Refining Focus09 May
I have no complaints or regrets about my career to this point, and I owe a lot of my happiness to the fact that I shunned becoming too highly specialized in any one specific technology. For example, some people are “mail administrators”, or worse, “Exchange administrators”, or “backup administrators”. Not me. What I’ve done for a living for the past 10 years doesn’t even completely fit within the title “System Administrator”. I’ve developed web sites, done security audits, administered and modeled databases, wrote APIs in Perl, Python, and PHP, and set up a whole lot of core infrastructure services like DHCP, DNS, Apache, NFS, LDAP, the list goes on.
When I decided to “go solo”, I was now in a position I was looking forward to: running a business. I grew up in business. I cut my teeth in business, and in running businesses. Long before I even got into technology for a living, I had been a stockbroker, and a restaurant manager. I had also been exposed to it through various family members, including my parents, who both ran businesses. I knew what I was getting myself into, and I was looking forward to it.
But it left me with a problem: marketing my services. “What exactly does your company do?” I know that this question needs to be answered at parties and networking events in just a couple of sentences, and yet wrapping up what I do in a couple of sentences is nearly impossible.
There’s also the issue of ongoing support of clients. It’s one thing to work internally for a company as an employee wearing a lot of hats, but when you have a dozen or so different clients, do I really want to have to think “now, what hat did I wear for this client?” No, I don’t. So while I’ll probably always be a generalist and pursue projects involving a lot of different technologies on my own time, Owl Advisors, LLC will have a more refined focus: we do training, and we do technical consulting for LAMP and cloud-based environments.