Friday, I sent emails off to the CEO's of Red Hat and Cisco, asking for a donation of software and training material for my computer class. Today I heard from someone at Red Hat, explaining that while they do not give away their Enterprise software, there are sources for software that approximate the Red Hat experience, namely fedora.org and centos.org. She mentioned that while the software may be a bit out of date compared to Red Hat, it should fit our needs all right.
She was not sure if training materials could be provided, but she will check on that. I have not heard from Cisco yet, but there is time.
I have downloaded Fedora and will put it on my laptop to play around with it at a later time.
I have been crunching some numbers lately, on how much just the classes would cost to produce. There are two sets: One where I pay the members, and one where I don't. I figure if we go by a straight salary of $200/week for each member, times a consistent 20 members training for six months, over the period of a year the costs will be $208,000 just for their salaries, plus the other expenses, including my own salary. I'd be happy making $25,000/year. Then there's the cost of the office, which I haven't looked into yet. Then there's the cost of the computers, assuming I can't get them donated.
If I go the way of paying the members, I'll need someone to handle payroll, either outsourced or in-house. Then there are taxes.
I suspect in the long run I'll need to forgo paying the members until we can prove that we can produce certifications. I'm not happy about it, but I'm realistic enough to know that people won't donate to pay homeless people. I want to get the party started, so I'll make sacrifices. I plan to explore other means of getting money into this start-up and I'll throw ideas out there from time to time.
Feedback will be appreciated!
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