How do you make your case to your prospective (or current) small business customer that moving to a flat-fee, proactive model makes sense?

Convert downtime into dollars and your point becomes easy to see.

According to a recent survey from International Data Corporation (IDC), the average small business generates a revenue of approximately $3.6 million dollars annually. As we Independent Computer Consultants tend to serve clients on the smaller side, let’s round that number down to $2 million to be safe.

If the client has 10 employees, we can estimate that each employee generates $200,000 of revenue per year. With 260 working days in a year and 8 hours per day, that breaks down to approximately $96/hr. per employee. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a tremendous amount on the surface, but add up the total number of service calls that might be made over the course of the year, and then couple that with the cost of doing repairs at an hourly rate, and the expense can really add up.

But let’s take a look at the big picture and consider the type of firm-wide problems that can be prevented. What if a hard-drive in the server were to fail and the backup hasn’t run in weeks, or a virus spreads across the network, or a hacker hijacks the server and sets it up as a spam relay. Issues like these affect millions of small businesses every day and can bring the entire company to a halt. With the cost of downtime for the entire company for a day being approximately $7680, plus the cost of repair at an hourly rate being approximately the same (assuming an average rate of $100/hr.), the true cost of a day of downtime is almost $16,000.

That doesn’t take into account the possibility of lost sales, lost data and lost time required to recreate lost data, damages to customer relations, etc., which could multiply that cost even more and in some cases be financially devastating to the small business.

Considering that a Managed Service Plan for a small company costs on average $1200/mo. or $14,400 annually and that any one of the above mentioned potential problems could easily be prevented with your included system monitoring, it becomes very easy to see how your Managed Service can provide a much greater value to a small business than an hourly support consultant who’s simply standing by waiting for a problem to occur.

Now tack on the benefit of being able to provide instant customer response through your remote support utilities (rather than having the customer wait for hours for their computer consultant to arrive), the increased productivity that will be gained by keeping the systems current, and the overall peace of mind that’s gained by knowing the network is being monitored around the clock, and it can be very difficult for a responsible small business owner to not switch to your Managed Service Plan.

It’s extremely easy to build a profitable client base when you build on a managed service model, and once you do, you will have an unmatched level of job security, no limit to the salary you can make, tremendous freedom in your daily schedule and more free time for your personal life than you can ever expect to have if you’re working for someone else.

With so many potential benefits, why would you choose to work for someone else?

Don’t think you can get enough clients?
Nonsense! If you setup your business under the correct model of flat-fee managed services, each of your clients will pay you a set fee each and every month (and I can show you how to guarantee to collect this fee on the FIRST of every month! No waiting 30, 60, 90 days for payment!) Small businesses with an average of 10 employees will gladly pay a managed service provider a fee of $1200 a month or more to know that their systems are monitored 24×7 and that support can be provided instantly (you can easily do both by using inexpensive, web based utilities). Just FOUR small clients can generate a stable, reliable salary of almost $58,000. ANYONE with a desire to succeed and a few decent pieces of marketing materials can land four or more small clients very quickly and easily.

Worried you can’t sell?
Let’s say instead of starting your own business, you chose to look for a new job instead. How different do you think going on an interview is from selling a potential client on your managed service? I’ll tell you how different… Selling to a potential client is WAY EASIER!

On a job interview, you’re probably competing with dozens, if not hundreds of other potential candidates. Many of which will probably have an equal if not greater level of experience than you do. But when you’re talking to a potential client for your computer consulting service, you’ll be competing with two or three other candidates at most. And if your potential client came to you through a referral (the greatest way to find new clients by the way), odds are, you won’t be competing with anyone!

When looking for new clients, you should be going to places where they are actually out looking for you (business networking, through referrals, through job ads the client placed, etc.). These businesses are already anxious to use your service. As long as you can show how your service can provide a benefit and value to this potential customer, you can make the sale.

Not sure if you’re qualified to run your own business?
If you can maintain a small business computer network, you’re qualified to run your own computer consulting business! Thanks to the inexpensive system monitoring and remote access applications available today, you can easily support a small but very profitable base of small business customers. Because you’ll be able to maintain your clients systems without having to run on-site for every little issue, and because you’ll be able to ensure a much more stable operating environment through your monitoring, you will be able to support your entire client base on just a few hours a day. Starting a computer consulting business as an Independent Computer Consultant requires almost zero startup capital and very little monthly overhead. By leveraging the use of current technology, there are few business opportunities available that are easier to start than that of an Independent Computer Consultant operating as a Managed Service Provider.

The Managed Service Model works and is the only way to operate an IT Support Company profitably and successfully. Eventually, all support providers will move away from hourly support an onto the Managed Service Model. But when everyone is offering essentially the same thing… 24×7 monitoring, remote helpdesk support, flat-fee billing… what can you as an Independent Computer Consultant offer that’s different?

Well, it’s the fact that you’re an Independent Computer Consultant that will set you apart and give you a very distinct advantage over your larger competition.

I get calls all the time from small businesses owners inquiring about my service because they’re unhappy with their current provider and looking to make a change. What do you think is the #1 reason usually given for wanting someone new?

Their current provider isn’t responsive enough! The client often feels like they’re being treated as a lower priorty than some of their IT Provider’s larger clients. Or their consultant is continually late or reschedules on-site appointments. Or they simply don’t receive the level of communication they would appreciate and believe they deserve.

Why is this such a problem for so many larger Support Providers to address? Because there’s typically a large amount of overhead needed to support a large IT Support Firm. To remain profitable, they must maintain a large client base, while keeping expensive internal staff members to a minimum. It’s a difficult balance to achieve and often the consultants are simply spread too thin.

But an Independent Computer Consultant operating under a Managed Service Model only needs to maintain a very small client base to remain profitable. In fact, I’ve proven time and again how a single computer consultant can generate a full-time income while supporting only 4 small business clients and working a total average of about 10 hours a week, a large portion of which is performed remotely.

Because as an Independent Computer Consultant you now only need a few clients to thrive as a successful business, and you can maintain these clients on such a flexible schedule, it’s very easy to provide a level of dedication and attention to your customers that your larger competition simply can’t match.

You can approach a potential new client and state, “I currently maintain a client base of “(number of)” clients, all of which will be glad to provide a glowing recommendation. I never maintain a base of any more than (number of) clients at any one time, so that I can be sure to give each and every one of my loyal customers the level of dedication and attention they deserve.”

You can easily show that you can provide the same level of monitoring and remote support that any large provider can offer. But it’s this level of personalized support that the small business owner craves, and knowing that they will have an expert IT Support Person who’s dedicated to them is what will help you win the contracts and beat out your competitors every time.

Of course, your clients will want to know how you intend to support them when you’re sick or on vacation. This is easily accomplished by creating a partnership with another consultant or support provider. But this is a subject for another post.

- Greater reliability from their systems
- Higher productivity
- Faster response when they have a problem
- Less loss due to unexpected downtime
- Predictable and affordable support costs

If you’re in the habit of charging hourly rates to support your customers, you probably know by now that it’s a very inefficient way to meet the above needs, and a very difficult way for you to be generating a reliable, steady income.

The best way to ensure that you give your small business client everything they want, and maximize your own profitability at the same time is through offering a Managed Service Plan at a flat, monthly rate. Your plan should include round the clock system monitoring and remote computer support, both which can be provided through very low cost or even free support utilities.

With system monitoring, you can get instantly alerted 24×7 via email or SMS when potential problems arise, such as:
- Failed backups
- Failed AntiVirus updates
- Hard Disks running low on space
- Windows System Service failures
- Overutilization of system processes
- Firewall hack attempts or multiple unauthorized login attempts
- Event Log errors or alerts
- and more…

By monitoring for these types of events, you’ll be able to catch potential problems early, or prevent them all together and therefore better satisfy all of the needs that your customers have. And because you provide these services for a flat-monthly fee, you’ll be able to create a stable income that you can rely on month after month.

But when so many small businesses have become completely accustomed to paying hourly rates to have their computer consultant come running whenever a problem arises, how do you convince them to switch to your Managed Service model, which on the surface might appear to cost more than they’re currently paying.

It’s easy enough to show a business owner that just one major issue over the course of a year can easily wipe out any savings they thought they were getting by paying low, hourly rates. A single hard drive crash (which might have been caught early and prevented through monitoring) and discovering that the backup hasn’t worked in days (again, could have been caught early), can cost a small business customer very substantial fees to repair, on top of potentially devastating financial and productivity losses due to lost and unrecoverable data.

A single incident like this can easily cost far more than a full year of your low cost, managed services.

But the reality is, unless a problem is actually occurring now, or unless one had occurred recently and is still fresh in the customer’s memory, then they might have a hard time accepting that a truly serious problem is very likely to occur in their future unless they take steps to prevent it.

So how do you convince them to move to your managed service?

You offer them a free 30-day trial to your monitoring service! “Let’s see just how healthy your network really is.”

Very simply, offer to install your monitoring software on their server for 30 days. There are several very inexpensive monitoring applications available to you that will take up very little server processing overhead and provide you with many great options, such as a web-based monitoring dashboard that can easily identify at a glance any problems on the system.

Give your potential customer full access to their dashboard so they can see for themselves on a daily basis where their problems might be. I can assure you that unless a qualified computer consultant maintains the system regularly (which almost never occurs on the hourly-support model), that the monitoring dashboard will identify multiple problems that require attention, and should continue to identify new problems throughout the course of the month.

By providing this simple proof that their network is not nearly as healthy as they might have hoped or expected is generally evidence enough that regular monitoring is a necessary and valuable support option.

Once your 30-day trial completes, you will not find a better opportunity to continue maintaining this business as a new Managed Service customer for your computer consulting business.

For valuable information on starting a computer consulting business as an Independent Computer Consultant, including free video training, sales and marketing tools and materials, business documents, contracts and more, visit http://SuccessfulComputerConsulting.com.

Businesses that are looking for dozens, or even hundreds of new customers (like a cleaning service or a copier repair center) can invest heavily in printing and mailing tens of thousands of flyers in the hopes of getting a return of just a small percentage of interested customers.

But for you as an Independent Computer Consultant, the cost to embark on a large campaign where you’ll print and blindly mail hundreds of flyers (especially if you’re just starting a computer consulting business) would not generate the sales quickly enough to justify the large expense.

Your flyer WILL be effective however if used to support your other sales efforts.

Primarily as either:

– A leave-behind (along with your business card and a note) when making a door-to-door cold call.

– or even as an offer for something like a free on-site evaluation of their computer support needs.
(A great way to sell them exactly what they might need – which isn’t always the same as what they THINK they need)

Because you will be handing or mailing your flyer to a limited number of recipients, your production costs can be kept very low. You can print your flyers inexpensively on your own inkjet printer (assuming you have a decent printer and use quality, heavyweight paper),or you can have small production runs produced by a web-based printing service.

The purpose of your flyer is to get your prospective customer to take a specific, desired action.

Just as with your other sales and marketing efforts, your intention is to help your target recognize that they have a problem in need of a solution and Show them how your service will solve their problem.

The components of an effective flyer are:

1. A Compelling Headline – This is where you’ll either capture their attention, or have your flyer deposited in the trash bin.

Your headline should contain a benefit or it should generate interest. How about…

“5 Reasons why John Smith Should be Your computer consultant!”
“Here’s How You Can Have a Full-Time IT Department for Less Than a Part-Timers Salary!”
“If You’re Tired of Worrying About Unexpected Computer Problems Hurting Your Business… Then One Simple Phone Call Can Prevent Them From Ever Occurring in the First Place!”
“The Secret To Having A Trouble-Free Computer Network In Your Office…”

2. YOUR MESSAGE

This is your list of services, which can be presented in comparison to other types of service solutions.
Your job is to show what your Unique Selling Proposition is. What makes you the best option available?

3. A PROMOTIONAL OFFER

This is where your flyer becomes an effective marketing tool.

Direct your reader to take action by giving a specific instruction and providing a compelling offer, such as one of the following examples:
“Call before Oct. 31st and receive 30 days of server monitoring absolutely free!”
“Call now for a FREE 27-Point Network Evaluation”
“Until Oct. 31, get 5 free hours of on-site support when signing up with our Daily Monitoring Plan”

While the content is key when creating your flyer, design is equally as important. A photocopied flyer with black courier text and some clipart isn’t going to cut it. A very professional flyer can be designed inexpensively and easily in any of today’s standard desktop publishing or word processing applications. But if graphic design isn’t your strong point, there are many options available for outsourcing the work to a freelancer (check elance.com) or a web-based printing and design service.

The problem faced by the vast majority of independent computer consultants today however is that they still base their income on the number of hours they’re able to bill in a day, week or month. How can this model possibly provide either a reliable income or a happy customer?

If you’re billing by the hour, how can you possibly count on revenues being steady on an ongoing basis, when the need for your services is so volatile?

By providing “reactive”, hourly support, you’re basically waiting for things to break to be able to keep yourself busy. If things aren’t breaking, your clients will be reluctant to pay additional hourly charges for you to just “check things out” and make sure everything is running ok.

If you have only a few clients, they’re going to have to each provide a significant amount of hours to meet your financial requirements. In a time when small business owners are trying to reduce expenses wherever possible, squeezing them for the hours you need to survive will be challenging and will not help client satisfaction.

If you’re able to land many clients, where it should be easy for you to maintain a busy schedule, you can be sure that more often than not you’ll have more fires to put out than you can handle at one time and customer satisfaction will again suffer. Plus, from personal experience I can assure you that there will be many times where you’ll be putting in far more working hours than you would ever want to fixing a serious problem that you wish you could have prevented in the first place.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution for today’s Independent Computer Consultant. Stop billing by the hour and charge flat, monthly fees for a proactive maintenance plan, with which you can provide round-the-clock monitoring, remote computer support and on-site service (for which I personally charge an additional hourly fee).

Billing your clients a flat, monthly rate can provide you with a stable income that you can rely on, while requiring you to work far less hours to do so.

If you use a reliable monitoring application (which can be done very inexpensively), you’ll be able to identify potential problems early and reduce the unexpected emergencies that keep the hourly-rate consultant so busy (and their clients so unhappy).

A bulk of the daily service requests are minor end user issues, which if addressed remotely can often be resolve very quickly. The daily support requests from a full client list of about 4 or 5 small business clients (40-50 end-users) can be supported remotely in about 1-2 hours a day, including monitoring their system logs.

On-site support can be provided for this handful of clients in about 2 hours a week each. This is a number most small business owners find acceptable, fair and manageable. If you charge an additional hourly rate for these on-site hours, you can supplement your flat-rate income nicely.

Because you’re working proactively, your clients will have fewer problems and higher productivity. Your remote support services will increase your response time dramatically, also improving your clients productivity. And they’ll see you less often.

All these things will contribute to INCREASING customer satisfaction.

If you structure your base, maintenance plan fees properly, a small client base of four small business customers can provide an Independent computer consultant with a full-time income, while requiring you to work about 10-12 hours a week.

Rationally, the small business owner is aware that to get the most out of the network, it should be monitored and maintained. But when there’s an hourly fee involved to do extra work when everything seems to be working just fine, emotions overtake rationality and proactive maintenance is often put off.

Proper proactive maintenance of a network will improve your client’s productivity, increase the reliability of the systems, and quite possibly save them money in IT support costs.

For me, my Proactive Maintenance Plan includes:
– monitoring all server event logs
– monitoring for proper AV updates and activity
– monitoring backup status, whether on-site or remote
– monitoring firewall activity, hack/spam relay attempts
– monitoring system bottlenecks (system processes, processor/ram utilization, etc.)
– monitoring application services (Exchange, ISA, IIS, etc.)
– Real-time Inventory collection and web-based reporting
– remote support for most issues

Monitoring is performed 24×7x365 by configuring the hosted software that you select to perform these tasks to send you an email or sms alert whenever an event occurs that needs your attention. The software I use, GFI Max, performs all of these tasks as well as provides many more features not listed above for a low monthly fee.

The benefits your client gets from having this level of monitoring is:

1. Improved productivity – Most problems display warning signs of some sort before becoming critical issues. Check the event logs of any unmonitored server and I would bet good money that they’ll be more than a couple of red X’s that warrant some level of attention. Same goes for the odds of an unmonitored backup system having more than an acceptable amount of failed backups. Or an AntiVirus system that hasn’t updated in weeks. Or even the possibility of having a hard drive in a drive array completely failed without anyone being aware.

Any one of these examples, or countless others, if gone unchecked could easily develop into a crisis situation where there could be very serious and possibly unrecoverable losses to productivity and to the finances of the company. Proactive monitoring gives you the ability to prevent these unexpected emergencies.

Besides being able to save the day from disaster, you’ll also be able to improve performance on a day-to-day basis.

Too often, performance of equipment is allowed to degrade to the point where the device is no longer functional or usable. You’ll be improving your client’s productivity by more closely examining inventory reports for outdated or inadequate equipment or applications and performing upgrades before productivity can suffer.

2. Improved reliability – If you can identify and correct small problems early, before they have a chance to develop into larger problems, and most small problems are addressed by you remotely and therefore immediately, your client will have very few complaints about their systems. Providing that you keep your client constantly informed about the status of their network and the services your providing through excellent reporting (a MUST!), they will have little reason to ever consider replacing you (and a lot of reasons for recommending you to someone else).

3. Save them Money – Hourly based, reactive support for a small business customer is typically unstable. There will be very busy months, often off-set by quiet periods where everyone (including the computer consultant) is just happy that things seem to be working nicely for a change. And once in a while, one of those crisis situations I mentioned earlier will occur and the consultant delivers an invoice that could be relationship changing. This is a tough pill for the client to swallow after suffering through whatever downtime was just experienced.

Average out the cost of hourly support long-term, taking into account both the good and the really bad times, and the average monthly costs should actually be somewhat reasonable from both the computer consultant’s and the customer’s viewpoint.

If proactive monitoring can be delivered at a similar cost to hourly, reactive support, there is little reason for a small business owner to opt for the old model of hourly support.

Factor in any financial benefits as a result of increased productivity, or the prevention of a single disaster, and a flat-fee, proactive monitoring plan should be easily justified as a valuable and cost-effective solution.

If you can convey this to your potential customers when starting a computer consulting business of your own, you should be well on your way to expanding your client base.

But in a time where small business customers still want to know what your hourly rate is, how can we convince them that a flat-fee is the best solution for them?
You need to show VALUE!

What will they get for this predictable and affordable monthly fee?

– Greater reliability from their systems.
– More productivity.
– Less losses due to downtime.
– For about the same or less than they’d pay for hourly, reactive service.

You’ll be able to accomplish this by monitoring their systems and providing remote computer support.

Monitoring your client’s systems 24×7x365 is easily done with low cost software like GFI Max, which is able to collect real-time inventory reports as well.

Through monitoring, you can immediately identify problems such as failed backups, system event errors, virus activity, hacker attempts, etc. By preventing errors, you will reduce unexpected problems and increase their productivity.

You can provide remote support to all of your client’s workstations and servers for free by using software like LogMeIn Free. By providing remote computer support, you can increase your response time to most issues, large or small by about 100%.

The biggest complaint small businesses have when it comes to their computer consultant is having to wait for him or her to arrive, and not being notified when the consultant is going to be late.

With remote computer support, as long as the computer (or user) with the problem has Internet connectivity, you should be able to log on and work as if you were deskside. You can actually respond faster than an internal IT admin could make it across the office.

By providing basic proactive maintenance and support, you can generate an income based on predictable and reliable monthly fees, while dedicating a greatly reduced number of work hours on site at your clients. They honestly don’t want to see you very often anyway. And they’ll be happy to pay a fair rate to ensure that the less they see you, the better.

For complete information on how to succeed at starting a computer consulting business as an Independent computer consultant, visit http://SuccessfulComputerConsulting.com.

But starting a computer consulting business today as an Independent Computer Consultant is one of the best career choices an IT Professional can make. All because you can now monitor and service your clients remotely. All the things that made running a consulting business difficult in the past (too many unexpected emergencies, can’t be in two places at once), are eliminated by using cheap or free utilities (I use GFI Max for server monitoring and inventory reporting and LogMeIn Free for remote computer support).

Using these tools can help you to:
a) catch problems early, minimize emergencies, downtime and unexpected problems.
b) identify weak spots so that you can make recommendations for (profitable) improvement projects
c) Fix “little” problems (change passwords, find lost files, etc.) instantly, without having to go on-site.
d) Start addressing “MAJOR” problems instantly (address a complete email outage, start an AV scan on an infected machine) without making the client wait for you to arrive.

If you maintain your clients properly, they will have minimal problems and maximum productivity. This is EXACTLY what they want for you to provide as their consultant, and they’re happy to pay for it.

But if you’re billing by the hour, and they hardly need you on-site, how do you make an income?

You stop billing by the hour!

Charge your customers a flat rate for your monthly monitoring and remote support and you’ll know every month exactly how much you’ll be making even if you never have to leave the house. In the video link below, I give a clear breakdown of how a total of 4 small business clients can provide a steady income of about $66K, with you dedicating a total of about 10 hours of work per week. Once you obtain your initial client base, you’ll never again have to worry about another paycheck, lay-off or sending out a resume.

So the trick of course is to get those first few clients, and get them quickly. How? That’s a big topic (so big in fact that I have about 2 hours of video on my website dedicated to it).

In a nutshell, my top three methods for finding new clients are:

1. Getting Referrals
2. Business Networking
3. cold-calling (I prefer door-to-door with flyers).

You definitely don’t have to spend a lot on sales and marketing to do it effectively. All the methods I use are very inexpensive or free. The biggest challenge isn’t financial. It’s having the confidence and determination to go out and do it.

If you live near a metropolitan area, I can guarantee you that there are many small businesses out there right now who are open to finding a way to improve the reliability of their systems and/or lowering their current support costs. You, as an Independent Computer Consultant can provide this solution, and you can find these potential customers through networking, asking for referrals and knocking on doors (among several other ways).

Once you get in front of these potential customers, you need to show them that as a professional Independent Computer Consultant, you’re their best possible solution. You do this by delivering a good sales pitch and by presenting yourself as a professional (seen through marketing materials – your business cards, website, newsletter and flyers if you use them).

Developing an effective sales pitch will take time and practice. But if you’re not currently using a scripted sales pitch and you prefer to “wing it” when talking to a potential customer, you need to evaluate how successful you’ve been with that approach. All successful sales people use a carefully scripted and practiced sales pitch (practiced to the point where it’s delivered very naturally). If you’ve never done any sales, I recommend reading “The Sales Bible” by Jeffrey Gitomer. It’s a fast and easy read and it should get you motivated to learn more.

As for the marketing materials, they need to look professional, but don’t need to be expensive to create. I recommend VistaPrint for business cards. You can create a very professional website using WordPress (free) and Artisteer ($50). Flyers can be done in MS Word using inexpensive graphics. Same with your newsletter.

While creating these materials and sales scripts don’t have to be expensive, they can be very time consuming if you try to create them on your own. And unless you have a background in sales, marketing and design, you also have to be realistic about how effective you expect them to be the first time you use them.

Of course, if you have the capital to invest, you can outsource the creation of these materials. But depending on who you outsource to, you may need a lot of capital, and be prepared to deal with missed delivery dates and “not-quite-what-you-were-expecting” results.

Or you can check the link at the end of this article for info on how to get all of these materials ready to use, right now.

However you go about obtaining your sales and marketing materials, you’re going to need them if you’re an Independent Computer Consultant looking to land new clients.

Fortunately, when you start a computer consulting business on the correct model of flat-fee, managed support, you need very few small business clients to create a significant and reliable income.

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!