By making it into a set of training videos, you could build once, sell everywhere. The effort is much lower, and the returns can be greater, as would the scalability of the business. I know it really drives a stake into the heart of your current sales pitch of “custom training”, but is that really what sells your training? Or is it you?

I’m an eLearning Developer and Instructional Designer and just decided to market independently since I had been laid off. Thank you for providing such timely information. I do want to know if you suggest Independent Consultants to send out mailers to companies or if cold calling is still acceptable. I have been reading quite a few articles and researching marketing best practicies but there is a lot of information out there and I am not sure of the best way to get out there in front of clients. My website, although a bit lack lusture, provides insights to my expertise. I am just income strapped and few and far between clients at the moment.

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.