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Ok. I’m debating hanging up my own shingle as a general IT consultant. I’m wondering what a good rate scale is for something like that. Also, to cover some of the costs do others charge “monthly maintenance fees” that include certain services? If so, how much and what does it include? If you are a small business would you be willing to pay someone say $250/month for general maintenance like software updates or certain number of hours spent at your site per month? Any ideas would be very appreciated. I would be aiming at small companies that can’t afford a fulltime IT person but are large enough to have issues if they aren’t careful. Please ask any clarifying questions if any are needed.

3 Spice ups
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Hey Bigfoot,

I am in the process of doing the same, but I dont want to quit my job. I am looking for side work.

Anyhow, I have been planning this for 2 years now. We had our 2nd baby, which put everything on hold.

Here are my general plans, and feel free to add to them.

  1. I have a Facebook acct with 200 friends. Perfect place to start my advertising. All of them have family/friends/co-workers/neighbors, etc. that might need help. Potentialy 200 FB friends will equal thousands of people.

  2. Get a Crossloop acct. You can do remote work anywhere. Why limit it to your area?

  3. Advertise on Craigslist.

  4. Get a website. I did a free one on office live. (Needs to be updated) http://3csconsulting.tech.officelive.com/default.aspx

That is my start. I have a few other ideas, but not rolling them out yet.

I am also looking at small businesses. Back at my other company, I had a consulting crew come in 1 time per month to do a monthly maintenance. They had a check list and spent about 1 hour. They charged $125 per hour. Money well spent since it is good to have a second set of eyes looking at everything.

Small businesses won’t have much money to spend, so look at trying to get a lot of them.

One thing to think about in terms of how much you are going to make: What do you make per day at your current job? Lets say 8 hours = $200. If you can get 2 jobs at around $100 per day, you equaled your current pay. Not bad.

The last thing to mention, and you will probably laugh, is to make flyers and put them in mail boxes. It works. I had a guy work for me who does it and he makes $200-$500 per week. He would walk past my office every morning, not look at me, then a hand with $$$ would be waving in my doorway. And I would here “What did you do last night buddy, he he he”

In terms of hourly wages, I would try to under-cut the competion by about $20-$30 dollars per hour when starting out. I am under the impression to get the business first, and get some “word-of-mouth” marketing working in my favor.

Let me know your thoughts,

^Bret

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Not that I am currently working in my own business, I am planning on starting up, but pricing depends a lot on your clients. Many small businesses are looking for the cheapest thing. You can offer say $250 a month maintenance that offers X hours performing some duties, but throw in an incentive too, like my normal rate/hr is $125/HR BUT IF YOU GET THE CONTRACT AND AN ISSUE EXCEEDS THE CONTRACT MONTHLY TIME THEN you work for $75/hr.

As for the $250 /mo for service question that’s still a sizable chink of change you have to convince them that it’s worth it, unless you are undercutting a competitor then they may just choose you because you save them money.

Service contracts are very common now and perfectly legit in a computer IT sense. What I think would be reasonable is to offer weekly perusing of logs and to make sure things are running smoothly, maybe some admin tasks, like defrags temp file cleanout etc… and some number of hours a month for the client. Like say 2 hours a month which includes log perusing etc… I would also suggest that you consider having your service contract grant you remote work priveleges to their machine so you don’t even have to go on site to perform your tasks. Might also consider something like using spiceworks and offering helpdesk submittal or something like that for your monthly fee. Might drum up more money too if they exceed their monthly quota hours on resolution of help desk ticket items.