- Teaching the PC (personal computer) to others. This can be done in your spare time, which gives you an opportunity to determine whether it will support a full-time effort and, at the same time, put extra money in the bank to be used as start-up capital for your own business. This approach goes hand-in-hand with a good suggestion that you moonlight outside your regular job. Besides providing extra money, enabling you to build your network of contacts within the community and industry, and giving you additional knowledge, it also can be the precursor (no pun intended) to a business of your own.
- Moonlighting. One of the advantages of moonlighting is that it can, over a long period of time, naturally develop into a full-time business. That's been the case with many people, and it could be for you. The thing to watch out for is that you don't rush from part time into full time. Just as there is the appropriate moment to go after a bigger and better job within data processing, there is the right time to make the entrepreneur's move. Don't be impetuous; it seldom pays off.
- Using temporary work to get your feet wet. Often, DPers who yearn to start their own business operate from a deficit in that their experience has been confined to a narrow scope. Taking temporary jobs through a specialized service can expose you to a wide variety of data processing situations.
- Consulting. I differentiate working temporary jobs and moonlighting from consulting, in that it represents a different level of providing outside help to individuals and companies. Again, it could start as a part-time endeavor, except that your accessibility and availability will be limited by the demands of your permanent job. Still, there are opportunities for part-time consultants in which access to you is not as important as time spent on solving a problem that can be reported in writing.
The term "consultant" can be misleading because it's so often abused and misused. The old line goes that if you're an executive who's out of work, you're a consultant. Lots of people bill themselves as consultants but don't do any consulting. The word has a nice ring to it and is shrouded in enough mystery to preclude questioning. Consultants to industry possess that "out-of-town" magic-anyone being brought in from the outside is expected to know more than those within the company-and this has always rankled permanent employees, who in many cases have been suggesting projects and programs that are ignored until the consultant arrives with the same suggestions, which are enthusiastically embraced as remarkable breakthroughs.
Still, legitimate consultants play a vital role in industry, and the good ones - coming into an ongoing situation without the prejudices of having been inside - apply their third-party and detached view, which often results in fresh vision and new ways of attacking old problems.
There's another saying about consultants, and that is that gray at the temples is worth another $10,000 a year. Consultants are expected to have wisdom and experience above and beyond those for whom they are consulting. If you are relatively young and inexperienced, the consulting label probably won't work for you. Then again, you may be twenty years old and have developed an approach to a systems or software problem that stands everybody on their ear. If that's the case, however, you are probably better off marketing it across the broad range of business rather than selling your knowledge to one or two clients.
