I’ve met a lot of Independent Computer Consultants over the course of my career. While a few continue to thrive in their Independent practice, and a few others have grown their business into larger, successful computer consulting firms, the vast majority will give it less than a year before they give up and begin actively searching for a job again.

 

Almost every small business today that relies on computer systems, needs someone qualified to maintain them. The demand for affordable solutions for maintaining and supporting small business computer systems is huge. Today, every small business owner is looking for ways to reduce costs, and the Independent Computer Consultant is perfectly positioned to offer an excellent level of support that costs less than alternate solutions like in-house employees or larger IT Support firms.

 

So with such a strong potential market and with the Independent Computer Consultant able to provide a much needed solution, why is success for Independent Computer Consultants so rare?

 

Because they follow a standard, but wrong, hourly support billing model. If you want to join the majority of your colleagues and struggle briefly before you decide that being your own boss is to difficult and unstable and decide to call it quits, do like they do and follow these three simple steps.

 

STEP 1: Bill By The Hour

Ask 100 Independent Computer Consultants what their hourly rate is and almost every one of them will be able to give you one, probably ranged somewhere between $75-$150 per hour.

 

How many will tell you, “I don’t charge by the hour. I charge flat, monthly rates.”? I’m betting not many.

 

Basing your income around how many hours you’re able to accumulate on a regular, monthly basis is a challenging and generally unstable situation.
Due to the very nature of hourly rates, a cost-conscious client (and what client isn’t cost-conscious today?) will always be aware of the time you spend on-site. And they’ll be hoping to reduce it whenever and wherever possible.

 

They’ll hold off on addressing “smaller” issues, judging if an item like connecting a user to a network printer justifies having you in for your hourly rate. Unfortunately, these little problems have a large negative effect on your client’s productivity. When their productivity suffers to the point where it hurts them financially, they’ll notice. And they’ll be quick to blame the systems that you’re responsible for maintaining.

 

Even if these small issues only amount to a few minutes a day for you to address, because they can get you in the door to work on other issues, these daily occurrences are generally the items that can make up the foundation of the hourly, computer consultant’s salary. But with the client often looking to reduce these hours, this conflict can make it difficult for the consultant to properly maintain the systems and generate a reliable income.

 

And when a BIG problem occurs, such as a server or major email outage, your client’s stress will be compounded by the fact while they’re productivity is at zero, they’re spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to have you fix the problem.

 

Billing by the hour creates a win-lose environment. The client has computer problems, they’re unhappy, but the consultant makes more money. Fewer problems means a happier client, but a poorer consultant.

 

STEP 2: Provide Reactive Support

If you’re billing by the hour for on-site support, you’re generally waiting for someone to call you with a need or problem for you to address. Hopefully you’ll be able to strike a balance where you’ll have enough clients with service requests to keep you busy, without too many clients demanding you simultaneously for “critical” requests or unexpected emergencies.

 

This is a difficult balance to find, and the downfall of many new computer consultants. If you have too few clients, with few problems and a minimal budget for improvement projects, keeping busy enough can be a challenge. When things are working smoothly, you may be tempted to call your client just to “check in”. But this can often be viewed negatively by your client as you possibly “fishing” for a few extra billable hours. Hitting a few slow months in a row can make for a very unreliable income.

 

Land yourself too many clients though, and you might be busier than you bargained for. Find yourself unable to provide support fast enough and you’ll have dissatisfied customers. Fail to respond to a client during a real emergency because you’re addressing another client’s emergency, and odds are high that you’ll lose more than just a few billable hours.

 

If you put a good server monitoring system in place, you can potentially eliminate most of these problems. If you monitor the server proactively, you can catch items like failed backups, low disk space, hardware failure alerts, etc. This will reduce unexpected emergencies and allow you to schedule your time much more reliably.

 

Monitoring will also let you identify issues that might have gone unnoticed until they escalated into a real problem. You don’t need to wait for your client to tell you what work needs to be done. You can review the server logs and let your client know what problems exist and need to be addressed.

 

The problem with proactive monitoring under the hourly billing model is… what if it works?

 

What if you’re able to clean up their systems to the point where problems are rare? Will you still be able to maintain a busy enough schedule with only the day-to-day minor user issues to address?

 

What if the opposite is true and you find problems popping up almost daily? While it’ll be easy enough to bring these problems to your client’s attention and hopefully they’ll appreciate you identifying the problem early, there’s also the probability that they’ll question why all these problems are occurring and why suddenly you need to spend so much billable time on their systems.

 

And of course there’s the question of how to charge for proactive system monitoring under an hourly-rate support model. Whether you charge an hourly, partial-hour or flat-rate for your monitoring service, unless the client sees regular, clear evidence of the effectiveness of your work, they’re going to question whether this extra expense is a necessary one.

 

If monitoring helps to identify problems and keeps you busy, your clients will potentially be asking why they’re spending more money now than before you started monitoring their systems. “Wasn’t the monitoring supposed to reduce problems and save me money?”

 

If it helps to keep their systems operating at peak performance, they’ll be happy, but your income will suffer.

 

Being proactive is a real challenge when operating under the hourly-rate business model. It can have a negative impact on your immediate income, but it gives you the best chance for satisfied clients.

 

Yet another conflict that the hourly-rate computer consultant must figure out how to overcome.

 

Reactive support however, is basically waiting for things to break in order for you to survive. Which for a computer consultant hired to keep things running, is career suicide.

 

STEP 3: Provide On-Site Service

Naturally, you’ll need to visit your clients on a fairly regular basis. As an hourly-support consultant, if you don’t see your clients, you don’t make money. If your business is built primarily around having to be at your client site to be able to support them and to generate your income, then it’s in your best interest to be there as often as possible. Of course, your client wants to see you there as infrequently as possible.

 

This conflict alone is enough to prevent someone who’s starting a computer consulting business from ever succeeding.

 

And there’s always the possibility that two of your clients might need support at the same time. If you’re not monitoring your clients proactively as discussed above, the chance for unexpected problems to arise is high. Two simultaneous emergencies happen often enough when you’re supporting multiple, unmonitored networks.

 

What if it’s not even an emergency, but a simple request to clean up a workstation that’s been getting pop-ups. But the call comes in while you’re working on a project and you have another service call waiting and you won’t be able to make it down until a day and a half from now. This doesn’t do much for customer satisfaction, let alone the possibility that your client may not want to wait for you and finds another way to resolve their problem, which will lose you some billable time at least (and maybe lose you a client at worst).

 

A simple solution would seem to be to provide remote computer support. Doing so gives you the ability to essentially be at two places at once. You probably won’t attempt to do an SBS migration remotely, but you certainly can start a malware scan remotely at one client while on-site at another (of course, if you’re billing by the hour, you need to be very careful about who’s clock you’re on when you’re doing remote work from a client site).

 

Providing remote computer support could definitely improve client satisfaction. In addition to being able to provide nearly instantaneous support, your clients will also be seeing you less often, which we know is what they want when being charged by the hour.

 

So unless you’re billing properly for remote support, you’ll be losing some income.

 

But under the hourly rate billing model, how do you charge for remote services? By the hour? In 15 minute increments? What if the support call takes 10 minutes to resolve? Do you charge for it, or do you chalk it up to providing “good customer service”? How many billable hours might you be giving away over the course of the month? How many of those calls could have led to additional billable time had you have gone on-site to provide the service? By not having to go on-site to resolve the day-to-day, minor issues, would you still be able to maintain enough hours of on-site work per week for each of your clients?

 

Let’s say you charge $125/hr. and you have four clients for who you provide a total of 2 hours of work each, per week remotely. This would be a fantastic gig for you… for the remote work alone, you’d be making $48K annually, while working about 8 hours a week, mostly while wearing your pj’s.

 

But I guarantee you, if you consistently send your client an invoice for 8 hours a month, and they can’t recall the last time they’ve seen your face for more than a few hours, it won’t be long before questions or suspicions arise as to the need or validity of your service.

 

Whenever you provide remote support, stellar record keeping and reporting is critical. However, even with detailed reports, if your client is paying for a substantial numbers of hours each month for work they don’t actually see you doing, they’re going to want a very high level of communication or other supporting evidence of your work and the time involved.

 

Once again, you’re faced with another conflict where you’re trying to do your work, and the very nature of your billing arrangement causes your client to question your work.

 

If you want to fail as an Independent Computer Consultant, it’s very simple to do. Just follow the examples laid out by the countless other failed consultants before you and create a business built on charging hourly rates to put out fires at your client’s sites as quickly and as often as you’re able to.

 

If however, you want to start a computer consulting business that follows a business model that’s been proven and guaranteed to succeed, then visit http://SuccessfulComputerConsulting.com for free step-by-step video training that can get you started on the right path today!

 

 

One of the greatest challenges faced by an Independent Computer Consultant is receiving payment for services rendered in a timely fashion. When serving small business customers, it is commonly expected that charges for services will be invoiced on a monthly basis for all services rendered for the previous month.

 

Now, you can be diligent and consistently mail all of your invoices out on the first of the month. But that doesn’t mean your customers will be mailing you a check on the 2nd.

 

As a small business owner yourself, you will have financial responsibilities to meet on a regular and timely basis. You can work very hard to make sure that your receivables are sufficient for meeting your expenses, but it won’t do you any good if your invoice for your hard work sits in your client’s inbox, unpaid for weeks or even months.

 

Fortunately, there’s a very easy solution to making sure that you receive payment ON THE VERY SAME DAY YOU GENERATE YOUR INVOICE.

 

You have a Factoring Company purchase your receivables.

 

Once a month (or as often as you like), you can A transmit a copy of all of your invoices directly to your Factoring Company, for which they will, on the same day, deposit up to 85% or more of the total amount directly into your bank account.

 

Then, once your client mails payment directly to your Factoring Company, you will receive the remaining 15% of your invoice, minus the fee charged by the factoring company, which will vary depending on how long it took to receive payment. A typical rate could be from about 1.2% for payments received within 30 days to 1.6% for invoices outstanding for longer than 3 months.

 

For me, these fees are well worth the benefit of knowing at the start of each month, EXACTLY how much money will be received and EXACTLY on which date!

 

It’s also a huge benefit not have to deal with any collections.

 

If an invoice is slow in getting paid, the factoring company is your outsourced “receivables department”, who will make the initial collection attempts.

 

Another great benefit of factoring receivables is the ability to generate additional income outside of the regular billing cycle.

 

For my small business clients, I provide a Proactive Maintenance Plan, for which I charge a flat, monthly fee. This covers general monitoring and remote computer support.

 

I will often make recommendations for projects that don’t fall under the scope of the regular, monthly maintenance plan. For example, replacing a firewall.

 

This project would be billed at an additional rate to the flat, monthly fee. If I complete the installation of the firewall to my client’s satisfaction on let’s say the 15th of the month, I can create the invoice for this project, submit it to my factoring company on the 15th and receive payment the same day.

 

Having reliable cash flow is critical to all businesses, especially to a start-up without substantial capital sitting in the bank account. Factoring your receivables can provide the financial stability you need when starting a small business of your own as an Independent Computer Consultant.

 

 

The IT Support landscape is rapidly changing, with new, inexpensive tools being developed for proactive maintenance and remote support that allow support to be delivered faster and cheaper than ever before.

 

Is this the beginning of the end of the Independent Computer Consultant? Or can he evolve to become the preferred option for cost-effective Small Business IT Support in the coming decade?

 

With almost 30 million small businesses in the US alone, there is no shortage of a need for new innovations in technology. Every major technology developer… Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, Apple, IBM, HP, Sony, BlackBerry, Intel and so on, as well as the thousands of smaller, but just as significant tech companies will continue to invest billions of dollars year after year developing new and innovative products for the immense and continuously growing small business market.

 

The way data is created, accessed and shared, the way communication will continue to expand our personal networks while shrinking our planet, the new and stronger methods we’ll need to protect ourselves and our information, the way we sell and market our services and ourselves… All will change, and will continue to change for long into the foreseeable future.

 

As long as technology continues to evolve, they’ll continue to be a need for a qualified support person to install it, configure it, monitor it, maintain it, and yes, fix it when it doesn’t work as it should.

 

And of course there will always be for a knowledgeable professional to show an inexperienced user how to get the most out of their systems.

 

To get the greatest long-term financial return from a technology investment, a small business owner will need to properly maintain these systems that are so critical to the daily functionality of their operations.

 

Qualified Computer Consultants who can keep their client’s systems current, working at peak performance levels and that operating with minimal problems will always be in high demand.

 

This is where an Independent Computer Consultant has an advantage over larger IT Support Providers or MSP’s. Thanks to affordable system monitoring and remote support utilities, the independent computer consultant can provide the same reliable and immediate support response as a larger provider, yet, can be very price-competitive thanks to much lower overhead.

 

Providing the computer consultant’s business is created on the correct business model, success is easily reached.

 

What is destined for extinction is the old support model of being the on-call computer “repairman”, who runs to the client’s office whenever a problem occurs… at a high, hourly billing rate. This reactive method of support relies on having systems fail for the consultant to make an income. The worse the systems perform (and the more dissatisfied the customer becomes), the more money the consultant makes.

 

This business model is guaranteed to fail. It’s heavily reliant on having problems to resolve, keeps your clients continuously associating you with greater expenses to their business and provides a very unstable income.

 

For a computer consultant to succeed in supporting small businesses, they need to provide a proactive monitoring keep their customers systems functioning at peak performance levels and operating as reliably as possible. They also need to provide instant response to critical support requests. Fortunately, these things can easily be accomplished by using today’s affordable IT support utilities, such as GFI Max for server monitoring and inventory reporting, and LogMeIn Free for reliable… and free, remote computer support.

 

When a computer consultant builds a business on a proactive support model, they can charge affordable, flat, monthly rates to their clients. This is much more preferable to billing high, hourly rates that the consultant is always looking for more of, while the customer is trying to cut them down.

 

By being proactive and reducing problems, a computer consultant will have a much more satisfied customer base, a more predictable and reliable income level and will be able to support many more computer systems in far less time.

 

The Independent Computer Consultant can be the ideal support model for providing efficient and cost-effective IT Support to today’s small businesses, who are more cost-conscious than ever before.

 

Starting a small business as an Independent Computer Consultant can be one of the most lucrative and rewarding career choices an IT professional can make today.

 

 

In Part 1 of this 2-part article, we discussed 3 of the 7 Major Perks that can be gained by starting a small business of your own as an Independent Computer Consultant.

 

Let’s discuss the 4 remaining Major Perks you’ll get by taking charge of your career and becoming your own boss.

 

Major Perk #4: Flexible work hours – You’re the one who sets your office hours. Naturally, as the support provider for your clients, you’ll need to be available when they need you. However, if you want to get paid an overtime rate for any work your clients request outside of your regular business hours, you can.
Simply set the ground rules for your hours and rates in the support agreement that you have signed when you begin your relationship with your customer.

 

When you follow the correct Proactive Support Model with Flat-Fee Billing and Remote Computer Support, you should be providing the vast majority of your work from a remote location and not at the client site. And because your support model is based on preventative maintenance and not on constantly addressing emergencies, you’ll have a great deal of flexibility as to when you begin and end your work day.

 

Major Perk #5: An Opportunity for technical growth – If you’re working for someone else, it’s typically your boss who decides what products you’ll get to work with or learn. Fall into the wrong position, and your experience level and growth can be severely limited.

 

But as an Independent Computer Consultant, your clients will be turning to you for recommendations on which products or solutions to install. You get to decide on the products you will be working with. The choice is yours as to what you will be installing and supporting.

 

You get to learn the systems that you want to learn. If there is a product that you want more experience with and it’s the right solution for one of your clients, then you have the opportunity to go ahead and learn it.

 

Your clients will believe in you and your expertise. If you believe your choice in systems is the best and most cost-effective option for your clients, they will usually follow your advice.

 

Major Perk #6: Opportunity for professional growth – As a business owner, you’ll communicate regularly with the upper management and owners of your clients’ businesses. You are no longer the “technician” sent in to work on their systems… you are a fellow business owner… and your relationship will take on a peer-like connection. It’s the type of connection that can lead to greater opportunities for higher level networking and relationship building.

 

Business owners enjoy talking with other business owners because they can relate to them. Suddenly you’ve become one of their inner circle… a place that many people never get access to.

 

You’ll also have the opportunity to grow your own business should you so decide. If you choose to expand your operations beyond what you’re able to handle on your own and build your business into a larger corporation, that’s your choice.

 

You see, the starting point of Independent Computer Consultant can be a solid foundation for providing the client base, contacts and capital that will help your growing computer consulting business to continue growing.

 

Major Perk #7: A stimulating social environment – You’re in complete control over the companies you work with. Every employee or employer of every company you choose to work with provides an opportunity for expanding your social circle. The larger and more varied the client base you create for yourself, the larger the social network you’ll have to operate within.

 

Strong social circles are where great referrals can be found.

 

And great referrals provide the foundation for growing your computer consulting business.

 

Starting a small business of your own as an Independent Computer Consultant can provide you with so many benefits that are simply difficult, if not impossible to obtain while working as an employee of someone else.

 

Assuming you already have the required skill set to support a small business network, getting started as your own boss as an Independent Computer Consultant will be easier, less risky and requires far less capital then starting a small business of almost any other kind.

 

By focusing on building your business on the correct model of flat-fee, proactive maintenance and using inexpensive, readily available utilities to monitor and remotely support your clients, you can achieve great success very quickly.