We often take the perspective of “me vs the rest of the world”. It’s an easy way of thinking. If you are employed as professional, you probably have indulged in the “I’m wasting my time and talent working for an idiot. I’m victimized.” thinking. Nobody understands you. Nobody appreciates you.

And some of you start your own businesses thinking you are now on top of the world — only to find that your customers are now your foe who don’t appreciate you! You wonder what went wrong . . .

Because you are yet to realize the challenge is within you, not outside. If your customers are unhappy, it’s because the business you have built has some glitches. Review your products and services, marketing strategies, the business structure, your people management skills, and so on, rather than making the customers wrong. You can start taking this responsible perspective even as employee.

Today’s guest is Tony Lawrence, who has been in the computer and network business for 25 years. He has a well-established website A.P.Lawrence.

1. Tell us a bit about your business and why you started it.

In 1981 I was working as a customer support rep for a Tandy Radio Shack Computer Center (yes, Radio Shack made computers back then). The base salary was low, but I also was paid a percentage of the store’s revenues, and that was pretty good. Unfortunately, IBM came out with their computer in 1981 and the IBM PC started killing our sales. By 1983, I was living on the base salary and hurting badly.

I had always wanted to start my own business (in fact had tried and failed twice prior to this) and it seemed like I had nothing to lose: I couldn’t do much worse than I was doing. So I just stood up one afternoon and walked out - I was a self employed consultant. In those days I did a lot of programming for small businesses. I was originally operating system agnostic, but I began to have more and more disdain for Microsoft and drifted toward Unix systems primarily. I’ve stayed there; picking up Linux in the 90’s and Mac OS X more recently.

My business has changed a lot over the years. I don’t do much programming now, though I do some back end Web scripts and small Perl projects. I sell mail servers for businesses with 10 to 750 employees, do some work with security routers and firewalls and am generally available for troubleshooting. I often function as the “IT guy” for companies too small to afford dedicated staff. I mostly do that for Unix and Linux systems; Microsoft Windows has improved enough that I won’t refuse to use it, but I still find Unix based systems to be more powerful and stable.

2. What were the biggest challenges when you were starting off as a new entrepreneur?

I thought my biggest challenge would be finding work, but in fact that wasn’t hard at all. At that time there were computer stores everywhere and the people who sold from them always needed help for themselves and their customers. I just drove around, stopped in, offered my services and left my card. Business came by the bucket full.

So much so that by 1985 I hired employees - four of them. I quickly found out that managing people is very different from providing technical services. I’m a lousy manager and most of the employees took advantage of that, goofing off while collecting generous paychecks from me. I was six figures in debt before I caught on and fixed the situation: I fired all but one and made him my partner.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work out either. We worked well together, and made money, but his wife wanted to move to the West Coast and soon enough they did. We tried to keep the partnership going, joking that we were “conveniently located at both ends of Interstate 90″, but it became a bookkeeping nightmare so we shut it down and went our separate ways.

The other challenge that is on-going is keeping up with new technology. That’s especially difficult as I get older - the brain that could once memorize fifteen digits at a glance isn’t quite so nimble any more. As the small independent computer stores folded up, finding new business also became more difficult.

3. And how did you work through these challenges?

I still struggle with learning - it’s a good part of every weeks work. It’s so important to keep your skills up in this constantly changing field. As I said above, the older I get the longer it takes me to learn new things, but I keep plugging away. It’s not that it is horribly difficult now; it’s that it used to be so easy.

An important part of finding work is paying attention to opportunity. If you listen carefully to what a customer is saying, if you take the time to engage with their employees and their customers, you may find income opportunities that your customer doesn’t even realize are there. One of my mottos in that regard is

“There are no problems, only income opportunities”

I am constantly alert for new opportunity.

The Internet brought new opportunities that I recognized very early on. I put up my first web page in the early 90’s and instituted http://aplawrence.com in 1997. Although originally this was strictly a technical site dealing with Unix and Linux issues, I now also write about Blogging and Self Employment there and 25% of my income comes from advertising revenues alone. Of course it also is a great source of consulting and sales opportunities: I have both consulting and mail server clients all over the United States.

I definitely would not have been so successful if it were not for the Internet.

4. What is the best part of being an entrepreneur for you?

For me, freedom is the driving force that keeps me self employed. I love being able to work when I choose. I also love being successful enough to turn down work I don’t want; for example refusing work from difficult or nasty people. I also enjoy helping other people start their own businesses - I’ve helped out many people with lunch-time chats and have even given them startup clients to get them rolling. Not all of them make it, but it feels good to help them try.

5. Any advice for people who dream to have their own business and yet find it hard to make the leap?

Consider that the most important thing in your life is happiness and that the happiest people are those who control their own destiny. I know it can be very scary to give up a “safe” job and set out into the uncertainty of self employment, but there are such tremendous rewards that it is worth the risk. Remember this also: if you are skilled and competent enough that someone else is willing to pay you money to work for them, you are obviously skilled and competent enough to work for yourself.

Another of my mottos is:

“If I have to work for an idiot, I may as well work for myself”

I view employment as a form of slavery and hate seeing any one forced into it. Break free, be free.

My Takeaway
I love the resilient manner Tony navigated his way through all the changes. A market change can be a disaster or an opportunity depending on your perspective. Also look deep to dig out the hidden opportunities – I see that, if I can do this, I am ahead of all potential competition. And I think it’s great he likes to help out newer entrepreneurs!

Source: http://yes-to-me.com/category/becoming-an-entrepreneur/interviews/page/3/

To Submit your confessions please email them to confessions@makingittv.com