How do you move from micro small businesses to the sweet spot IT consulting?  What you need to do is look over the checklist of what technology they are looking for and start spending some time beefing up your skills.

How Much Time Do You Spend to Improve Your Skills?

Balance your time.  If you have the skills to work with micro, but don’t quite have the skills to work with sweet spot, spend about 75% of your time over the next couple of months on IT consulting business development and about 25% of your time on increasing your technical skills.

What Skills Do You Need to Focus On?

Get a not for resale copy of Microsoft Small Business Server 2003.  Load it up on a spare system and start learning that.  That is, by far, the most common thing that is going to get you into IT consulting for the sweet spot clients.  Second would probably be Novell Small Business Suite.

Start With the Simpler Sweet Spot Clients

You are going to be able to qualify your sweet spot clients before going on sales calls, and generating proposals. Then, you can figure out if your skills are strong enough.  There are all kinds of different IT consulting sweet spot clients out there.

The smaller sweet spot clients the 10, 15, 20 seats are going to have less sophisticated needs than those on the upper end of that range where they start to get into 2 or 3 servers and multiple locations.

Transition to the Sweet Spot

Start working with some micro small businesses in IT consulting.  Get the confidence and start building your business up.  Get your references going, so you can transition. 

Some of your larger micro businesses are probably going to start needing the skills that you are going to need to brush up against the sweet spot anyway, like when they outgrow peer to peer. 

The Bottom Line about IT Consulting
 
In this article, you’ve been introduced to IT consulting.  To learn more about IT consulting, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.