Small Business IT Consulting: The Micro Small Business Environment

Posted by Nick Niesen on October 28th, 2010

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.

Copyright MMI-MMVI, Small Biz Tech Talk. All Worldwide Rights Reserved. {Attention Publishers: Live hyperlink in author resource box required for copyright compliance}