Unique Small Business Climate

Before you start planning how you’ll build your consulting business, it’s important to understand some of the idiosyncrasies of small businesses. Unlike medium-sized and large corporations, a small business staff often takes on a variety of functions that would be the domain of multiple people or departments in larger firms even within the same industry. For example, in a small law firm the office manager may be charged with handling purchasing, human resources, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and payroll. In a small advertising agency, the sales manager may oversee such diverse areas as technology, marketing, public relations, and asset management.

Clients Wearing Lots of Hats

Small business owners tend to focus on what they do best. Whether it’s selling houses, running restaurants, manufacturing specialty chemicals, practicing law, or preparing tax audits, small business owners generally devote nearly all their attention to their core business objectives and rarely leave time or energy to think about how technology fits into the competitive landscape. Many small business owners still perceive technology spending as expenses as opposed to investments.

Because small business owners are usually more resource-constrained than Fortune 1000 CEOs, small businesses look to get immediate return on investment (ROI) on their technology projects. So when implementing small business IT solutions, you need to provide some tangible, instant gratification. For many small businesses, this means e-mail, Web browsing, and network-based faxing.

When the small business owner does have first hand experience with computer or networking issues, the owner tends to only see a very small piece of the whole puzzle. For example, the small business owner may be familiar with how to use a checkbook management program such as Microsoft Money. Installation of this kind of program is very simple: just run the set-up program and you’re recording transactions 15 minutes later. Because that might be the full extent of the owner’s experience with computers and networks, the small business owner often overlooks such hidden, soft costs such as total cost of ownership (TCO). This includes testing, training, deployment, downtime, knowledge transfer, and ongoing support.

The small business owner also often tries to equate hourly billing rates from technology providers with those of his own internal staff. Part of your challenge is to educate the small business owner on why continual investments in training and retraining are such a critical component of making the best use of small business networks. Ultimately, it’s this training and the scarcity of those with similar skills that drives the levels of hourly billing rates for technology providers. Keeping current also is a big part of building a successful computer consulting practice.

Most small businesses generally don’t have the resources or the need to hire a full-time staff person dedicated to installing, upgrading, and maintaining their office PCs or network. Also bear in mind that clients generally don’t tell you the whole story. It’s your job to ask open-ended questions about the state of the technology used by the small business. Before you call on a small business prospect, it’s important to understand some of the key players in small business technology—the people you’ll likely run into providing day-to-day computer support. Generally these technology support functions are taken care of in one of three ways.

• The Volunteer: The owner or manager has a spouse, relative, or friend, who may be a teenager, plumber, actuary, or teacher (or any other conceivable profession for that matter), who dabbles in computers as a hobby, and who volunteers to help with occasional computer support needs after-hours.
• The Moonlighter: The owner or manager hires a moonlighter who has a day job in a related field with a larger organization. This person may be a SQL database administrator for a large brokerage house or a help desk manager for a hospital. Although the main difference between the volunteer and the moonlighter is compensation, moonlighters will often charge hourly rates substantially below market rates because they perceive the income to be supplemental. In addition, the lower hourly rate often offsets the small business’ inconvenience of having access to the moonlighter only after-hours, just like the volunteer. Small businesses generally only hire moonlighters when they can’t find a qualified volunteer who can step up to the plate for their support needs.
• The Internal Guru: Someone on staff knows just enough to handle many of the basic daily computer support needs. Usually this owner, manager, accountant, sales rep, or other staff member feels comfortable with routine tasks like updating antivirus software definitions, recovering lost Office toolbars, or creating user logon accounts. This same person, however, often lacks formal or on-the-job training on intermediate to advanced level topics and generally shies away from more complicated tasks like configuring DHCP scopes or Exchange Server public folders.

Sizing Up the Client’s Internal Guru

Regardless of the specific small business accounts that you’re servicing, the person who is currently providing network or computer support to these businesses probably doesn’t make his or her living servicing small business networks. This is where your firm comes into the picture. You’re the expert-in-training when it comes to installing, customizing, and supporting small business networks.

Although you may be the undisputed expert when it comes to TCP/IP, database-driven Web sites, or virtual private networks (VPN), it’s important to tread lightly when first beginning your engagement with the small business. Although your new client’s internal guru may have limited or in some cases totally inaccurate or inadequate knowledge of small business networks, the client’s guru has been the trusted technology advisor so far. Before you get too far along in sizing up whether the internal guru knows what he or she is talking about, you’ll want to subtly determine whether your firm is being brought in to supplement the internal guru or replace the guru.

If your firm will be supplementing the internal guru and your efforts will be collaborative in nature, you’ll want to spend some time getting to know this key, internal resource person. As you get further along in discussions, the guru will be able to tell you how the technology was installed, what’s the history behind the implementation, and how the technology was supported before you arrived. You’ll also want to find out what the guru’s real job is.

While each small business is unique, the following guidelines should help you gain a better understanding of the role of the internal guru.

1. Is the guru a decision-maker? A techie? Or both?
2. Does the guru feel threatened by your firm? How does the guru feel about external IT vendors?
3. Does the guru have aspirations to someday assume a full-time IT position?
4. How strong is the guru’s technical knowledge in various areas? Does the guru feel comfortable asking for help when overwhelmed?
5. Does the guru’s boss make the computer-support part of the guru’s job a priority? Or is it just a task that the guru gets to when time permits?
6. Has the guru ever had any formal training?

It’s also extremely important to find out the relationship between the internal guru and the owner(s) of the small business. Often the internal computer guru is a family member, relative, or longtime personal friend of one of the principals in the business.

Regardless of whether you’ll now be providing all of the computer or network support to this small business or just serving as an escalation point, it’s important for you to get the political lay of the land before voicing any controversial opinions, such as “That guy Bob is a total idiot when it comes to routers.”