One hard to target market for small business IT consulting is the "micro-small businesses"; those that have a single-digit number of PC’s - anywhere from one to nine PC’s. These micro-small businesses can provide, depending on the metro area where you’re located, $50 to $75 an hour or $75 to $90 (at the absolute most) for small business IT consulting work.
The "Micro-small" Business Environment
In small business IT consulting you need to be very aware that in this micro-small business space, when there are one to ten computers, one to ten employees, their revenue usually amounts to anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million a year in annual revenue. The big thing that defines a micro-small business is that there is no dedicated server yet.
Who's Your Competition?
In this space, there’s a ton of competition small business IT consulting firms will contend with. This competition is willing to work for less than $50 an hour, or in some cases, zero dollars an hour. This delivers a challenge for the small business IT consulting professional.
What the Competition Has (Or Doesn’t Have) To Offer
The competition agrees to help the micro-small business with their computer problems, every once in a while of course, because they have a day job. Therefore they can’t get there as quickly as a small business IT consulting professional could.
The small business, even though their server is down, will have to wait until a week from Saturday until they can get there, but hey, the help is cheap! They work for donuts and coffee, or pizza and beer! That’s the competition for a small business IT consultant in this space.
The Bottom Line about Small Business IT consulting
Part of the reason why a small business IT consulting professional has competition in attracting micro-small business is that the company has less than ten computers, less than ten employees, doing generally less than $1 million a year in annual revenue. There’s just not enough riding on IT to invest in small business IT consulting professionals. IT just isn’t that strategically important to the company yet.
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