Hello everyone! My name is Brian Carey, owner and sole proprietor of KISS IT Consulting. I wanted to take this opportunity to welcome you to our new site, by means of our new blog, as well as give you a brief history about us and what we're about.
KISS was officially founded almost two years ago now out of my desire to take what was at the time a 3 year side job full time. I've spent the majority of my career in full time positions for various companies from small to large. I did a stint at State Farm Insurance right out of college...a great place to work but too far away from family. I've worked for several start ups that were sold leaving me wanting to move on to another challenge. I spent some time with Expedient Data Centers, another great company to work for and also another role that planted the seed to do what i'm doing now. But what really started it was a call one day years ago from a previous employer of mine who needed some help. Essentially when I had left them years before, things continued to keep running smoothly and little was maintained. However they were now in need of some refreshes and such and asked if I would be interested in coming back on a 1099 basis, no pressure (since I was fully employed during business hours), to help get things up to speed from where they were left when I left years before. I was hesitant at first but agreed, and it turned out to be a great way to spend some of my free time...I enjoyed the work and got payed for it! That was about 5 years ago, and I still happily provide services to that client to this day.
Making the jump
At this point, my part time gig of several years was honestly what was offsetting what seemed to be a growing number of less-than-happy days working a normal business day at an office. My biggest complaint of my last several full time positions was what seemed to be a trend towards less hard working and more towards making sure employees were happy. Simply put, I'm a heads down workhorse. I didn't go to work to play, but increasingly I was being forced to in the name of being part of a team. I had several jobs lined up and decided it was time. I pulled my manager aside at my day job and said you don't need me here full time, 1099 me for 20 hours a week. You'll save money and get the same results from me while doing so. They bit and I was officially self employed.
Why be an independent consultant?
For those who know me, I'm not an extremely social person. Don't take that the wrong way, I just treat work time as work time and play time is separate. As I said above I'm a heads down worker. I didn't want to get up and go to an office just to take 1+ hour lunches or spend hours in Sprint planning meetings because half of the time was spent socializing and not working. I think this is one reason why I've been so successful. I can work a full day in my home office and get the same amount of work done as two if not more employees in an office, and I can guarantee in most cases the quality is better too.
Why should you want to work with us?
I think there's a lot of reasons. Just as I ask this question to myself of my clients when first discussing a possible relationship. There's not one single answer but instead various points that should be taken into consideration. Here are a few that I feel are most important:
- Efficiency & cost savings. As I've eluded to above I'm a very efficient worker. As a client you only get billed for time worked (assuming its an hourly arrangement). Not time that I am eating lunch or decide to take a walk. You don't pay my health benefits or anything else.
- Quality of work. Everything I do I ask myself If I were looking at this for the first time for myself, would I consider it a good solution? If not then I need to make it right. Thats just how I operate regardless of the task at hand.
- Honesty & Integrity. If you come to me with a project that I am not well suited for, as much as I may need the work at the time, I will tell you that its not a good fit. The last thing I want to do is take on something that I can't complete correctly and end up looking bad in the process.
- We're problem solvers, not salesmen. I have no hidden agenda to sell you a specific product or service that you don't need. I've found that by following this rule, I tend to form a much more long lasting relationship with a client where I'm considered a trusted advisor not a typical consultant being hired so that when things go south they have someone to blame.
What do you do best?
Its easy to say we support your linux servers in the cloud or we write custom applications, but what does that really mean? Here is a short list of things we currently do for clients on a daily basis:
- Infrastructure management. Nowadays its mostly cloud but not all. We're great at making sure your infrastructure is up and serving your business in a reliable fashion. If you're cloud based we've been working with both AWS and Rackspace for years. If you are using another cloud provider, give us a week and we'll be right at home. Also, in regards to cloud infrastructure we have a lot of experience with developing auto scaling solutions tailored to your needs. Its a common misconception that the cloud is magical and will just scale as you need it. Thats not true, if you want it to do all that automatically you need to make it happen in such a way to suit your technology. We can do that.
- Automation (DevOps, or whatever other buzzword is current). So you have 30 cloud instances providing various services. When you need to make a configuration change that only affects 10 of them, do you login to each one and do that manually? Do you deploy code manually? We're experts at automating repetitive tasks. Not only does that save you money but it also ensures that things happen the same across your entire environment. It doesn't matter what the tasks are or what people call it. We've done this for many years just because its efficient.
- Custom application development. If you can get away with a Wordpress install to do what you need, thats great we can install and support it in our sleep. But most businesses need custom data driven applications to make them tick. We'll work with you to define the requirements, build it, and make sure it does what you expect. Does it need to support thousands of concurrent users, no sweat thats how we build everything we develop. We pride ourselves on being able to build applications that actually do scale, the most recent handles tens of thousands of requests per second totaling billions per day. The above two points are just as important to making this possible as proper design.
- Custom backup platforms. Backups are important to any business, though surprising most either don't have them or if they do they don't even know if they would work if needed. We've always been a stickler for backups while most run the other way because they're not fun or sexy. There are platforms you can pay a lot of money for, though in most cases thats not needed if you leverage some older technologies that still work just fine. Let us build you a custom backup solution that is monitored to ensure its functioning properly and test it to ensure your data is recoverable.
- The Health care industry. We've done a lot of work in this area. HIPAA and Security rule compliance, check. HL7 interfaces, check. With the increasing requirements of Electronic Medical Records we can help make sure your Patient data is secure and you're meeting your compliance needs.
You keep saying 'Us' but you seem to be one guy...whats the deal?
Generally speaking, yes, we're made up of one independent consultant, me. I say 'Us' for two reasons. First, I do have another resource that pitches in if needed for certain types of projects. Second, I say us because in the future there may be more than just myself and then I won't have to change everything.