Small Business Computer Consulting

Many IT consultants have found the field-tested, PROVEN strategies offered by the Computer Consulting Kit to be integral to their business plans.  While the Computer Consulting Kit offers a variety of templates to help you in all stages of relationship-building with clients – from networking in order to make new contacts, to getting prospects and customers to sign on-going support contracts – many have found the lead generation tips, templates and techniques to really make an impact on their businesses, regardless of specialty or niche.

Here’s what two specific Computer Consulting Kit customers had to say about their experiences:

"I only got the Computer Consulting Kit a few weeks ago, but already we’re seeing more leads generated. Before getting the Computer Consulting Kit, I was generating leads using all the wrong methods. But thanks to your Computer Consulting Kit, I’ve begun working on improving my networking skills with immediate results.”

Stephen J. Hall, Your IT Department, Sliema, Malta

"Last year, I successfully met and exceeded my $1,000,000 sales target. From the Computer Consulting Kit, I learned how to keep the lead generation funnel topped up and successfully cultivated the reputation as an expert in my field, which brought a lot of business. I was able to earn $300,000 in revenue from the ideas I learned by using the Computer Consulting Kit."

Yves Ephraim, Pegasus Technologies, Inc., St. John’s, Antigua

To learn more about lead generation and how the Computer Consulting Kit can help you and your IT business, visit the attached link!

Added By:  Computer Consulting Kit

Are you ready to be more than just an IT freelancer and get serious about starting your own computer consulting business?  Being successful at getting enough high-paying, steady clients to get started means getting to know a lot of people and getting them to trust you.  Networking is one of the very best ways to achieve your goal of being a successful IT consultant and be more than just another IT freelancer trying to make ends meet.

While you can’t join every organization under the sun, you can join a few that will work best with your schedule and give you access to the best leads and prospects for your specific business.  Take some time to go to a meeting or two and get to know organizations in your area.

Organizations that Can Help You Be More than an IT Freelancer

1.    General Business Organizations:  These can be your chamber of commerce or Rotary Club or Kiwanis or even a group like Le Tip or BNI or some other lead club.  These clubs are targeted by industry or occupation and will give you access to a lot of other small business owners/managers.

2.    User Groups:  This type of group can be useful if you decide you want to specialize in a specific type of software or other platform.  You can find people with similar interests that are either consultants or IT professionals.

3.    Targeted Business Organizations or Trade Groups:  This is a group that will give you the most direct access to the clients you want for your business.  Choose a group that gives you access to small business owners within your specialty or niche and start to look for upcoming events like expos, etc. as well as a newsletter you can read.

No matter what, you need to get ACTIVE to engage in great networking that will get you beyond being just another IT freelancer and closer to your goal of being an IT consulting business owner, thriving in your field.  To learn more about this topic, visit the attached link!

Submitted By:  Joshua Feinberg

If you are like any other IT consulting professional, you may have questions about time management.  How can you focus on finding long-term B2B clients when you already feel maxed out working 60-80 hours per week?  The solution is not easy, but you have some options.

The IT Consulting Time Study

If you examine where you are spending most of your IT consulting time, you can figure out if you can delegate, automate or eliminate some tasks.  For example, if you find yourself building PCs and putting in motherboards and power supplies 10 hours per week, this simple task could probably be delegated.  If you are minding traffic in your store, you should probably delegate that as well.  

How Does Delegating Help?

You should think about which tasks you can delegate based on the staff you have already.  When you delegate, you can often free up a day or a day and a half each week that can be spent finding IT consulting clients.

How Do You Use Extra IT Consulting Time?

To get clients, you can go to networking events, plan marketing campaigns, go out on sales calls and also make follow-up phone calls to cultivate relationships.  

Time Management and IT Consulting

If you are already working a lot of hours per week, you just need to find the time to do what you have to do to find IT consulting clients.

Blogged By:  Joshua Feinberg

In order to separate yourself from the herd as an IT specialist, you need to focus on company branding.  Sell your company name with the spin of its new industry on it.  

You don’t need to blaze into meetings wielding your certifications and logos, because you will be seen as a product.  You should include this as part of your background information and a topic of conversation, but announcing your IT specialist status should not be your first statement.  Market and sell your brand and its unique value to the industry.

IT Specialist:  What Needs are Going Unfulfilled?

If you can find a local niche that is struggling to have its needs fulfilled and take control of it, you can do well as an IT specialist.  Ask around to find out what people in the community need.  

IT Specialist:  How Do You Find Your Industry Spin?

When you are at chamber meetings or other organizational meetings and talking to prospects, ask to see which big problems are not fulfilled.  One day you will find something you never thought of – a problem that you can solve for a lot of people in the area to differentiate yourself as an IT specialist.  

IT Specialist:  You Might Not Agree with Clients on Problems and Vice Versa

You won’t be very successful at selling solutions to problems of which people are unaware.  Prospects need to understand the many components of their business before they can embrace every solution.  You can educate, but you can’t force people to ask you to solve problems they do not understand.

If you are there for half an hour and can’t convince your prospect of the problem you are pushing, there may be someone else that does get it, and you should move on.  

IT Specialist:  What is the Competition?

Study your local competition as an IT specialist, most particularly the top five competitors.  Look at websites and brochures to see what others are doing and if their businesses look similar to yours.  This can give you ideas on how you can set yourself apart from the rest as an IT specialist.

Added By: Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

A major part of being an IT specialist is finding a niche so you can use targeted marketing to find the best prospects.  After all, if you are expanding your business, you don’t want to have to turn away potential clients.  If you are working within a niche as an IT specialist, you will find that IT marketing strategies are not about turning away clients; they are about finding the right number of prospects as targets for your services.  

Once you determine your niche and which clients are your best, you can do a quick search to find out the prospects in your area that are your best targets.  You can contact the specific industry’s trade groups or even talk to a mailing list broker.

Market to a Niche as an IT Specialist

Marketing to a niche is easier as an IT specialist because you know in which trade publications to advertise.  You should avoid generic ads in newspapers, on the radio or in the phone book as an IT specialist and just focus on your established niche.  As a specialist with an expertise, you will be worth a great deal to prospects and your marketing message will ring true.

Don’t Try to Reach Everyone as an IT Specialist

You need to come up with a very targeted message when trying to work within a niche.  Otherwise, you will end up competing based on price rather than the solutions and benefits you offer.  Don’t be a commodity.

Your Name Needs to Be Visible

Think about which newsletters or magazines all the prospects you’re targeting as an IT specialist read and create a very specific ad, write an article or become active an a related organization by speaking at an event.  Make sure you mention that you are an IT specialist that works on solutions for that very industry.   

IT Specialists Are Targeted

There are many ways to find a niche as an IT specialist, but make sure you find one that is enjoyable for you and will give you enough clients to make your business prosper.

Blogged By:  Joshua Feinberg

Narrowing down leads to uncover prospects can be a difficult task in the computer consulting industry.  Finding your industry focus is an important first step that can help you identify the right market.  In order to target clients you have to stand out from the rest of the computer consulting professionals trying to use the exact advertising to sell the same services.

You can also narrow down your leads and turn more into prospects by focusing on size.  

Computer Consulting:  Three Different Sizes

Micro small businesses with just a handful of PCs are a good place to start in computer consulting.  The mindset of the business owner is more important than the number of PCs he has, but micro-small businesses are not typically looking for very high-level, expensive IT computer consulting services.

The sweet spot small businesses are the next step up, and where most computer consulting professionals do very well. Small business computer consulting involves ten to fifty PC’s.  Many studies have proven that the two-to-one ratio works across industries, so if you are maxing out at a 50-seat LAN, this often means a 90-100-employee company.  Downtime for the sweet spot is very expensive.  To determine downtime expenses, divide by 250 business days a year and eight hours a day and give them the example of how a company doing $4 million a year in annual revenue with 2,000 business hours a year loses about $2,000 per hour when there is downtime.  As a computer consulting professional, you can save them money and time over the long-term.

More than 50 PCs gives you the top of the small business world and the bottom of the medium-sized business world.  At this size, the IT services bills from your company would be similar to a full-time salary for an in-house real IT manager.  This type of business will probably not outsource generalist roles and will most likely hire an on-site person and therefore is not as strong a lead as some of the smaller businesses.  

Added By:   Joshua Feinberg

Business agreements with other IT companies can be an excellent way to secure high quality referrals. When you are dealing within a B2B context, the referrals you get from non competing IT businesses tend to be ones that will turn into long term service contracts.  This is exactly the kind of business you want.

The question becomes though, "What kind of fee should I give to the person I have such a business agreement with?"

There is no quick answer as the referral fee depends on a number of factors.  Here are a few guidelines to use to structure your referral business agreements:

• Figure out what your average client relationship is worth to you over a year. If the business agreement you have set up is providing you leads that typically turn into sweet spot service contracts, then a $500.00 referral fee is not unreasonable.

• If the business agreement is passing on leads that are more one-time service call events (someone got their AOL disk stuck and you have to go over on a Saturday afternoon to fish it out and they balk at paying a $100 fee), then you really can’t afford to pay any kind of referral fee.

• If you go through the trouble of setting up a business agreement, make sure you will be getting high quality referrals.  I recommend you keep these business agreements real simple.

• For fixed fee business agreements call it a finders fee and use a range of $250 to $500 per referral.  You may go up to $1000, but that should only be after you have established a set of referral criteria that would trigger this large of a fee.  You may also want to consider a business agreement where you pay a percentage of revenue.

Bottom Line on Business Agreements
Ultimately, you have to do what you’re comfortable with.  Business agreements are an excellent referral source but you don’t want to lock yourself into paying high fees for referrals that aren’t part of your sweet spot.  Be smart about it, establish a good relationship with the company you are entering into a business agreement with, and adjust your fee system as you get more comfortable with the process.  

In this article, you’ve been introduced to Business Agreements. To learn more about how you can improve your knowledge about Business Agreements, just click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.

As in any business, a computer consultant will do some learning by trial and error. One of the key elements of a successful business is having the right clients. Sometimes your "ideal client" will change over time, so periodically review your client list.

Read on to learn how one of our computer consultants benefited from others’ learning experiences:

"I streamlined my client base. 2005 was my first year entirely without a client who had been my largest in 2003. They were a source of significant revenue, but they were also extremely demanding and paid less than half my regular hourly rate. They were also the largest source of complaints and ‘off-hour’ demands.  Since they would not allow me to send in a subcontractor or employee, I was stuck with the choice of spending all my time nursing half my revenue, or changing the scenario. I gradually weaned this client in 2004 and entirely removed them from my client base for all of 2005.  My revenue grew measurably as a result. One thing I learned from the Computer Consulting Kit was to look at each client, their revenue for the year, and decide who and what to focus on. This brought me $23,000."

Robert Rains, Gibraltar Systems Computer Consulting
Lowell, Massachusetts

The Bottom Line about Computer Consultants

In this article, you’ve learned about computer consultants. To learn more about computer consultants, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.

In the computer consulting business, finding IT leads is crucial to grow your business. The key thing is to find your ideal clients - not just anyone.

See how one of our computer consultants was able to identify high quality potential IT leads.

"In the past, we worked completely by word of mouth. Due to the Computer Consulting Kit, we now have the knowledge to make calls on qualified customers that we didn’t know even existed prior to this year."

David Riggs, Computer Consulting Services, Inc.
Jackson, Tennessee

The Bottom Line about IT Leads

To learn more about IT leads, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.

Small business network members understand and depend on networking benefits.  You can start a small business network with a little research and creativity.  All that is required for a successful small business network is a few strong business relationships.

Forming a Small Business Network

Starting a small business network may seem like a daunting task.  However, it is a relatively simple process that only improves with time.  As the network grows, so does your business.

A business owner is faced with two options.  You can join a professional organization or you can form your own small business network.

Joining a Professional Organization

One way of forming a small business network is to join one or two professional organizations.  For starters, find an organization that specializes in your industry.

You can learn a lot from other entrepreneurs that are working in your field of interest.  You should also decide what you wish to achieve from joining the small business network.  Do you simply want to make business contacts?

Are you interested in attending seminars or lectures that relate to your business?  Determine your goals before selecting a professional organization.

Forming Your Own Small Business Network

Some entrepreneurs do not have the time to invest in attending professional organization meetings.  These individuals should consider forming their own small business network.  This can be accomplished in a variety of ways.  The most common is to utilize Internet mailing lists to form relationships.

Instead of a face-to-face meeting with these individuals, you will communicate via e-mail.  This can be a valuable tool.  You will be sharing ideas, problems, and solutions with other entrepreneurs who are not considered your competition! 

Do It Today

No matter how you choose to start a small business network, the most important point is that you start one!  Networking allows a business to form long lasting relationships that impact the success of your business.

Every time you contact a network member, you are improving the odds of receiving referrals.  The community is exposed to the valuable services and products your business offers.
  
The Bottom Line about a Small Business Network

In this article, you’ve learned about a small business network. To learn more about a small business network, click here now to get access to a free one-hour audio training program on 5 Easy Ways to Grow Your Computer Consulting Business.