Are you in the software consulting business? Would you like to go beyond just selling products and services, and move towards selling real solutions that can give your firm long-term profitability?  

Many involved in software consulting don’t fully understand why you need to go beyond selling software and products and establish real relationships with clients that involve sophisticated end-to-end IT solutions.  And even if installing networks and finding the right software for your small business clients is a part of your job description, you really need to move beyond just basic server and network installation, and find profitable ways to continue adding value to your installations.  

The following 8 tips can help you go beyond basic software consulting, so you can profit from mutually-beneficial, on-going relationships with steady, high-paying clients.

1. The Best Opportunities Come from Being a Virtual CIO/Project Manager.  As you start to develop long-term relationships with small business clients and go beyond just installing and customizing software, you want to become each client’s virtual CIO and project manager.  As you take on this role, you will have the ultimate responsibility for delivering the completed project on time and on budget.  You are commanding high rates because you are managing complex projects with a lot of variables.  Smooth upgrades and on-going maintenance don’t just happen. As a true project manager and virtual CIO, you have to be diligent with advanced planning and attention to many details.

2. Build a Testing Center in Your Office.  Building a test bed in your office can help you become more comfortable with supported software and product recommendations.  Know the major product features inside-out and backwards before you install the software at a client site.  You don’t want your clients to be your guinea pigs.

   
   

3. Plan and Coordinate Carefully.  A lot of the work for any major software consulting project is advance planning and coordination.  As a virtual CIO, make sure everything you do for clients is rigorously planned, so you don’t compromise important client relationships by failing to deliver on your promises.

   
   

4. Schedule Major Upgrades and Other Disruptive Work for After Hours.  Plan to do major software upgrades and network installations when your clients aren’t in the middle of a busy work day.  Start planning downtime weeks in advance so everyone knows what to expect.

   
   

5. Be Totally Prepared for Emergencies.  As part of your software consulting, you have to have your proverbial “fire extinguisher” ready for every client.  Know who to call, including vendor tech support phone numbers, passwords, hours, and newsgroups, when you run into a problem that stumps you before you are in the middle of it and completely stressed out.

6. Review Your Clients’ IT Asset Inventories and Site Survey Notes.  Get familiar with any shortcomings your clients might have in terms of their IT assets or any other systems that might get in the way of a successful installation.  You shouldn’t consider taking on a client that refuses to pay for a few hours of your time to do an updated site survey or create an asset inventory.

7. Set Up Clear Testing Criteria for Each Client.  As part of your software consulting, you need to define success with each client when it comes to installations.  Figure out how to test systems and applications to make sure you have successfully completed a project. To do this, you need to have very set criteria for determining a job well done.

8. Have Back-Ups.   If you really want to be a virtual CIO for your valued clients, you shouldn’t undertake any major installation until you are totally sure that your client has multiple, verified and tested back-ups in case something goes wrong.

In this article, we talked about 8 important tips that help you run a successful software consulting firm.  Learn more about how you can attract great, steady, high-paying clients for your software consulting business now at the attached link.    
 
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With a computer contract job, you need to look at where you spend most of your time and determine if there are some things you are doing that you could delegate, automate or even eliminate altogether.

As an example, maybe you are sitting around building PCs and putting in motherboards and power supplies 10 hours per week, which is something you could delegate.  If you are minding retail traffic in a retail computer store and you have someone else that can do that for a day per week, this is another good way to manage time.  

Delegation is Key

You need to consider which computer contract job tasks you can delegate based on your staff.  Then you can give yourself a free day to a day-and-a-half per week to work on cultivating business-to-business clients.  

What Should You Do with Extra Time?

With free time earned through delegation of computer contract job duties, you can go to networking events, plan marketing strategies, go out on sales calls and make follow-up calls.  

The Main Idea

If you are already working way too many hours, even with some computer contract job delegation and time management, you just need to find the time to get everything done.  Look out for where you spend computer contract job time and see if you can delegate a few things to free up some time for important marketing and networking tasks.

Submitted By:  Joshua Feinberg

You can figure out a lot about computer consulting time spent by journaling.  You should write down everything you do for a few weeks to get a good sample of how you use your time. Where are you wasting it?  How can you improve time management?  Use your journal to evaluate and combine it with an Excel spreadsheet or calendar.  Do you have enough time to do the business development for larger accounts?

Evaluation

Time is at a premium when you are working in the computer consulting business.  You may need to make decisions about where you can and can’t afford to spend as little as ten hours per week.

Make Time for Training

Training can be expensive.  But a lot of computer consulting firms do training that is more costly time-wise than financially.  Don’t send people out for five-day $2,500 Exchange Server courses.  Instead get the action pack subscription and buy some resale copies.  You can load it up on spare machines and whenever your techs have downtime, make them go through the tutorials.  Have them look at the read-me files, resource kits and have them do the CBT training.

Computer Consulting Plans Are Critical

If you are billing out computer consulting techs at 65 or 70 percent capacity and they spend six or eight hours per week just sitting there or doing some work around the store, structure their downtime more wisely.

Give them a plan during the month to concentrate all their time on learning how to do Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 or get stronger on troubleshooting Exchange Sever.       

The Main Point about Computer Consulting

Track where your time is spent and have technical staff spend some time each week keeping skills up to speed.  Identify your computer consulting skills gaps to get to the next level.

Added By:  Computer Consulting Kit

Which Web Design Programs Do You Need?

You need to know basic web authoring tools in order to be able to set up simple websites for your IT consulting clients.  Also make sure you have your own website. Know Microsoft Front page, and if you are looking at more high-end websites, Macromedia or Dreamweaver.   

Terminal Services

Real is still a hot thing with small businesses.  Know what is built into the window server.  While the fax machine is probably going quickly, faxing over a network is very important.

Get to know what you can about performance monitoring so you can do tune-ups and checks.  You will be dealing with VPN and RADs, virtual private networking and remote access, particularly when working with teleworkers and branch offices.

Things to Know about Virus Protection

You need to know more about advanced virus protection applications, particularly when they cross over different applications.  When they work with a group-wide system like Exchange Server or IAS, know how to automate the process.  Also get to know some sophisticated firewall and intrusion detection packages to fully protect your IT consulting sweet spot clients.

Added By:  Joshua Feinberg

Large small businesses have between five and 100 seats, 50 and 100 computers and usually 50 – 200 employees.  The annual revenue of a large small business is typically from $5 – $20 million.  You will probably find a lot of publicly run corporations at this level.

Large small businesses will have two or more dedicated servers.  You will typically find an in-house IT manager that has been hired to do generalist tasks.

Professionals on Staff

Large small businesses will have more than a technician, coordinator or guru.  They will have a dedicated IT consulting professional with skills very similar to yours.  The IT manager will sometimes be vendor certified and might know a couple different operating systems, database platforms or be or be in touch with a software developer.  

No matter what the situation, large small businesses will have staff with IT consulting skills that make them professionals and are typically in charge of all the generalist work.  If you want to provide IT consulting to large small businesses, you will need to be a true specialist.

Blogged By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

Which networking skills specifically should you have to best serve your IT consulting customers?  Where networking software is concerned, you should know some client server messaging packages including Microsoft Exchange Server, Novell group wise, client server and sequel database applications.  Microsoft sequel server will play a large part in your IT consulting business. 

Accounting Applications

To provide the best IT consulting solutions, know Microsoft Business Solutions and Great Plains’ Best 90. 

CRM Applications

You may want to make CRM applications a specialty.  Get to know Best Software and Microsoft Business Solutions.  Microsoft Business Solutions can fit well into your IT consulting solutions.  Also establish some knowledge of web servers, administering Microsoft IS and Open Source Apache. 

The Bottom Line About Skills for Sweet Spot Customers

When it comes to offering the most comprehensive solutions to valued IT consulting customers, be prepared to have some basic skills in terms of networking software, accounting software and CRM applications. 

Submitted By:  Computer Consulting Kit

When you have a small business computer consulting firm, you will take a third of your gross and use it for sales and marketing.  This means you can afford a $40,000 base salary for a sales account executive.  Of the one-third of your gross small business computer consulting income, $40,000 goes to base salary and $10,000 goes to marketing expenses.  

Another one-third will handle taxes, insurance and overhead items.  $50,000 will be left to pay technical staff salary.

How Do You Get Past $100 Per Hour?

If you are thinking about going beyond a $100 per hour rate for your small business computer consulting firm, you can hit the hourly billing rate ceiling.  If your clients are paying $110 to $125 per hour, you will be more able to afford the best, most qualified technical staff.

Higher Rates Mean a Different Business

If you want to charge beyond $100 per hour, you will need to go beyond sweet spot small business clients and start serving large small businesses, medium-sized businesses and enterprise accounts that will mean a new business model and new technical skills for your small business computer consulting firm.

Blogged By:  Joshua Feinberg

IT Specialists:  The Positive Side of Working with Non-Profits

1.    You can reach non-profits because they are part of trade groups.  You will find non-profits in directories available to the public.

2.    Non-profits can provide IT specialists with emotional satisfaction and rewards that you can’t get anywhere else but through working with a cause that means something to you. 

IT Specialists:  The Negative Aspects of Working with Non-Profits

1.    Non-profits provide poor profit margins.

2.    Approaching non-profits can involve you in bidding wars.

Bidding wars reduce your firm to a product rather than a service.  Also, when you bid against someone else’s prices, your competitors could be working to get you to lower your bid price to a point where you forget to offer the most realistic and best solution.

When you’re involved in a bidding war, you don’t have credibility, trust and personality on your side.  The bottom line is whether you can offer the lowest price in the right amount of time and generally follow the rules.  Bidding wars create a great deal of non-billable work up-front as well for which you would normally charge in the private sector.     

IT Specialists:  Non-Profits and Government Bids

Selling to private sector small businesses is easier than selling to non-profits and government organizations for most IT specialists.  Many times non-profits and government agencies have to take quoted prices for legal reasons, which can cause you problems when trying to lay out benefits for both you and the non-profit.

Bid Smart as an IT Specialist

Don’t risk your whole company just to make a competitive bid to non-profits.  Make sure you spend no more than 20% of your business development on bid chasing if your company is not purely dedicated to non-profits and government agencies.

A government organization looking to outsource support services that has a very good request for proposal is a much better bet for you than a prospect without a clear plan or one that is just looking for a one-shot deal.

Non-profit and government agencies are better options for providing niche services as an IT specialist than retail services.  However, non-profit and government sectors are still not as favorable as the sweet spot of small business computer consulting. 

Added By:  Computer Consulting Kit

Here are some relatively universal risk-reduction tips you can use for planning most small business server and LAN installations:

IT Project Management Tips For Server and/or LAN Installations

• Build a “test bed” in your office to become more technically comfortable with your standard server and LAN product recommendations. Know the major product features inside-out and backwards before you install the product at a client site. Remember this simple rule of thumb for IT project management: Client guinea pigs make great former clients.

• 70-80% of the work for the project is often advanced planning and coordination. Without this rigorous planning, your IT project management efforts will result in failure.

• Schedule the upgrade to occur after hours. This is a critical aspect of IT project management that should be planned a few weeks in advance.

• Have your “fire extinguisher” fully charged up. Make sure you know who to call (vendor tech support phone numbers, passwords, hours, newsgroups, etc.) when you’re stumped before you get stumped and become totally stressed out.

• Review your clients’ IT asset inventories and site survey notes for any shortcomings that could derail your planned server/LAN installation. IT project management is always proactive.  

• Don’t even think about taking on a major network rollout if the client is too cheap to pay for a few hours of your time to prepare an updated site survey and asset inventory document.

• Develop testing criteria with your client. After all, how will you know if you’ve succeeded if you don’t have a working definition of “success”? As the up-grade or rollout nears completion your IT project management plan should detail which business applications to test and how.

• Fortify the client’s backup arsenal. Never, never, never undertake any major installation or upgrade until you are triple positive that the client has multiple, verified and tested backup media sets readily available.

Bottom Line on IT Project Management
Successful IT project management requires proactive thinking and excellent planning.  As a computer consultant, you will be asked to perform IT project management particularly for server and LAN installations, so you need to have excellent skills in IT project management.

In this article, you’ve been introduced to IT Project Management. To learn more about how you can improve your knowledge about IT Project Management, 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. 

Read on to see how one of our computer consultants was able to do an upgrade quickly and effectively.

"The project management section {of the Computer Consulting Kit} was most valuable to me. It has helped me earn an additional $10,000. I upgraded a customer from Microsoft Windows Server 2000 to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with minimum down time. I used a lab server to temporarily run all customer applications while loading the customer server with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and all applications. Customer down time was less than 2 hours in this process. The key is planning, planning, planning! You can never plan enough."

Rowland Johnson, SiMS
Clearwater, Florida

The Bottom Line about Project Management

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