jtrtoo

Everyone is going to have a different answer to this (and that answer may evolve as the business does).

All business decisions like this are about what level of abstraction is appropriate for us (today) and what level of specialization is conducive to our strategy[1] (today).

In some cases the infrastructure outsourcing question won't even be particularly important - a wash essentially regardless of the path taken (in the bigger picture of the enterprise's mission anyway). Other times, it'll be - effectively - paramount.

[1] Or current priorities, concerns, strengths, weaknesses, biases, pressures, risks, opportunities, competitors, etc.

Yes, but it's much harder to have a legally enforceable SLA with your in-house team and much less fun to threaten to sue yourself.

[On the other hand, in-house gives you greater control. If you're good (enough) at alignment and execution, you can optimize your infrastructure for your use case and either save the organization money or enable more money to be made through enhanced capabilities.]

I find it a mixture of frustrating and amusing the services (and software) that sell enterprise level packages but won't accept anything more than "free" from me either personally or my (tiny) business. I don't even need support - I just want to provide support. Just stick a Stripe charge form on there and say "best effort tech support" or even "no private support / forum only" and take my money damn it. :)

1. Don't expect you'll be cost effective for all potential clients that come to you with this sort of situation.

2. Charge a fixed fee - or even hourly - to figure out wtf is going on and assess things. This is effectively a discovery/consult. For some reason many independents can't wrap their heads around charging for what seems - to them - to be "nothing" but it's literally what consulting is. Get into the issue and help the client map a way out. Then...

3. If you want to help the client implement the map, you are also now in an informed position to give them a fixed fee arrangement to do this - the implementation bit. Or if you stick with hourly you can more realistically set expectations and estimate workloads.

Most independents are great at #3 (though most seem far more comfortable charging hourly for this implementation work rather than fixed fee, but that's fine too - at least they'll be able to estimate it better after doing #2 and end up with a better reputation), but horrible at realizing their real value is in #2 (as well as bridging the gap between #2 and #3).

P.S. If you invest in getting better (more comfortable and effective) at charging fixed fee you can rightfully charge more because you are literally being paid by the client to offload uncertainty (risk) onto you.

They don't send you stuff every month. You pay a fixed monthly price for a certain number of pages of whatever color/quality you want along with some page count rollover benefits. You no longer buy cartridges. The printer phones home when the cartridge runs low (well before that based on their proprietary predictive algorithm) and a new one arrives soon thereafter automatically. It's not like you have more than 1-2 cartridges at a time. And you never pay for them in any case.

Incidentally you can still install standard (non-subscription tied - e.g. bought at Costco) cartridges and the subscription status is then irrelevant (but of course you pay for those cartridges so they're yours to do with as you please unlike the rented subscription ones), but that's not the point (for the most part).

I find it handy for super low volume printing needs at home.

Check the OEM's manual. There are nearly always options in the BIOS to disable. Also Intel's AMT engine rolls by during POST. You can do a <Ctrl-P> to go into the AMT (not BIOS) settings to see provisioning status and/or reset the ME AMT configuration in all cases I've seen.

On really old or some oddball systems the process requires a CMOS battery pull for a few minutes.

This all assumes your device was enterprise targeted to start with. If it lacks vPro/DASH it's irrelevant.

You can double check your own device in other ways too like seeing if there is a web server at http{s}://your_local_ip:{16992,16993}/ (from another host on your LAN not the same one).

A 2x hourly rate (on a contract basis) only nets out to ~1x FTE over a typical year. (I'm speaking generally of course).

The 2x doesn't come for free nor is it just for PTO & health - it's paying for all the non billable time generally spent marketing, prospecting, qualifying leads, creating proposals, paying for time to proposals that never result in paid work, etc.

A typical independent consultant or freelancer only does billable work 50% of the time.

To answer your question as to "should you?" - it depends on your goals. Contracting versus standard employment is not just a financial, but a lifestyle decision.

The costs of insurance should be built into your service pricing, just as a traditional employer builds their own employee costs into their pricing.

Well said.

So don't use unofficial ones. :)

Plenty of primary sources package their software for Docker these days.

Which HP? There are two now.

Enterprise (HPE) or Inc (HPQ)

Hi. That's quite a topic! I've been consulting as my primary source of income going on 13 years consecutively (and consulting / freelancing for far longer than that).

I occasionally post about my experiences. Perhaps you'll find something useful in my archives: https://joshrichards.net/tag/self-employment/

Fair enough. It does mention using them promptly after acquisition. I suppose I overlooked some folks might not realize beans have a shelf life. And not all beans on the shelf are sealed.

Fortunately, most beans in my experience are sealed such that prior to the consumer purchasing them they'll at least be in a reasonable state. Not roasted within the past few days fresh, but good enough for many folks.

For espresso, absolutely. For brewed coffee, debatable.

The post was about the least so some corners were cut, albeit quite deliberately.

Interesting work. I currently utilize Bench (https://bench.co) for my outsourced bookkeeping needs in my solo consulting practice. I'm quite happy with them, but if you're not aware of them it might give you an idea of what you're competing with when it comes to potential users like me. Good luck!

I like your way of thinking about it and how you worded it.

Regardless of whether a guarantee is offered upfront, there is going to be a mess if the client isn't satisfied. The way I think about it is: I might as well use it to everyone's advantage and be clear about it upfront.

And there's a substantive difference between all parties knowing things could go wrong versus one boldly stating upfront that one will try to do the right thing. This will close more deals and offers additional value upfront to the client.

Of course, it helps if one addresses other issues like filtering out likely to be problematic prospective clients, but that's another post / series of posts for another day. ;-)

That seems fine, but it doesn't really change whether you should ask for some of the overall fees upfront. :-)

I've moved almost entirely away from hourly billing, but where it does pop up there is generally a different fee for clients who have retainer agreements with me (which are usually annual in nature).