markys2

Anyone provide support to small businesses, looking to start up myself and woundering if anyone has any prior experiance.

jpor

iTrader: (1)

Used to work for a company who put out to tender for small to medium sized businesses. From what I can gather it can be a bit of a pain, especially getting and keeping the contract. A lot of companies get taken over by other companies which then means they have to cut back, and then in turn get their own staff in to look after the I.T. Just my experience of it all.
Also you may have to bare in mind what your taking on, and what type of experience you have to offer.

Good luck all the same.

mykp

Thats pretty much what I do.

Three bits of advice, treat your customers well. Treat them badly and they will look elsewhere for service. If they trust you and you do a good job they'll pay you accordingly. Explain what your doing in terms your customers can understand, why your doing it and how it benefits them.

Secondly, dont take short cuts, they will back fire in the long term. IE cheap equipment.

Thirdly, make sure you have the right insurance.

Mike

ps. aim for business customers not household customers - household customers always, always want to pay as little as possible and if anything goes wrong with their equipment in the next millenium - its your fault, even if it isnt! I wont touch home users anymore because of this. Business customers who have a problem want it sorting out asap, home customers want it sorting out NOW and wont pay even if its not your fault! Plus they always have a friend who know more than you (why they dont get them to do it?)

jpor

iTrader: (1)

Yep good point there about home customers. They start off by being your friend, then they start taking the p*ss by thinking they can phone you up at anytime of day and expecting you to be there to answer and fix their problem they caused. One of the reasons why I also stopped doing this sort of thing.

mykp

I had a problem a few years ago with a customer whos machine I fixed, his sound card was knackered and I removed it. Hey presto, working machine.

I got half way home and got a phone call, his machine had stopped working again. I turn round and return to his house.

Guess what he'd done!

Yep he'd put the card back in his machine, he wanted to play his flight sim and his flight control was set to use the sound card. Didnt matter that his machine didnt work or that he had a joystick port on the motherboard.

Idiot.

To cap it all, this bloke was my uncle!

mike

jpor

iTrader: (1)

Well you know what they say. You can choose your friends, but not your family.....

mike1210

Where i work the official line is that we dont touch users home machines (well unless they are important powerful people). This does not stop them hinting and the like "where is a cheap place to get my PC looked at??"

People i work with have done private work and say these days it just isnt worth it. The old classic "my son has been using it and its running really slow"

go to machine to find limewire, kazza, torrent and all file sharing packages you can think of. Running on startup with no firewall or anti-virus. The son in question they denies all knowledge of them being there, or before hand hides the folder.

EP82

Used to work for a company doing this sort of thing. They also dodged home users but if anyone asked i'd always take the work on the side

The place i worked at would always install the cheap hardware, the problem with small businesses in my experience is they also want things as cheap as possible.

IT 9 times out of 10 isn't as crucial to their business as say a large company who rely on their IT running 100% of the time.

So they think pay less and if it breaks it breaks, they will always have you their to fix it. In my experience you wont get custom being the most expensive but offering the best hardware, no matter how hard you try to drill home that if they go for cheap stuff it will be problematic.