IT Employment

As stated in response to your first question, I'm in a very small town, but there are some things that apply across the board.

1. List in the Yellow Pages. Means you must have a business phone. Costly but gives you credibility and people still look in the phone book for repair shops.

2. Advertise in the local paper. Lets people know you exist.

3. Have a storefront or rented office space if possible. Working from home is fine for consultants and on-site techs, but not for general public access. An analogy: would you take your car to a mechanic who works in his home garage?

4. Outside of network installation and administration, the money now is in service. I de-louse about 3 or 4 PCs a week (adware/spyware/virii) and that is pure income (no parts, software is freeware). PC repair also has a decent return.

5. Look for regional or national contract service companies that provide on-site or carry-in warranty service. If you get your name in the phone book, odds are some will find you.

6. There ain't no money in selling PCs unless you are solution provider. I still build a few because long time customers prefer mine to Dell and Gateway and I prefer to build my own small network servers. Note I said build, not buy white boxes. By ordering components, can build custom, high quality systems with top notch components. Not necessarily state-of-art, but reliable.

7. For service work, stock basic parts or have ready local access to same. Memory, FDDs, HDDs, power supplies, 80 cm fans, socket 370/socket A CPU coolers, fans for socket 478 CPU coolers, NICs, modems (biggie here, replace several after every severe thunderstorm), Cat 5E cables, keyboards, mice, optical drives. Start with limited amount and increase/decrease stock based on experience.

8. Have OEM copies of every version of Windows from 95B thru XP Pro.

I could go on, but that's a good start.

I'm not rolling in dough, but I enjoy what I do, work my own hours (long), my boss is very understanding, and I stay mentally sharp.

Dalton