sustain risk at that point like if it
didn't work out I could pick up another contract I was okay with that and I my
only dependent was a giant rapid at that time so relatively low risk it ended up
getting a full-time job at Microsoft looking back on it it would not have
been a good job in terms of going out to work on my own because I hadn't
negotiated a great rate just and that a lot of that was I didn't even know how
to negotiate and not knowing how to negotiate is a hindrance when you're
working for yourself I just wasn't ready at that time also I worked a lot of
hours to that job and I needed to be available to work an on-call schedule
that could be very erratic and if I had tried to do that job and another job at
the same time I would have gotten burnt out
so it just would not that contracting job wouldn't have worked for that if you
can't do contracting in a way where you can negotiate a really a good rate that
allows you to within a limited scoping hours of work say okay I'm earning
enough here that I can do a side hustle or I'm learning you know earning enough
here that I have time to blog I have time to build up my expertise and this
contracting job allows me to go on the expert path you can do this but you
really want to make sure that it isn't the type of job that isn't gonna burn
you out and then here's the other thing with contracting jobs the contract can
come to end at any time the reason this is attractive to employers is you're not
a full-time employee so if they run out of budget you're gone so the the biggest
problem I think with contracting is you get the sort of uncertainty of what is
my paycheck gonna be next month without the benefits of working for yourself you
might be able to fit it in with this but I don't think it's a magical way to
speed up the process if that that helps it's another job but it's a job with
some uncertainty built into it so it can be a little tougher than having a more
predictable full-time job if you're trying to do the side hustle repped now
I know this sounds hard and may sound a little bit discouraging but it is hard I
mean there's a reason that not everyone is doing this there's a reason that you
see people strike out on their own and then take a job at a full-time company
again it doesn't always work well and you will when running your own business
you will have to go through a process of saying oh this didn't work out
I wasn't charging enough money for this I need to change my product or I need to
raise my rates or I've lost clients and I need to figure out a way to find new
ones or I goofed up at this client and we need to have a difficult you know I
need to see if I can save this relationship with my client and they may
they may leave me these things may start up I mean goofing up may or may not be
your fault goofing up could be a communication thing it could
have been a problem with that contract it could have been in part someone
else's fault it works at the client right but but things are gonna happen
and mistakes are going to be made that's just life so you will constantly have to
be really persistent when working for yourself and say okay how can I make
this better and how can I get past this so it's hard but there and there is a
path from being really burnt-out to being a consultant who works for
themselves the first thing I would do is address the burnout problem the problem
of I am working for someone else and I am really burnt out this is not
something you want to start a company from it's not because it's a hard
process like starting something really hard isn't gonna solve your burnout so
the first step I think is actually figuring out what is a place I need to
get into a place where I'm not unhappy because either becoming an expert or
doing the side hustle having your main job making you really stressed out and
unhappy not going to help you succeed on this path so you may need to change your
job you may need to change your habits exercise sleep how you handle stress you
may need to change things in your personal life you may need to work on
your ability to say no to people and to be able to explain your manager okay
here's why I can't work late every night and here's what we're gonna do to solve
this problem because when you start your own company all these things that stress
you out of all of my customers think their issue is number one or I have to
give someone bad news or we can't make this deadline because there's 18 things
about this project you didn't tell me about things you will have to constantly
deal with things that are out of your control causing you problems when you
work for yourself and yes as someone who were sure yourself you do have the
ability to say okay I don't want to do this work and we're not you know we are
gonna end this relationship with my customer but it comes with a very clear
financial penalty and you have to be able to work through that and
have to be able to work through the things where things don't work out and
we have to start over again without it causing stress and burnout the truth
really is that being your own boss can mean having a terrible boss you know my
boss doesn't go away on the weekend she's there with me in the morning she's
there with me late at night and sometimes she just won't shut up about
all the stuff she wants me to do and she wants to know why I haven't gotten it
done yet that is the truth about working for yourself suit this thing up being
burnt out really is important to solve in order to actually enjoy having your
own company and it may not be something you can solve immediately but it is
really worth figuring that out and then from a more healthy mental space of not
being completely burned out figure out do I want to go more along this expert
route and how am I gonna find a small to medium size company doing something
similar to what I'm doing to work at and what is my plan to start trying to find
these jobs start trying to figure out what I can do to work for these folks or
do I want to do more of the side hustle gig and what is my plan to make that
actually work in my life so that I can still sleep so they can still leave the
house occasionally and so that I can really not get burnt out again really
really tough to figure it out but you absolutely can figure it out so I've got
another question that I'm gonna hit up before I hit up the question what I do
want to just say there have been some changes going on in terms of the webcast
that I offer I no longer offer free sign ups for my technical webcast I'm going
subscribers only on my technical webcasts but there will be lots more
interior sequel DBA podcast episodes those are now free and open to everyone
so in the next one we'll be talking about what the deal is with
certifications in the next episode also do sequel DBAs need college degrees and
lots more stuff so I would love it if you can join me for any of the events
going forward but yeah I have been changing things up like I said you have
to constantly reinvent things in or to keep things going the question is
what areas of sequel server do you think deserve attention nowadays and therefore
can be an area of expertise for exploration so a great question in
really interesting things when it comes to sequel server these days there's a
lot if you're at all interested in cloud technologies there's a lot of momentum
going still for what parts of our applications can we move to the clouds
to the clouds it really is clouds because we may want
to use more than one cloud we may want to use more than one service but what
can we move to the cloud how much can it save us on cost and things change
rapidly in the cloud so becoming an expert on things as they emerge can be
worthwhile there's always a risk though that you're gonna learn something new
with some new cloud technology that no one's going to eventually adopt maybe
because it's just too expensive right so with all of these things I do think that
yeah if you're looking at a new area to specialize in right now and and who want
to do consulting and training the cloud can be really interesting the cloud is
really hard for training though because of the rapid rate that it changes and I
do say if that's something you're interested in because I think you really
have to like it and be interested in it for it to work one example of where
interest is and aptitude as well is really important is things like learning
data science so yes learning data science very very
interesting field emerging great area for building expertise but you have to
like statistics and math and you have to be willing to kind of stick through it
and see where it evolves and learn how what is offered in sequel server
compares to what's offered elsewhere right I know some folks in a
college-level course on artificial intelligence who got signed up for this
course and Panny apparently was just a whopper all right this sounds really
cool and then like you know near the end of the semester
just like this this is overwhelming like there's literally a fire hose pointed at
me see these these areas I really are taking off and really are getting a lot
of interest but do look at your own and like I I don't love working with
statistics for example so I will not be going deep down the data science path
just because I took a college course on statistics once and I did okay but I
really kind of dreaded doing my homework it wasn't something I looked forward to
so whereas on the other hand when I first started working with relational
databases in queries in sequel server I just wanted to work on it all the time
so if there is areas where you've got you know that people say don't don't
follow your passion I kind of think that's BS I don't know if it's really
like follow your passion but I do think like if there's things that you find
really rewarding to do even if there's some way you can figure out how to make
money on it even if it's uncool even if you know it's not the newest greatest
thing see if you can make money doing that thing because you really like
working with it and it's your life so you know I would consider that first
personally I mean if you're if your passion is underwater basket-weaving
there are places you can teach that it turns out there are ways to make a
living out of that so yep part of that I would fit into is
definitely aptitude and I mean aptitude not just as I'm automatically good at it
but aptitude as I'm interested enough in it to keep wanting to do it when it's
really hard because all a lot of these things are really hard and we'll have to
keep keep Adam it's really that I like keeping at it and I really want to know
it even though it kind of drives me crazy that it's really hard right I
don't mean aptitude as something that's just easy so thank you folks for showing
up for this inaugural recorded episode live episode of the dear sequel TV a
podcast and thank you or the questions those are awesome I hope that you guys
have a great day wherever you are and I will be back on April 18th for the
next recorded episode I personally am about to head to Hawaii with a bunch of
my closest girlfriends so I'm abandoning the homestead and Jeremiah will stay
here while I head off to have some Sun and fun with sixteen of my favorite
women friends and I will then be back later to do lots more stuff with you
guys thanks a bunch a great date and I'll see you soon thanks guys
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