An elephant or a flea?

At a certain stage, each of the specialists reaches the peak of the demand for their services. This generally applies not only to IT, but in IT it is most clearly and clearly expressed.

For example, take such a prosaic profession as a plumber. It would seem that it is easier - it is easy to understand where it is leaking, it is easy to fix the problem by replacing the gasket. Then why to normal plumbers need to be recorded in the queue? Because the rest can only take money, and they do not know how to repair.

Suppose there is a system administrator offering his services to various companies. He can take a lot of orders and earn two to three times more than his colleague, who works “for an uncle”.

But at the same time, one ordinary individual will not be able to earn more than a business owner providing administrative services.
There is a moment when a specialist is at a crossroads - he has to be a flea all his life or try to become an elephant, having organized his business.
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However, business organization is an occupation that is very different from system administration. And above all, the fact that you have to work in a team, hire and control employees, maintain their balance of qualifications, find intelligent managers to get decent customers. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Team

The very first is the team. Each team member will be required to perform their part of the work, ensuring ideally the presence of at least one employee in 24x7 full combat readiness mode. If we take the standard 6 hour sysadmin shift as a basis, then the minimum team will be 4 people. This means that everyone will get 25% of the profits.
On the one hand, this is at first less than working on your own, on the other - you can get a lot more orders and this 25% will bring more money.

Employees

Sooner or later, team members will outgrow the level of normal administration and will want to find a replacement, hiring a new sysadmin at a fixed rate and moving to the level of control and management.

And here a lot of new problems appear. The motivation of partners whose income directly depends on the success of the business and hired employees who want to work less and get more are very different.
For comparison, I can bring a rower from a team participating in competitions in rowing and a rower who is chained to the oar on the gallery.
Both work the same way - rowing, but the quality of work is very different. If the first lures the prize, the second scares the whip.
Yes, I'm talking about the carrot and stick method. As you know, this method is simple - the guard eats gingerbread and beats everyone with a whip. Joke. Nevertheless, control is needed.

Control

How to check how well the problem is solved? Will it take a lot of effort to check the actions of the employee, and perhaps it would be possible to solve the problem more quickly than to find out what method of solution was used.
I will give a simple example. On the server, periodically flies apache. In the logs, a message is written that the child process has fallen off on a segfolt.
The problem can be solved in at least 4 ways:

• Unconsciously incompetent: Perform an LAMP update to the most recent versions. And turn around that in the last PHP many functions were broken off. And the customer will find who will get the screams of his offended customers.
• Consciously incompetent: Go to google, read the thematic forums, find out that there is a problem with this PHP in the Zend + IonCube + eAccelerator bundle. Suggest to disable eAccelerator as a solution.
• Consciously competent: Assemble an identical bundle with debugger options on the stack, get a dump, route it, change the order of connecting extensions, run again, make sure that the problem is solved and do the same on the battle server.
• Unconsciously competent: Run php -v in the console. Get a segolt. That it is worth the old buggy version of Zend. Put a new one. Check php -v again. Making sure everything works restart the Apache.

And all this needs control. And besides control, we need an understanding of why the employee did this and not otherwise. And of course - you need training.
However, all this will be useless if orders will not be. We need…

Manager

Fine. We hired a manager and he began to look for clients. Moreover, he took over part of the work on control and communication with customers. Now he will always call and tell which option he can have if the problem is solved and how it will behave in the future.

However, the manager is also an outsider. And he may not be a very good employee. And it can be sent by competitors, and it will be a business catastrophe, hitting the most painful places - customers and employees.

Lead customers

Have you met a client’s withdrawal as your own manager? It seemed that everything was already agreed, but the next day the customer changes his opinion and silently leaves.
And all because the manager thrust a business card to him and said - here it will be done for half the amount, only silence.
So managers also need control.
But allow, control of sysadmins + control of managers = lack of free time for personal life. Is this what we wanted?

Removal of employees

Worse customer care can only be poaching an employee to the side. There can be a lot of reasons, for example - a big salary is banal, interesting orders, access to new technologies, social aspects, a secretary at the reception with big boobs eyes. Who knows what?
You must constantly be aware of the business, feeling what your employees lack and give it to them before they finally decide to leave it.
Have you dreamed that you could manage your business while relaxing in the Maldives? Forget about rest for at least a couple of years.

Morality

If you want to be a flea - stay with her. Jump to where it is more interesting. Rest where it is warmer. But do not envy the elephants.
If you want to become an elephant - forget about the rest. You will work even harder. Elephants do not rest, they are constantly in motion.

Or in other words - your business will give only more income, but will not give more free time.