I could write a short book on this subject, I simply don’t have time. I have been in business for 17 years, but I have over 30 years experience. I have never discussed my business with a lawyer. I do not carry insurance (best way not to get sued). I am not incorporated. I meet with my accountant, if you can call it that, once a year to have my taxes done. I’ll just outline a few things.
1.) You will need 250 to 300 end users to make it.
2.) You will need 15 or more servers.
3.) You will make your money on projects, not fixing things. Adds, moves, and changes.
4.) You will need to manage customer expectations.
5.) You will need to register your business for sales tax.
6.) You will learn to hate billing, it is tedious, but you have to do it.
7.) Get QuickBooks or something similar.
8.) I actually just use one bank account now, I closed my business account, I didn’t need it.
9.) Make quarterly tax estimate payments. Figure 25% of net profit.
10.) You need an anchor account or two. You will make 80% of your money off of 20% of your accounts.
11.) Try to stay away from selling commodity hardware. You can do ok on higher end items like routers, switches, and the like. You really need 25 point margins on hardware, if you try to do that on PC’s in might come back to bite you.
12.) Avoid the “onesy, twosy” clients. They will kill you. Your target market should be 8 to 70 users. Companies much larger typically have their own IT person or staff.
13.) Home users are death, typically by hari-kiri.
14.) Iron your shirt.
I’m sure some here will dispute some of this, but really, this is a numbers game more than anything else.
