Working On Your Business and Not In Your Business
You need to extract yourself from your business. In the beginning (to me at least), solving PC and server problems was fun. Leaving the server room to an ovation and encores because you managed to remount the Exchange Information Store is inspiring and heartening. However, you are going to find that it doesn’t pay the bills (well, not all of them). Trust me, I know.
Being disturbed on a Sunday afternoon because an important, but obviously inebriated, client spilled a glass of red wine on his Sony Vaio’s keyboard gets irritating after a while. Especially if the client has his pals around him and he wants to prove to them how good his IT Support is (“He even answers calls on Sundays and After Hours!”). Even worse, the client is alone at home and invites you for a drink afterwards. May sound funny, but it does happen.
It doesn’t pay the bills to continue working in your business. You have two hands, one brain, and 320 hours in a month (yep, that’s how many hours you are going to have to work to earn a decent living).
You cannot possibly become rich by working at an hourly rate. You need to take a break sometime. A two week vacation means that you’re not earning in that period.
Jean Paul Getty said that he would rather earn 1% of 100 people’s efforts than earn 100% of his own efforts.
Why did we become IT Technicians/System Administrators/Network Engineers in the first place? We chose our career because we love solving problems. We love overcoming those challenges the ordinary guy doesn’t have the patience to research; try a solution and, if that doesn’t work, pushing on and trying something different until we get everything working as it should.
Guess what? This all takes time and clients aren’t willing to pay for your ‘learning time’, nor would you ever charge them for it.
So, a problem that should have taken two hours to solve has now taken you six, but you can only bill for two.
Sure, in the future, you will be able to sort this issue out at a fraction of the time it would take the client to do it, but technology changes…..incessantly. You are always going to be learning. Need to master a new operating system like Linux? Peg down at least 500 hours of learning time before you will be able to be considered enough of an expert, and capable enough, to bill for your expertise. You cannot charge a single cent for the learning time required to become an expert. There needs to be a better way…
And there is! It’s called Managed Services, where you bill a flat rate for the support that you offer your clients. You have enough fat built in to ensure your technicians’ learning time is accounted for and you do not constantly squabble over what is billable and what isn’t.
So, get the systems and procedures in place to start working ON your business and not IN your business - you owe it to yourself!
Regards
Arno
Original Article Posted at http://www.msppractice.com/
