Computer in Business
Getting Started In Information Technology Computer Consulting PDF Print E-mail
Sunday, 04 May 2008 09:01

One of the best things about being in the Information Technology industry is consulting. For purposes of this article I"m using the term consulting in reference to side jobs or moonlighting work. While full time Computer Consultants can also benefit from the tips in this article, I"m really writing at the IT Employee who works a full-time IT job and then takes extra jobs for extra money on the side.

So your working your regular job and you want to earn more working for yourself. Here"s a few ideas to get started. First realize that its now almost impossible to function these days without a computer in your home. In fact many homes now have 2-3 PC"s and eventually they are going to break or will need to be hooked together.

Word of Mouth Is King

To start, get yourself some business cards that explain your services. DO NOT LIST YOUR RATE I made this rookie mistake and was tied to my lowball rate once I was more established. So start by spreading the word at work. Hopefully your employer is tolerant of this. To know the limits simply ask someone in HR if the company has a policy regarding work outside of the job. If not you may be able to post a notice in the lunchroom or company classified ad board. However if this is not an option just spread the word among co-workers you trust. Word of mouth is always the best way to bring in new business. Everyone knows someone with a broken computer and you just need to get people talking. Once you get an opportunity, provide more service than the customer expects. Remember these initial jobs are seeds so even if you don"t make a profit, the goodwill you earn will keep you working down the road.

The golden ring in doing this is to find someone who will recommend you to a small or medium size business that does not have its own IT staff.

Why Businesses? Because its steady work and businesses know that time is money. Businesses tend to pay on-time, they don"t keep junk on their systems, and if a job runs over the amount of time you expect they are generally willing to keep the clock running so long as their systems are fixed. Home clients on the other hand tie the money for the job with the price of the PC. This works against us as PC"s become cheaper. Businesses assign a monetary value to their time and data so these are easier clients to work with. They also view hiring you as just another cost of business and will not hesitate to let any employee call you in after you gain their trust.

Advertising

I"ve tried advertising in newspapers and never found it to pay off. One of the best things I"ve done besides word of mouth is to use my neighborhood. I put a flyer in each newspaper box advertising my services. The target here is the person who works out of a home office. This is another attempt to secure a client whose time is money. From here apply the same principle of outperforming their expectations. Let them know you appreciate referrals and provide them with plenty of extra business cards. I once was hired to separate two businesses during a purchase. While one half was my client I made sure the other business owner knew the level of my service and went out of my way to ensure his systems worked as well or better once I left. Of course I taped my card to each of his servers.

A better way than walking your neighborhood is to obtain a list of the addresses in your neighborhood and visit http://www.usps.com and start a mailing campaign. Select the postcard mailing option and simply upload your flyer, send them your list of addresses and enter your credit card number. I"ve found that I can canvass a 300 house neighborhood for about $40.00 - $50.00 much cheaper and more targeted then my other attempts.

The reason you want to use a postcard is two fold. 1) It"s cheaper 2) Its easy to hang on to. When I used 8 1/2 x 11 paper flyers I only could reach those with an immediate computer problem. Everyone else simply tossed the ad. The idea it to get them to keep your card for later so offer an incentive to this. Give them $10.00 off their first job or offer a free consultation. You want them calling you not the other guy.

Billing

Ok here"s my take on billing and getting paid. Judgment is the key. When you bill a business be sure to add to your invoice that payment is due upon receipt. Does this mean you"ll get paid immediately? Nope but if you leave it out businesses will assume a Net 30 approach and pay you 30 days after receipt and that"s no good. So put the payment due upon receipt and see what happens. I give them 30 days anyway before sending a second invoice with a clear notice that this is a PAST DUE invoice. Most times this clears things up. Now I should add that I do have some customers that are inconsistent about how long it takes to get paid but they do pay and furthermore I LIKE working for them. Maybe they are the type that doesn"t watch over my shoulder or gives me the key to the place or lets me take stuff home to work on.

My point is you be the judge where the hassle is worth the delay if this occurs. Most important spell out your terms on the invoice and send reminders every 30 days. Now home users are different, you should expect them to pay on the spot or very soon after. Just as the local PC shop expects them to pay before getting their stuff back you should too. Judgment comes into play here as well. Some will ask you to stop by for one thing and then keep you longer than expected. DO NOT bring a prepared invoice based on what you believe the charge will be. It"s always better to tell them the cost and then e-mail them the invoice after you"ve been paid.

Tax Tips

If your serious about an on-going consulting business take the time to set yourself up properly. This will pay dividends in increased revenue and tax savings. Assign a room in your house as your home office. This will let you deduct any costs related to that office from your earnings as a consultant. There is no law your business has to make a profit so as long as you document the expenses you deduct you can do so even if the expenses exceed your earnings. The benefit here is that you get some tax savings from your regular paycheck from the loss of your business. Hopefully your business gets going and earns a profit but until this is the case you may as well do what you can to save money. A few examples of things you can deduct are the insurance, utilities, and internet costs proportional to the % of square feet your office consumes. I"ve even heard that technically you can deduct dog related expenses if you can prove the dog also guards the home office. I don"t recommend stretching anything however.

Sales Tax

Get yourself established as a business in your state so you can charge sales tax. I know this sounds crazy but if your going to sell your time, why not sell the parts and mark them up 10% so you make more money. I used to require my clients to purchase items and then call me to install them. Now I just make sure I trust they"ll pay and order the items myself. This lets me increase revenue and as long as you keep track of what you charged you simply pay the sales tax at the end of the year, couldn"t be easier.

Hopefully those tips will help you start a small business on the side. From there you can grow or shrink the business as you see fit.

About The Author

John Gall is a full time IT Manager and IT Consultant in Minnesota. He runs several websites as a hobby featuring content similar to that in this article: http://www.gallconsulting.com, http://www.sandalspictures.com, http://www.napavalleypictures.com

http://www.winesilove.com
 
Mystery of the Unknown! PDF Print E-mail
Friday, 02 May 2008 06:01

Your Work place is no longer available, disaster has struck, and time is money! How many times have you heard these statements?

It is a nightmare for CIOs and IT directors to have to explain downtime to their CEO and CFO.

For many CEOs and CFOs, what was important yesterday is no longer valid today. Too much concentration and spending has been invested into the infrastructure of networking which opposes the reality of today, that is more concentrated upon business availability and continuity.

What would happen if your company had a small disaster that equals to big trouble? If something happens to the workplace, then how much will it cost to recover lost data? What contingency plan does your company have? And finally, how much will all of the above costs? This is not an example of psychic divination, it is a mere fact and we all experimented that after September 11th 2001.

There are different variations to business continuity, which will all depend on to which extent is acceptable for a company to have a downtime. Is it two days, one hour or perhaps not even a mere 5 minutes? Does the company need business continuity to the extent of an off-site disaster recovery?

Business continuity can be differentiated in two levels.

  1. Business continuity where we secure and manage all risks which may be brought about by technology failure. This includes human error, equipment failure, database corruption, hacking and various other external disasters.

  2. Business continuity where we require an offsite backup (Disaster Recovery Site) to resume the same level of productivity in case of workplace disruption. The disaster recovery (DR) planning deals with massive site failure whether it is complete or partial. Site failure is typically the permanent consequence of broadly disruptive forces.

Threats to businesses are more obvious today, however, they have always existed and they always will prevail. The event, which occurred on September 11, changed the definition of crisis management plans since many companies had disaster recovery plans in place. However, very few had an off-site plan.

A DR plan begins with evaluating the vulnerabilities of an organization’s information technology assets. Your business may have done some work towards planning for a possible disaster but will it survive such circumstances? The next important step is to find out the effect of a disaster on your business. How much money could you lose if the IT systems are no longer available? How much money would it cost to recover your IT systems?

The third step is to develop a disaster recovery strategy that fits your requirements in terms of cost and time. After the strategy has been defined the detailed work of ‘disaster recovery’ begins by implementing the plan that will allow your business to survive any situation. Studies have shown that even the best plan will not succeed if it has not been practiced and maintained. On a final note, a long-term program of testing and maintenance should be attempted to ensure that the plan will work at any time.

Many solutions are available and every company has a different set of needs. The main issue in choosing DR solutions is the speed of replication and recovery. In the past, 48 hours was acceptable to get backup tapes loaded, and be up-and-running again. Today, every uptime moment qualifies as mission critical. As more enterprises rely on the Internet and require immediate access to their data to function, they are less tolerant of lost uptime. Each day more companies realize the only way to minimize downtime associated with disaster is to implement an alternative data processing site that can be operational in a very short time. One of the major technical challenges in maintaining a backup data center is in keeping the data at the backup data center synchronized with the data in the primary data center.

Thanks to today’s available technology, software supporting any-to-any connectivity, not only delivers lightning-fast data mirroring and replication technology that enables the creation of cutting edge backup data, but centers with no single point of failure. Also, it makes the resulting fast remote data synchronization available across vendor lines and avoids the problems of host-based replication. This software does not require any specialized hardware to replicate storage data. It can replicate data over any existing LAN, MAN, or WAN network infrastructure. The replication is configured and managed independently of application servers.

Fault-tolerant hardware is available, with zero interruption in processing, zero loss of performance and zero loss of data integrity, even if a component fails. This means that unlike a high availability cluster, these computers do not impose recovery time. Their designs include modular redundancy fault-tolerant server to protect your users and applications from component outages for an average less than five minutes of downtime annually.

Risks can be minimized but never entirely eliminated. All studies show that businesses, which have a disaster recovery plan for their vital systems, have a substantially higher likelihood of surviving when loss occurs.

No one knows when a disaster will strike. It may never happen, or it may happen today. It is only for that of which ‘might happen’. The mystery of the unknown! Being ready and prepared ahead of time can mark the fine line between staying in business or going out of business.

About Protection Infoglobale Inc:
Founded in 1999, Protection Infoglobale Inc. is a system integrator that specializes in off site disaster recovery, business continuity, and 7x24x365 solutions from the hardware and software side, Storage Area Networking (SAN), high Performance Fiber Raid Solution, Server-Less Enterprise Backups. Our URL is http://www.protectioninfo.com.

For more information on our partners in the Middle East, please contact Joseph Ghabi.

About The Author

Joseph Ghabi is the Directory of Business Development at Protection Infoglobale Inc. His experience in IT consulting and business development for international market in the past 8 years enable him to bring a full range of experience working with system integrator in the area of IT consulting, communication, and telecommunication.

http://www.protectioninfo.com

Dina Safar
Director of Marketing
Protection Infoglobale Inc.

Joseph Ghabi
Director of Business Development
Protection Infoglobale Inc.
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Tel: (514) 630 4499
Fax: (514) 630 4484
 
Getting Started In Information Technology Computer Consultin PDF Print E-mail
Monday, 22 October 2007 16:01

One of the best things about being in the Information Technology industry is consulting. For purposes of this article I"m using the term consulting in reference to side jobs or moonlighting work. While full time Computer Consultants can also benefit from the tips in this article, I"m really writing at the IT Employee who works a full-time IT job and then takes extra jobs for extra money on the side.

So your working your regular job and you want to earn more working for yourself. Here"s a few ideas to get started. First realize that its now almost impossible to function these days without a computer in your home. In fact many homes now have 2-3 PC"s and eventually they are going to break or will need to be hooked together.

Word of Mouth Is King

To start, get yourself some business cards that explain your services. DO NOT LIST YOUR RATE I made this rookie mistake and was tied to my lowball rate once I was more established. So start by spreading the word at work. Hopefully your employer is tolerant of this. To know the limits simply ask someone in HR if the company has a policy regarding work outside of the job. If not you may be able to post a notice in the lunchroom or company classified ad board. However if this is not an option just spread the word among co-workers you trust. Word of mouth is always the best way to bring in new business. Everyone knows someone with a broken computer and you just need to get people talking. Once you get an opportunity, provide more service than the customer expects. Remember these initial jobs are seeds so even if you don"t make a profit, the goodwill you earn will keep you working down the road.

The golden ring in doing this is to find someone who will recommend you to a small or medium size business that does not have its own IT staff.

Why Businesses? Because its steady work and businesses know that time is money. Businesses tend to pay on-time, they don"t keep junk on their systems, and if a job runs over the amount of time you expect they are generally willing to keep the clock running so long as their systems are fixed. Home clients on the other hand tie the money for the job with the price of the PC. This works against us as PC"s become cheaper. Businesses assign a monetary value to their time and data so these are easier clients to work with. They also view hiring you as just another cost of business and will not hesitate to let any employee call you in after you gain their trust.

Advertising

I"ve tried advertising in newspapers and never found it to pay off. One of the best things I"ve done besides word of mouth is to use my neighborhood. I put a flyer in each newspaper box advertising my services. The target here is the person who works out of a home office. This is another attempt to secure a client whose time is money. From here apply the same principle of outperforming their expectations. Let them know you appreciate referrals and provide them with plenty of extra business cards. I once was hired to separate two businesses during a purchase. While one half was my client I made sure the other business owner knew the level of my service and went out of my way to ensure his systems worked as well or better once I left. Of course I taped my card to each of his servers. A better way than walking your neighborhood is to obtain a list of the addresses in your neighborhood and visit http://www.usps.com and start a mailing campaign. Select the postcard mailing option and simply upload your flyer, send them your list of addresses and enter your credit card number. I"ve found that I can canvass a 300 house neighborhood for about $40.00 - $50.00 much cheaper and more targeted then my other attempts. The reason you want to use a postcard is two fold. 1) It"s cheaper 2) Its easy to hang on to. When I used 8 1/2 x 11 paper flyers I only could reach those with an immediate computer problem. Everyone else simply tossed the ad. The idea it to get them to keep your card for later so offer an incentive to this. Give them $10.00 off their first job or offer a free consultation. You want them calling you not the other guy.

Billing

Ok here"s my take on billing and getting paid. Judgment is the key. When you bill a business be sure to add to your invoice that payment is due upon receipt. Does this mean you"ll get paid immediately? Nope but if you leave it out businesses will assume a Net 30 approach and pay you 30 days after receipt and that"s no good. So put the payment due upon receipt and see what happens. I give them 30 days anyway before sending a second invoice with a clear notice that this is a PAST DUE invoice. Most times this clears things up. Now I should add that I do have some customers that are inconsistent about how long it takes to get paid but they do pay and furthermore I LIKE working for them. Maybe they are the type that doesn"t watch over my shoulder or gives me the key to the place or lets me take stuff home to work on. My point is you be the judge where the hassle is worth the delay if this occurs. Most important spell out your terms on the invoice and send reminders every 30 days. Now home users are different, you should expect them to pay on the spot or very soon after. Just as the local PC shop expects them to pay before getting their stuff back you should too. Judgment comes into play here as well. Some will ask you to stop by for one thing and then keep you longer than expected. DO NOT bring a prepared invoice based on what you believe the charge will be. It"s always better to tell them the cost and then e-mail them the invoice after you"ve been paid.

Tax Tips

If your serious about an on-going consulting business take the time to set yourself up properly. This will pay dividends in increased revenue and tax savings. Assign a room in your house as your home office. This will let you deduct any costs related to that office from your earnings as a consultant. There is no law your business has to make a profit so as long as you document the expenses you deduct you can do so even if the expenses exceed your earnings. The benefit here is that you get some tax savings from your regular paycheck from the loss of your business. Hopefully your business gets going and earns a profit but until this is the case you may as well do what you can to save money. A few examples of things you can deduct are the insurance, utilities, and internet costs proportional to the % of square feet your office consumes. I"ve even heard that technically you can deduct dog related expenses if you can prove the dog also guards the home office. I don"t recommend stretching anything however.

Sales Tax

Get yourself established as a business in your state so you can charge sales tax. I know this sounds crazy but if your going to sell your time, why not sell the parts and mark them up 10% so you make more money. I used to require my clients to purchase items and then call me to install them. Now I just make sure I trust they"ll pay and order the items myself. This lets me increase revenue and as long as you keep track of what you charged you simply pay the sales tax at the end of the year, couldn"t be easier.

Hopefully those tips will help you start a small business on the side. From there you can grow or shrink the business as you see fit.

About the Author

John Gall is a full time IT Manager and IT Consultant in Minnesota. He runs several websites as a hobby featuring content similar to that in this article.
http://www.gallconsulting.com
http://www.sandalspictures.com
http://www.napavalleypictures.com
http://www.winesilove.com
 
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