So you’re tired of your boss? Are you sick of Hawaiian shirt days, office politics, being under paid and always getting a crappy gift from your companies secret Santa? So was I. So I quit.
I had thought about running my own IT support company for a long time but the thought of not knowing where my next meal was going to come from always dissuaded me. Fortunately, after I started my company and learned a few lessons, I never had to worry about my finances or the amount of business I had. In fact, within 3 months of starting, I was turning down customers because I was just too busy. I’m going to tell you the steps I took to start and grow my own IT support company.

Get Licensed

The first things you will want to do when starting off in this field is get licensed in your state to do business. In my state and city, IT work does not require any special bonds or even a business license. Your state may vary. I did however register my company name and incorporate with the state. This is needed for our next step.

Open up business bank accounts

The next thing I did was open up a second checking account solely for business purposes. It is always a good idea to have a separate checking account from your personal checking account for tax purposes. Accountants and the IRS don’t like it when you mix business with personal which brings me to my next point.

Have an exit strategy

Before I even began working for my first customer I knew exactly how much I needed to make in the first month and how long I was willing to live off of Top Ramen before I would call it quits. I also laid out a full plan of what companies I would apply to work for if worse came to worse. Doing this allowed me a peace of mind, knowing that if I made a huge mistake (which I did not) that I would still be able to meet my basic needs.

Set monthly goals

You need a white board. You can pick them up from any general store along with some dry erase markers for $15 to $20. Now write down your goal for the month. When I started my business, my goal was to find 3 businesses and 10 home customers a month. After a few months I then started to set a dollar amount that I wanted to earn and after every check I would start subtracting from that amount. Trying to make that number go to zero kept me motivated and reminded me that I was on track.

Announce yourself to the world

Now to the juicy stuff, it’s time to open up shop and start advertising your services. The first thing before you do anything is go down to a Kinkos and spring for some business cards. Yours should say company name, your name, phone number and things such as “Computer Repair” “Networking” “Troubleshooting” “Virus Removal” etc. If you decide to not get business cards, stop reading right now because no matter what other type of advertising you do, if a small business can’t neatly file your name in a rolodex and look for it under “Computer problems” you won’t be getting a call back.

After you have your business cards in hand, it’s time to spam… I mean email all your friends and family and tell them about your new IT consulting service. Depending upon your friends and family, this should rake you in your first couple of customers.

Advertise

OK, so now I’m going to tell you exactly what I did to make my company grow to a point where I was working 60 hours a week at $65.00 an hour for 3 years.

After you have your business cards in hand, find a sticker/decal company in the local phone book that puts decals on car windows. On my rear car window it says

(Company Name)
Computer Repair Services
(Phone number)

You wouldn’t believe how many people will call you from this, especially if you live in a major metropolitan area. Because my business phone was also my cell phone, many times I would be driving down the road when the person behind me would call. I would ask them if they would like to pull over to discuss what their problem was that they where having and almost always by the end of the conversation I would have a new customer. Some times these customers would be small business owners which is exactly the customers you want. Normal home customers are good for a quick buck but generally they are a giant pain in the ass and always want to haggle over prices. If you can, always try to build your small business client base. Once you have a few small business clients, you will use my next step.

Small business bookkeepers, your new best friends
Small business customers are better for repeat business, volume of business, simplicity of the work and the amount of repeat business. I have never had a single small business “shop around” on me. 99% of all small businesses value competency over price when it comes to computer work. Mostly because your services are a tax write off for them.

Once you have a small business client, find out immediately who the booker/accountant is. Whoever the person is who enters in the monthly expenses and handles parts of payroll, they are your new best friend and the most important person in the company to you. Find out their name, their personality, what they do for fun, where they are from, what they like to do on the weekends, how many kids they have, where they live, what they had for breakfast, if it’s “boxer’s or briefs”, if they found Jesus, what’s their favorite color. Everything you can find out about them that will help you chum up to them, you need to find out.

This is how I built my business. I have never in my career met a small business bookkeeper that didn’t work for at least 2 other small businesses. And odds are, if the company you are at right now is having problems with their computers, and the bookkeeper didn’t refer the IT guy from the other companies they work for, that other IT guy either sucks or they don’t exist… in either case it is good news for you because you just found 2 more clients.
Networking

Put down the CAT 5 cable you nerd, it’s not that kind of networking. Nope, it’s time you learn some people skills and here’s what I did. Every month buy 5 or 6 of those Hickory Farm sausage, cheese and crackers combo packs. Drop by every single business customer you have and drop one off either at 10 AM or 3 PM. I found that these specific times gathered the most emotional response from the businesses because the people where the most awake and remembered that they where having a computer problem (now you look like Johnny on the spot) or at 3 PM you are the new saint to everyone who forgot to get lunch or needed a sugar rush to get them through the rest of the day.

Now next to these boxes of cheese and crackers is a big stack of your business cards that they can then hand out to their friends and family. And they WILL hand them out. What I have found is that subconsciously people feel guilty about taking something for nothing, especially food and feel that if they get you a new customer; they can wolf down all of the honey mustard spread they want.

I hope that what I have written will help you on your new journey. I had the time of my life when I started my IT support company. I met a lot of very interesting people and got to do some very interesting work. I remember a few months after I started my company, I sat down with an Ethiopian family for afternoon tea, got paid by a small local wine company with a case of their finest merlot, helped an old lady build a church quilting website and installed a new Linux file server for an animal rescue all within the same week. I encourage any person who has the technical know-how to tell their boss to shove their motivational posters where the sun-don’t-shine and start their own IT support company.

I have since left the IT world which is why I have written this article. I have used the money that I made to create 2 other businesses, a film production company and a real estate investment company.

Written by Peter Hesselman pete@houseflippingloans.com

Eclipse Mortgage
http://www.houseflippingloans.com

Tags: business bank accounts, business license, business purposes, call it quits, checking account, crappy gift, dry erase markers, exit strategy, fortunately, hawaiian shirt, irs, knowing, mind knowing that, mix business, office politics, peace of mind, secret santa, self employed, tax purposes, top ramen

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