I’ve been self-employed for over ten years. Over that time, I have provided a changing mix of technology oriented services to my customers. Troubleshooting, networking, website design, programming – whatever they need as long as the checks clear.

I’m still pretty passionate about providing good service to my customers, but I’m finding I run into more and more situations where people just don’t want to pay a fair rate for service. Consequently, I keep my active customer list pretty narrow and spend most of my time keeping my regular customers happy.

I don’t actively market my service using traditional methods such as yellow pages, mail outs, newsletters or cold calling. Over time, I’ve tried them all and found most methods to be a costly waste of time. Too many people respond expecting hours of free expertise by phone. The few good customers I picked up by advertising barely covered the cost of the ads. Pretty much everyone who finds me does so when an existing customer refers me. So far, that has served me well, but there are times when I’m sweating the bills just a bit.

Technology is a wonderful thing. I really love what I do. I get a big charge out of solving problems for people and I don’t mind routine work like stomping viruses and excising spyware. But one thing really gets to me. . . When good tech goes bad. Inevitably, some piddly little one hour job installing an off the shelf piece of software goes south for no apparent reason and with no obvious warning.

For now, I’ll focus on those little morsels of pain and humiliation and see where it takes me.

Welcome to life in the trenches.