Ideas for growing an IT business?

dynamik

So I started a new job today. It's for a small managed services company. We provide services to small and medium-sized business. The current owner recently acquired the company and is focused on improving and expanding the business. I know we have a few business owners here, and I was wondering if you had any suggestions.

There's only a handful of us at the moment, and I'm the main talent (scary, huh?). The rest are great at sales, but they haven't been selling a great deal because they've been bogged down with the IT stuff (most of which is well beyond their abilities).

I got a $5k bump in pay, but I'm still fairly low for my skills. The owner agreed to quarterly reviews, and my pay will increase as the company does, so I have a significant interest in taking things to the next level.

I'm really open to any suggestions. He's open to anything. I've thought about things like offering training, becoming a testing center (though I hear it doesn't pay well, so I'm not sure if that'd be worth it), partnering with vendors. I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas. TIA.

Related threads:
http://www.techexams.net/forums/off-topic/39956-vendor-partner-advice.html#post289810
http://www.techexams.net/forums/off-topic/39958-procedures-network-systems-analysis-improvements.html#post289812

skrpune

First of all, congrats on the new job & pay increase! It may not be a huge bump, but every little bit helps and to get an increase in pay in this economy is a wonder in & of itself. Kudos to you.

As for building a business, I'll be honest, I have no idea. But becoming a vendor or channel partner can lead to making new connections & finding new business opportunities. The last company I worked for was an Intel Channel Partner and an authorized reseller of MS products among others, and we got to go to cool conferences & do some networking (& get some nice freebies too). I don't think there's a cost associated with it, but there definitely was some benefit.

Training is pretty lucrative, but not sure how far you can go or how much you can charge without having an official "trainer" title from individual companies/technologies you folks would be providing training for. What kind of training are we talking about here? Or is that pretty open ended?

blargoe

"Learning consultants" do pretty well, I hear. The kind that do training on the side and consult most of the time, or consult on the side and train most of the time. VMWare instructors, for example, get $800/day for the classroom training and I imagine substantially more for dedicated onsite training. I don't know that it would really fit into your business model though.

blargoe

And yeah, congrats on the new job man!

vCole

Congrats on the new job!

Training is pretty big I hear...not sure where I heard that from

Bokeh

Congrats on the new job, I know you will do well. Are you buying dinner this go around?

genXrcist

Congrats! I can see you being the main talent, what with your Minesweeper and Solitaire skills and all.

As for business ideas, how about coming up with a solution to automate Identity Management for small companies so that accounts are automatically disabled when someone goes on leave. Or the account is deleted when someone quits or is fired. Something that regularily goes through and deletes old accounts that haven't been used in 90 days or something.

Hope that helps. Good luck in your new role!

Turgon

Good luck with the job. There's lots of competition in the training market place and preparing materials is very time consuming. Difficult to launch yourself into the training space and be effective unless you have prior experience there. Teaching classes can be daunting as well.

A lot depends on your sales people. They will be the ones drumming up business. Suggest you work closely with them to find out precisely what kind of work they are pitching for. Sounds like you will have to make good on their promises to clients. Are you going to be the sole provider of technical services to clients in the field? If so be careful what they promise your customers because you will be expected to do it.

paintb4707

Congrats on the new job! I'm sad though, you used to work for a company that was practically identical to mine but now you've moved on.

Have you considered CRM and ERP solutions?

UnixGuy

congrats for the new job


My advice is predictable..go for SUN :P

Daniel333

With a small ITMS company the distance between technical and sales is very small. Embrace that, see yourself as a CIO for your clients.

Questions -
Do you flat rate per month your client? Or per hour? Time block? Or just manage servers and infrastructure? Windows/Mac/Linux?

empc4000xl

I could tell you some stuff, but now you are the competition in MPLS.

the_Grinch

An idea I have been pushing around for a company (not that I will be doing it anytime soon) is open source solutions for small and medium small businesses. Can provide the install, support, and training with the customer not having to pay for the actual product. Also, if you get or have some programmers you can customize the software for other needs. Congrats and good luck!

darkerosxx

Managed services is getting extremely competitive in today's market. If I were you, I'd do some business/market analysis and focus on the things that will make the company the leader coming out of the recession. Talk to the sales people and see if they know anything customers are looking for that they can't get in the current market.

Also, do you want to do managed services or do you want to do training? Training people to do IT work goes against the managed services business model and these people will be your competition if one of your customers is performing cost/benefit analysis of dropping you for a permanent hire.

One quick thing that can bring in cash that I see a lot of managed services businesses doing is becoming testing centers. Use a room in your office building to offer one desktop for testing through vue/prometric and earn some nearly work-free revenue. That could work if your area's testing center market isn't saturated. While some may think this goes with the idea above about going against the business model, it's more of accepting the fact that people are going to do this anyways, so you can earn the money on them getting tested as well as get an idea of who your competition is in the area.

Good luck though, plenty of fun times ahead for you, I bet.

Slowhand

I'm not much of a salesman, (actually, I am, but I like to tell people I don't know anything about sales so that I don't have to do it,) but there are quite a few things you can do on the back-end to help streamline new customer setups and maintenance. I don't know what is in place right now, but start working on getting a documentation/ticketing/management system to help make day-to-day tasks easier and make projects like new client setups and server rollouts much smoother.

When I worked in that particular niche of the industry, we used two products:
ConnectWise for ticketing and resource management. We kept track of time, purchases, projects, inventory, and a slew of other things in this system. It was also connected to the next product to gather information automatically about each of our clients' networks:

Kaseya was the agent-based remote support system we used. Through it, we could log into users' machines from our office, from other offices, and even from home, just by logging onto the web-based interface. There was even a way for us to have people without a Kaseya agent on their machine to send a request to us, click on a link, and allow a temporary, encrypted VNC session to run throuh port 80, letting a tech log on. (I used this to help my parents out on countless occasions, while I worked at this place.)

Basically, having the tools and procedures in place to make the work as quick and as smooth as possible will also help boost your sales. The productivity you gain will not only help you deal with multiple clients in a day, (I used to work with six to ten different companies in a single day,) you'll also impress the hell out of these customers so that they'll recommend you to friends or will be willing to write testimonials that your sales crew can use when doing their pitch to new prospective clients.

Other than that, how can you boost your sales? I don't know. . . set up a kissing-booth?
This is what's called 'taking one for the team'.

networker050184

Nothing really productive to add but congrats!

dtlokee

Yes, Congrats on the new job Andrew, I hope it works well for you!

dynamik

Thanks for the congrats everyone

skrpune wrote: »

Training is pretty lucrative, but not sure how far you can go or how much you can charge without having an official "trainer" title from individual companies/technologies you folks would be providing training for. What kind of training are we talking about here? Or is that pretty open ended?

I'd go after CTT+, which can also be applied towards the MCT as well, so it would be "official."

Training would probably be a couple of years out anyway. Until we get another engineer or two, I can't block myself off for 3-5 day courses. It's something I would like to do, so I'm trying to at least get it on the road map now.

blargoe wrote: »

"Learning consultants" do pretty well, I hear. The kind that do training on the side and consult most of the time, or consult on the side and train most of the time. VMWare instructors, for example, get $800/day for the classroom training and I imagine substantially more for dedicated onsite training. I don't know that it would really fit into your business model though.

It's an interesting business. We're technically a franchise, but that's just for the management software and ticketing system. Corporate has recommended firewalls, antivirus software, backup devices, etc., but we're free to do whatever we want. Nearly every other location, focuses on small businesses and break/fix work. This guy and another location (which is coincidentally in my home town) are the only two that are focusing on the bigger fish.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there isn't a set business model. If I say, "Let's try to incorporate training over the next few years," He'll say, "Great!" We're actually the regional HQ too, so we're building a new conference room, which would also work great for training.

Bokeh wrote: »

Congrats on the new job, I know you will do well. Are you buying dinner this go around?

Sure!

genXrcist wrote: »

As for business ideas, how about coming up with a solution to automate Identity Management for small companies so that accounts are automatically disabled when someone goes on leave. Or the account is deleted when someone quits or is fired. Something that regularily goes through and deletes old accounts that haven't been used in 90 days or something.

Interesting idea; thanks. I'd probably take it a step further and focus on awareness for these types of things. Many places don't know that's possible or why it's important.

Turgon wrote: »

Good luck with the job. There's lots of competition in the training market place and preparing materials is very time consuming. Difficult to launch yourself into the training space and be effective unless you have prior experience there. Teaching classes can be daunting as well.

I would go with official courseware. I am a bit hesitant to get up in front of a group of people, but I think I can work through it, especially if I start with something less technical, such as CompTIA.

Turgon wrote: »

A lot depends on your sales people. They will be the ones drumming up business. Suggest you work closely with them to find out precisely what kind of work they are pitching for. Sounds like you will have to make good on their promises to clients. Are you going to be the sole provider of technical services to clients in the field? If so be careful what they promise your customers because you will be expected to do it.

Hah, he's already overselling me. We're sitting down tomorrow or Wednesday to go over my skillset, so he won't go too far overboard.

paintb4707 wrote: »

Congrats on the new job! I'm sad though, you used to work for a company that was practically identical to mine but now you've moved on.

Have you considered CRM and ERP solutions?

Yep, I guess that puts you on deck

I haven't. I have no experience with those, and no real interest in getting too involved with them either. Now, bringing on someone who is experienced after a couple of years of growth would be more feasible. Good suggestion; thanks.

UnixGuy wrote: »

My advice is predictable..go for SUN :P

You know, I was hoping someone would tell me to throw out everything I know and start from scratch

Daniel333 wrote: »

With a small ITMS company the distance between technical and sales is very small. Embrace that, see yourself as a CIO for your clients.

Questions -
Do you flat rate per month your client? Or per hour? Time block? Or just manage servers and infrastructure? Windows/Mac/Linux?

Some clients commit via contracts for a flat monthly fee, others call upon us as needed. I have to deal with all kinds of technologies, so yes, all of those, and more.

empc4000xl wrote: »

I could tell you some stuff, but now you are the competition in MPLS.

And to think I offered to buy you a beer...

the_Grinch wrote: »

An idea I have been pushing around for a company (not that I will be doing it anytime soon) is open source solutions for small and medium small businesses. Can provide the install, support, and training with the customer not having to pay for the actual product. Also, if you get or have some programmers you can customize the software for other needs. Congrats and good luck!

Good idea. Unfortunately, that's too far from my area of specialization to be feasible for us, but I hope that works out for you.

darkerosxx wrote: »

Managed services is getting extremely competitive in today's market. If I were you, I'd do some business/market analysis and focus on the things that will make the company the leader coming out of the recession. Talk to the sales people and see if they know anything customers are looking for that they can't get in the current market.

Yea, we're going to be doing just that. It's going to take a bit before everyone gets acclimated to this arrangement, develops procedures, etc. We're all relatively new to this. It's a bit risky, but it'll pay off for everyone if it works out.

darkerosxx wrote: »

Also, do you want to do managed services or do you want to do training? Training people to do IT work goes against the managed services business model and these people will be your competition if one of your customers is performing cost/benefit analysis of dropping you for a permanent hire.

I suppose that's true to an extent, but we typically provide those services for small business who would never bring in their own IT staff.

darkerosxx wrote: »

One quick thing that can bring in cash that I see a lot of managed services businesses doing is becoming testing centers. Use a room in your office building to offer one desktop for testing through vue/prometric and earn some nearly work-free revenue. That could work if your area's testing center market isn't saturated. While some may think this goes with the idea above about going against the business model, it's more of accepting the fact that people are going to do this anyways, so you can earn the money on them getting tested as well as get an idea of who your competition is in the area.

As mentioned above, it's something I'm considering, but I can't tell if it'll be worthwhile. It sounds like you don't make very much per exam, so the space may be able to be put to a better use. Plus, I'd feel guilty pushing Prometric on people. I'd always dread coming across that post that says what a terrible experience a person had at our facility

Slowhand wrote: »

I'm not much of a salesman, (actually, I am, but I like to tell people I don't know anything about sales so that I don't have to do it,) but there are quite a few things you can do on the back-end to help streamline new customer setups and maintenance. I don't know what is in place right now, but start working on getting a documentation/ticketing/management system to help make day-to-day tasks easier and make projects like new client setups and server rollouts much smoother.

When I worked in that particular niche of the industry, we used two products:
ConnectWise for ticketing and resource management. We kept track of time, purchases, projects, inventory, and a slew of other things in this system. It was also connected to the next product to gather information automatically about each of our clients' networks:

Kaseya was the agent-based remote support system we used. Through it, we could log into users' machines from our office, from other offices, and even from home, just by logging onto the web-based interface. There was even a way for us to have people without a Kaseya agent on their machine to send a request to us, click on a link, and allow a temporary, encrypted VNC session to run throuh port 80, letting a tech log on. (I used this to help my parents out on countless occasions, while I worked at this place.)

Basically, having the tools and procedures in place to make the work as quick and as smooth as possible will also help boost your sales. The productivity you gain will not only help you deal with multiple clients in a day, (I used to work with six to ten different companies in a single day,) you'll also impress the hell out of these customers so that they'll recommend you to friends or will be willing to write testimonials that your sales crew can use when doing their pitch to new prospective clients.

Other than that, how can you boost your sales? I don't know. . . set up a kissing-booth?
This is what's called 'taking one for the team'.

We are actually using ConnectWise, and something that sounds identical to Kaseya. Like I said, this is a franchise with a pretty sweet backing. There is also a pool of remote engineers (probably in India) that we can draw upon or delegate tasks to. It costs us, but it's nice to have a place to **** your problems if you're busy with something more important.

ally_uk

How do you apply to become a prometric testing centre? and is there alot of work involved?

eMeS

Congrats on the new job!

The best advice that I can give is to never compete on the basis of cost. Always compete on the basis of quality and scarcity.

Testing centers IMO do not make enough to justify all of the risk/requirements for offering testing. The places that I know that do this offer it as more of a value add type service. I considered this, and decided it was not anything I wanted my business anywhere near (except in isolated cases for ITIL written exams).

Training is lucrative, and there are many many companies that play in this market. Still, the demand seems to be very high across all segments of this market. What I have found is required to be successful in the training market is to offer something very unique that people can't get anywhere else. E.g., there are about a million CPLS's offering the same Microsoft classes ad naseum. There is really no distinction between them, and about all they can compete on is cost. E.g., Every CPLS offers a BizTalk class, very few offer a BizTalk class with custom courseware specific to the financial service industry (or energy, or retailing, etc...). For me, the scarcity factor comes from delivering the higher-level ITIL education as well as customized and specialized WebSphere and other education. Again, the value add is the customization and the focus on specific industries and their problems.

As lucrative as training is, the money made from any one or 10 classes is irrelevant. The goal is to expose yourself and your organization to people that attend training that can ultimately be a source of long-term consulting income. The revenue that can be made here easily eclipses the amounts that can be earned from professional education. Here's how it goes though. In almost every class, someone inquires about additional consulting services. Usually they cannot afford the admission price (everyone wants something for nothing). I would say that about 1 in every 25 of these opportunities comes to fruition. So, on average, I would estimate that 1 in every 25 classes results in some kind of significant follow-on consulting business.

You'll hear two things, and they are a bit cliche. The first, find your niche. I really don't know much about managed services, but if it is as competitive as others say, then you will have to find what it is that makes you special to survive. IMO "cost" is usually the wrong answer, as eventually someone will outcompete you on that. The second is, the secret to success in sales often boils down to "at-bats", or how many doors you knock on. See my 1 in 25 stat above...Basically, if I can increase the rate at which my organization delivers classes, I can increase the opportunities to get consulting business.

Best of luck in your new job....I have to go take a shower now so I can go make the world a better place by teaching an ITIL Foundation class.

MS

HeroPsycho

Partner with companies, and they'll bring business to you as long as you develop your partner status.

Don't get bogged down with IT stuff as you're saying. Start developing solutions that you get paid better for implementing that take less time than repeatedly doing break/fix.

Congrats on the new job!

eMeS

HeroPsycho wrote: »

Partner with companies, and they'll bring business to you as long as you develop your partner status.

Couldn't agree with this more. I've recently signed two supplier agreements with large companies, and it quickly resulted in more work than we have resources to service.

There's nothing wrong with riding on superman's cape.

...or Batman's.

MS

NetAdmin2436

Congrats!

It sounds like your in for quite an experience.