I work a full time job in a field totally unrelated. Easily 120k a year total compensation. About 88k gross. Excellent benefits that cost me like $3 a week. A pension. A 401k.

But I am miserable. I fully intend to quit. Place sucks the soul out of me. Over the years I’ve taken on side jobs in home automation. Learned a ton self taught over the years. I strive to do high quality work with crazy attention to details. Couple recent jobs I have made more money on the side in 3 weeks then I net in 3 months at my regular job. Some smaller jobs I make more in 6 hours then i make in 48 hours at my main job. I am turning down work constantly. I’m getting close to the point where I plan to walk away from my main job and make this my main focus.

There has to be good $ out there if you are good at this. My market sucks. But there is some serious cash out there to be made I’ve seen. I do zero advertising. I wonder if I actually put any effort at all into finding work how things could take off. Sooner rather then later I’m going to have to try and make the jump and find out before I go insane at the main job.

I feel you really need to run things like a business and have a good crew in place if you want to grow large. Everything can’t rest solely on you. Growth is limited too much. There’s only so much one person can handle. Like most I feel the talent pool is very limited and that’s my biggest worry, finding great help that will do the work to the level I expect.

I’d really like to grow my business to a good size and have a good team in place so that if I wanted to take a month vacation I could trust that the business can stay running. I think that’s the mentality you need. The business needs to be able to stay a profitable business even when you’re not there. When you are sick, or have surgery, or vacation, etc. YOU alone can’t be the business. Then it fails if god forbid something happened. That’s a good long term plan I feel. Obviously in the beginning things rest on you a lot more but strive to grow if you want the income to grow.

Do great work but even more so actually do what you say you are gonna do. I feel that alone puts you ahead of 90% of the curve. It’s amazing how horrible people are at their jobs. From never calling you back. To screwing up and order. To saying they will email you tomorrow with a response and forget.


There is definitely integrators out there that kill it. Some cepro 100 integrators that are always on that list. Bill Maronet at ETC in West Palm, Shawn Hannson at Logic Integration.... you cant tell me those guys aren’t making some serious bank every year and aren’t millionaires by now just from this industry let alone what they might have done in the past.