If you have any problem getting a job, or would like to start your own consulting business, learn Information Technology and Quickbooks, and set up offices to be highly automated and yet possess extremely redundant record-keeping. Many small businesses make very poor use of computers, and have very bad record-keeping. A situation you can set up is where a small business has a full time office lady, and you set her up to work as efficiently as possible, and have a maintenance contract where you charge 15 dollars for a telephone call, and 30 an hour if you have to come to the office. So you are an office trainer and free lance consultant.
There are many details I could go into as to doing redundant book-keeping which I don’t have time to discuss in detail, but I can fill in the details if someone wants to contact me and start their own consulting business.
On the IT side you want to do the A+ and Network+ certification, and the basic Microsoft MCD certification. A full MCSE would be very good, and so would Linux+ though it’s difficult to convince residental and business users to switch to Linux. However, Quickbooks can be ported to Linux. You need to have a backup scheme. Carbonite online backup is a good solution, though I recommend both Carbonite and a local backup. Redundancy is always better.
On the book-keeping side, you want to be a Quickbooks guru. You can learn this by reading and playing with QB and getting a job as a book-keeper for a while. You’ll probably work for a grouchy middle aged lady, but you’ll learn QB. The thing to pay attention to is money coming in. Money going out is all recorded in checks. Money coming in has to be redundantly recorded. For example, you should scan checks and keep the pictures in folders based on the year, and a sub-folder based on the customer. Cash transactions should be kept in Word or Open Office Writer files in the same sub-folders, or if you write cash receipts for the customers, they should be scanned and put in the sub-folders. All this should be backed up every night.
You will help businesses run much better, and you won’t have to spend your days in offices. Your time will be worth decent money. You could be farming, take a call on your cell phone, go inside your house, remote to the office computer, fix their problem, make sure they are happy, record a bill for the call, and go back to your rototiller.
Small office management is all about common sense, and it’s mostly a matter of automation and exquisitely organized and redundant record keeping.
I have a waste of time and money MBA from a top ten Eastern School – so I didn’t learn practical things like using Quickbooks.
I have used Quickbooks on one temp job – it worked well. I have a new business, but I am all Mac and Quickbooks wasn’t working on my Mac platform. How do you feel about Quickbooks On Line? Will that work with a Mac platform?
Thanks for the solid tip on real world work. We’re not getting hired in academia, government, corporate world – small business is the way to go.
Jack,
You should be a small businessman. Do a market analysis and buy a convenience store or a video rental store, or both in one. Movie Gallery just shuttered it’s two stores in my area. There’s an office for rent for 650 a month that could be a sole proprietor movie rental shop. You could get movies cheap from Walmart and rent them, and get the old ones from the closing up shop movie stores. I don’t know if it would profit, but you the MBA should be able to figure that out ahead of time.
No quickbooks for Mac? What’s this?
http://quickbooks.intuit.com/product/accounting-software/mac-accounting-software.jsp
Get in touch if you want, Jack. You probably have a good base of knowledge, and I could easily help set you up as an “small business office consultant.” You can do a Quickbooks course for 500 bucks. You know basic accounting/book-keeping, so it’s just a matter of implementing it on QB. As far as the IT side, you can get the A+ certification for about 600 dollars total costs, and I can show you the rest.
One thing we do is based on the Anderson Consulting model. that is, if I have a computer problem that is over my head, I call a guru I know and he helps me and I send him a few bucks. I could do the same for you if you run into an IT problem that you can’t fix, or a question you can’t answer. When you are at a client and can’t answer a question, you take a lot of notes on what is needed and what outcome is desired, and you say, “I need to research this and get back to you.” No problem.
Also, I sometimes get a residential call for someone with a perfectly good computer but they lost their Windows license. I install Linux, and charge 50 bucks for what amounts to about 40 minutes of work.
Lastly, I’d like to learn more about book-keeping, accounting and market research. You teach me business, I’ll teach you IT. my e-mail is skypelanguageteacher at gmail *** com
Sorry, why do you scan cheques?
“You should be a small businessman. Do a market analysis and buy a convenience store or a video rental store, or both in one. Movie Gallery just shuttered it’s two stores in my area. There’s an office for rent for 650 a month that could be a sole proprietor movie rental shop. You could get movies cheap from Walmart and rent them, and get the old ones from the closing up shop movie stores.”
Kievsky
Video rental stores are a dying business, obsolete thanks to Netflix, Redbox, high speed internet and cable video on demand.
Kievsky – your advice to Jack Ryan sounds good except for the part about opening a video rental store. Netflix is killing off video stores left and right, plus more and more people are watching movies online at sites like Hulu and Stagevu. There might be a small niche for bricks and mortar video stores in the future, but it is definitely not an expanding market.
@ Kievsky
It sounds like you have some experience farming. Do you have any recommendations for someone who is interested in learning some farming skills? I’m currently in an urban area without much in the way of options to teach myself but plans can change and my long term plan is to go rural. Are there internships / apprenticeships or would you recommend going about it another way.
Thanks in advance for your consideration.
I scan incoming checks that are paid to us in order to be able to recreate who paid what, which payors go with which bank deposits. this is in the event of payment disputes. You also record check # and dates and payor in Quickbooks, but redundancy is like wearing a seat belt. It’s well worth the little extra time. Having to figure out badly recorded books is hell.
Mr. Petrenko,
Join the organic farming association in your area. They will probably publish a newspaper that has classified ads for farming apprenticeships. If you are in New England, it is http://www.nofa.org
Re — video stores. That’s why I said do a market analysis.
I suspect Movie Gallery had too much overhead, but there is still a market for renting movies. The place we went to was very busy. We couldn’t believe they went out of business.
If I had the free time and just as importantly the ambition I would write up a custom(izable) front end browser-driven scripted app with a MySQL back end.
Tweak the database and user side for each customer and be on call for support at a reasonable rate. Additionally, you must document each system with a modification history for each customer.
You really don’t need to go buy, learn and install a major corporation’s proprietary out of the box package. There are all sorts of strings attached, it’s more expensive and it never is 100% yours, therefore a client can replace you with some other certified Joe or Jane out there who underbids.
Do people still use Macintosh?
I guess it’s worth the 2.5x the price (for inferior hardware) in order to feel hip and cool.