Start & Run a Rural Computer Consultant Business. John D. Deans

As they age, get married, and have kids, their home square-footage requirement grows, which pushes them farther out of the core areas into more affordable housing markets — which in turn increases their commute time.

      These are the issues for the internal support professionals who have a single fixed place of employment with little travel required on the job. The other group of cyber-hounds, however, includes hourly billable consultants and contractors, who have to go where the short-term technical work is located. Many times they will actually fly out Sunday night or early Monday morning to a remote client site, work like dogs all week, and then fly back late Friday afternoon to their homes. During the workweek, they fight the city’s unfamiliar traffic patterns and deal with the hidden crime dangers while driving a rented car and finally crashing in a lonely hotel room, which may or may not have a working high-speed Internet connection.

      Traffic hurts IT people more than workers in most other industries because there are so many instances when we have to make a second trip to the work site to fix a problem or to work on a project outside of prime time. During some troubleshooting events, I’ve had to make multiple trips back and forth to work, chasing an intermittent networking problem that seemed to pop up again only after I arrived back home. It should come as no surprise that big IT job centers such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Jose, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, and Boston comprise the top ten worst traffic areas in the United States.

      I make such a big deal out of the traffic issue because it really is a big deal. Sitting in traffic while commuting to and from work is wasted time. It is frustrating, upsetting, and sometimes maddening. I have not only witnessed but also (unfortunately) participated in road rage on more than one occasion.

      Basically, commuting to our IT jobs really inhales immensely (i.e., it sucks!), and traffic congestion in the urban and metropolitan areas in which we work is constantly getting worse. Keep reading, and I can show you an alternative to your daily gridlock and gruel.

      Once you actually get to work, it is likely you have a single primary superior or boss to deal with on a daily basis. You hope this person is a moral, fair, and understanding human being who is familiar with your job requirements, your professional capabilities, and your personal commitments and needs. I have been very fortunate at the companies I’ve worked for to have had great bosses who not only treated me fairly, but also mentored me and looked out for my best interest. They all wanted me to progress, learn, and eventually move on to bigger and better things. I was constantly given opportunities to grow my skill sets, and my mentors nurtured my personal communication techniques to better deal with customers and peers.

      I was lucky, but many others are not so fortunate and have to deal with bosses, superiors, team leaders, and other higher-ups who seem to be complete jerks. This brings me to another point of concern common to many urban IT-support positions: the “single point of economic failure.” The vast majority of IT professionals — not to mention most employees of companies in any industry — have a single boss to report to who has almost unilateral control over their immediate future. That one boss can limit your professional growth and opportunities, or worse, can terminate your employment and cut off 100 percent of your income without warning.

      Let me emphasize this point. It only takes one obnoxious manager assigned as your superior to stop your paychecks and send you home, stunned and suddenly unemployed. How much of the money you’ve saved for the kids’ college or a new home will now be needed just to pay the mortgage, car notes, and other bills? Will you have to move and take the kids out of their school midyear? Can you even sell the house now and recoup what you’ve put into it? Is the IT market in your area already saturated with pros like yourself barely holding onto their jobs? How long can you go until the next paycheck is deposited into your soon-to-be-shrinking bank account?

      This may sound like doom and gloom talk, but I have heard and seen it from too many of my IT peers since the technology industry crash of 2000. Since many of us are monstrous consumers, we have the bills and debt to go with that high earning and spending lifestyle. We all seem to need the largest house we can afford at the time of purchase, multiple SUVs, and expensive vacations just to get away from the computer world at least once a year. All this costs more than we can usually pay in cash, so we put it on credit. But lose your job and this single point of economic failure will kill you financially and possibly devastate your fiscal plans for years.

      Becoming a rural computer consultant can not only get you away from the metropolitan traffic nightmare, but can also eliminate this single point of economic failure. There are thousands of small rural communities similar to the one I am flourishing in. Note that 80 percent of workers are employed by small companies with less than 50 employees. You can be the IT pro for a number of those small companies in a rural town or cluster of towns far away from the big city.

      Later in this book I will describe in detail how to get these small businesses as paying clients, effectively getting multiple monthly paychecks instead of having to rely on one source for 100 percent of your income. Remember, this is real work for real people and not some B.S. work-at-home scheme or MLM (multi-level-marketing) plan. You already have an existing IT skill set. I will explain how you can expand that skill set to serve small businesses in rural areas — allowing you to change your life.

      Rural Computer Consulting: A Brand-New Niche

      A rural computer consultant is the jack-of-all-computer-trades. He or she has to be able to fix, configure, install, test, and troubleshoot everything and anything electronic that businesses use on a day-to-day basis, and do all this for numerous customers that make up a client base.

      During my years as an urban enterprise-level consultant, I never imagined doing what I do now or doing it where I do it. My perception during the 1990s was that only big cities had enough computer-related jobs and projects to support full-time information technology personnel. What I’ve learned is that a small town (or cluster of small towns within a 30-mile radius) big enough to warrant a Wal-Mart and a McDonald’s is fertile ground for computer consulting experts.

      I grant you that most small-town environments will only support one or two multiskilled consultants, but odds are that should you decide to become a rural computer consultant, you won’t find much competition. One of the reasons I can say this with confidence is that while I was researching this book, I was not able to find any other books describing IT or computer consulting in rural areas. There were, however, numerous books in both hardcover and paperback related to general consulting, IT consulting, and starting small businesses in various IT fields. The common thread to all these books was the need for medium-to-large metropolitan areas as a marketplace.

      Another way I learned that there are not many computer consultants working solely in rural environments was by roaming chat rooms and newsgroups. What I’ve discovered is that ever since the IT bust of 2000, many of my peers have had to really scrounge for work just to pay their bills. They’ve had to take almost anything, anywhere, even if it required flying out to the client site on Sunday nights and back again late Friday afternoons. Others have simply given up and taken work in non-IT environments. The past five years have certainly culled many single-skill-set workers and/or poor performers from the IT industry.

      Rarely, if ever, did I hear or read of urban IT professionals leaving the city for the country and successfully providing computer consulting and services. If you’re willing to accept some risk, however, the rewards can be great.

      I was lucky enough to be able to take all of 1999 off from the IT industry so I could investigate various agribusinesses that could be supported on my 115-acre ranch in Brenham. After learning about multiple types of farming and ranching business models such as raising chickens, goats, and horses, or growing fruit trees or cut flowers, I realized that farming and ranching were not my cup of tea.

      During those nine months of testing both plant crops and animal raising, I ran the numbers on Excel and discovered a disheartening fact about agribusinesses. Most of these farming and ranching enterprises require large capital investment, are high risk due to uncontrollable factors such as weather, require hard outdoor work seven days a week, and have a very low payout at the end of the year. This is with no major disasters such as drought