Most small business owners equate expenses with overhead items and capital expenditures such as buying a PC, notebook, printer, modem or version upgrade to Microsoft Office XP. These kind of small business owners often desperately need your computer consulting business assistance to see the big picture and the total solution.

In order to help your prospects and clients leverage their IT infrastructure, you need to elevate your price quotes, proposals and invoices from transaction status to investment.

Your Computer Consulting Business as an Investment

An investment usually has at least the perception of quantifiable and somewhat immediately measurable benefits. If you're still proposing individual hardware and software purchase recommendations, it's time to move your sales pitch toward a more cohesive, proactive technology plan - of which your proposed small business network becomes "mission control".

Small business IT expenses tend to be somewhat random and haphazard. When technology is looked at as overhead, purchases are often made only when there's an emergency.

Have a Plan

When IT investments are made, on the other hand, there's a written plan of attack. This is the project plan that your computer consulting business started developing during your initial consultation and IT audit for how standards are supported, how purchases are made, how projects are implemented and how pilots are rolled into production use.

Take the results of the IT audit, or similar fact-finding mission, and be proactive. To run a successful computer consulting business, you must help your small business clients get out of the fire extinguisher mode.

Understanding Client's Downtime Costs

While the investments associated with data backup, power protection or virus protection certainly are not trivial, they often become quite small in the whole scheme of things -- when you compare costs to the value of the data being stored and the potential business impact if the data were partially or completely lost. It's crucial for you to understand your computer consulting business' client's true costs of downtime.

It's much easier to protect data when the data is well organized. In many small businesses, you'll find critical data being stored on an individual's local "c:" drive. Because the data is so decentralized, it's nearly impossible to adequately protect the valuable information.

The Bottom Line about the Computer Consulting Business

Alternatively, data may be stored on a server in a disorganized fashion, making it difficult for others in the company to locate the files at a later date. You can add tremendous value to the installation, and help increase ROI on your client's networking investment, by devising a well-organized file, folder, and share structure.

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