IT Consulting for Micro Businesses: What You Need to Know

Summary:
IT Consulting in Micro Businesses requires you to be familiar with basic hardware, software, and networking. You only need to know how to perform about half of the skills to be successful at IT consulting.

Computer Consultant Startup: Identify Your Business Skills

Summary:

Computer consultants need to have the right mix of business and technical skills to succeed with small businesses. Do you have the right skill-set to be a successful small business computer consultant?

Article Body:

Since you're taking the time to read this article right now, it's a good sign that you have what it takes to become a computer consultant. You're in the small minority of people who have recognized that this is a business and needs to be run like one.

A Good Computer Consultant Has More Than Just Technical Skills

It's not about playing with the latest routers or wi-fi device or VPNs or firewalls. Sure, you have to have a certain amount of skills to make a successful computer consultant because people are buying your expertise. At the end of the day, though, it's a business.

In order for the business to be successful, you have to know a few things about getting revenue in and keeping your expenses down. You also need to forecast and be able to bill, negotiate, and network properly.

There are a lot of stubborn techies out there who think that studying the Windows Server Resource Kit is going to tell them what they need to know about running a business. Not true. It's going to teach you about registry keys and directories and things like that.

Even a Computer Consultant Needs a Good Resume

If you're currently self-employed, you may not have an up- to-date resume, but for most people looking to transition into the business to become a computer consultant you probably do have a resume. Take out a copy of your resume and a yellow highlighter marker and go through and highlight every sentence or phrase in your resume that describes a project or a job or a skill that you think would be relevant or marketable to the owner of a small company.

Categorize the Items on Your Resume

Go through it and look for all the phrases and the jobs and the projects that you've worked on for the past couple of years and think about what's going to catch the eye of a typical small business owner or manager. Once you've done that, go back through each highlighted item and mark whether it was IT related, whether it had to do with understanding how to run a business or whether it had to do with being able to communicate effectively.

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Computer Consultant 101: How to Build a Stable Business

Summary:

Computer Consultant businesses need to implement good business practices. Make sure you implement the strategies in this article and you will become a successful computer consultant.

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Know How To Bill and What to Charge

Without knowing how to bill and what to charge, you’re going to lose a lot of money that’s really yours. If you get your billing and pricing wrong as a computer consultant, you'll send a bad message to people that you’re trying to quote for business. 

You'll be screaming that you’re a rank amateur rather than a skilled computer consultant. It could take you years to recover from this. A lot of times you would need to scrap existing clients and completely start over because certain clients you brought in at the wrong level.

Perform IT Audits

If you know how to do them right it’s an incredibly powerful technique. You get paid to write proposals and do needs assessment work. If you don’t know how to do this you’re going to wind up doing a lot of exploratory work for free. You can actually get paid for your initial consultation time for doing the technology assessments and the IT audits. 

Build Local Partnerships

You’ll need partnerships as your computer consultant business evolves. These will get you some of your best clients along the way. If you don’t have good local partnerships, you can almost guarantee that you’ll lose clients along the way with this as well. You need to learn how to find these key players and how to negotiate with them. 

Exceed Client Expectations

If you want to get paid the big bucks as a small business computer consultant, your clients will expect a lot from you. Your clients' idea of perfection may be different from yours. You need to learn the magic words you need to know to avoid a lot of the stress and intense pressure. You want to come out smelling like a rose to exceed their expectations.

Maximize your Utilization Rate and Profitability

Making as much of your work-week billable as possible and eliminate a lot of the non billable, time-draining non revenue draining computer consultant activities.  It’s all about delivering small business virtual IT services and how to build a stable business; how to get clients for life. 

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