Is asking for help from someone in the business, asking for too much?

[inertial]

Greetz everyone,

I have been frequenting this awesome discussion site for awhile now, although I have not posted until now.

Here I am, I am a CS major with one year of school under my belt, and I have an unending urge to start my own small business - a web hosting business. I have a good degree of knowledge in IT, and have been running and operating my own FreeBSD web and seperate mail server for a couple years now... mainly hosting personal sites, as well as web sites for friends. I also have significant experience in design as well as good business sense, and feel that I have the knowledge, desire, and work ethic to be successful.

I have an idea of where I should start, but I find myself desperately wanting to find someone who is in the field, and who has managed to have some degree of success, and have that person give me some pointers. I realize that it may be a bit much to expect that someone just walk me though starting my own business - but I hope that there is a successful business person who would be willing to advise me. I don’t know, is it asking too much to have someone help me with devising my initial plan for starting up? I sincerely hope that there is someone out there that may be able to.. for lack of a better term.. walk me through certain stages.

I have aquired numerous books on starting a new buisness, however I find myself wanting to have someone to actualy compare notes with, someone I know that I can contact with questions and develop a business/mentor relationship with.

I am even willing to work for you for free in order to gain more first hand knowlage in the industry.

I am not going to take up too much space going through a litany of questions I have. I figure that it would be better to instead discuss my questions via e-mail, or possibly in person (San Diego, CA).

I would be incredibly grateful for any responses.


Sincerely,

joshua j.
joshua[at]matrixflux.com

 

[Blue]

Joshua, put together a list of questions that you have. Make it as thorough as you can and PM the list to me.
I will answer as many as I can and refer you to others sources.
A good place to start is browsing around http://www.thewhir.com/
There are a lot of articles and information sources there.

 

[Artashes]

Joshua, welcome to the forum and I can see you're educated enough to run your small business successfully.

I don't run a hosting company myself, so I'll leave the part about mentorship to other members. As for how to start your business, I'm sure that if you are really serious about it, every person would advice you to go see a lawyer to have some idea of how much liability and financing it would require from your side to officially run business.

What many people also advice is to hang around specialized forums such as this one and learn more about the industry's strength and weaknesses, opportunities and threats to realize how you can focus yourself on creating value on an already saturated market.

From my personal viewpoint, I see web hosting business as a very unattractive market to compete it due to low entry barriers (everyone wants to get in nowadays), high power of buyers and threat of substiture products (once something wrong goes in your company - you may lose clients you fought for in the first place because the switching cost for them is very low), high administrative costs and plenty of time.

But there still are a few companies that started small and are now big, but most of them started 7-10 years ago and were just in time to get on the action. Right now I see the industry is in a mature stage as it does not generate high returns - only average or above average, if managed correctly.

So my advice, stick to hosting forums, learn more, write a business plan, including projected financials for at least 1-2 years ahead. Make sure you have enough funds at all times to keep your business running for at least 6-8 upcoming months.

Hope this helps a bit.

Best,

 

[EvilHaider]

http://www.score.org/

The above site should be helpful for general business advice. This organization is a group of retired executives who dedicate their time to helping small businesses get off the ground. They have various local chapters. They offer free appointments and counseling. It's definitely worth checking out. Hope this helps.

 

[inertial]

Thank you so much for your responses. I apologize for the time it has taken me to reply..

Artashes, your comments regarding the over saturation of the web hosting market are well taken. I very much appreciate your thoughts on the matter. Although I can appreciate the current market conditions, I am certainly still interested in making this endeavor work.

Blue, I am already putting together a comprehensive list of questions for you, and you can expect to receive them sometime late today. Thank you so much for offering your expertise!

EvilHaider, the info you provided pertaining to score.org is very interesting!! Thank you also!


Once again, thank you very much, and thank you for your quick feedback. You have no idea how much it is appreciated!

joshua

 

[Artashes]

Joshua,

You're welcome. That is what we're here for. In fact, I'm going to tell you something I think you should keep in mind: you would be very very lucky to have Blue as your mentor. Michael (his real name) is considered to be one of the best experts in the industry. As far as my knowledge suggests, you won't get a better advice anywhere. So value him and his advice!

Good luck,