Consultant value to small business

BIG company mentalities and needs are MUCH different than a smaller company's. Most smaller companies have single managment levels or are family owned. This has built te persons business to where it stands today, unless the person is looking to make major changes and rethink his/her business plan, they will never appreciate your BIG knowledge.

If the compnay is stable and content, you are going to have your work cut out for you, if they are in dire need of progression, they will be searching for someone like yourself.

The only things is, YOU can't decide what is best for a small company and convince them to move ahead. I know you can probably improve the way they do business, you can streamline the operation and help with marketing goals, but if papa owner likes the way it is and doesn't UNDERSTAND the new ideas, he is not going to relinquish control of the company.

Your better off looking at the medium sized market, they are always looking and thinking like big companies. 50-300 employees?

After meeting few small client, you need to persuade them that you will be their 'overall' IT consultant and would charge them only when your services are being used. What this means is 'no retainer fee'. If it is not going to scare the smaller clients you can have a small contract.

Once you bag a few such customers, you can benefit from their names in your 'partial list of customers' when selling your expertise to other such smaller clients.

Slowly, somewhere down the line you start charging reasonable retainer fees.

Good luck!!!

Your business analyst and project manager experience is probably not going to be skills you can sell to businesses of the size you are targeting. Most companies of this size also do not need generally need an IT manager per se (part-time or otherwise).

Assuming you want to concentrate on the IT part of your experience, companies this size are generally looking for on-call technical support, network maintenance, and network managment. They also generally look for support for such projects as upgrading operating systems, upgrading hardware, network design and installation, migration to more new or more robust business process software, etc. In other words, they are looking for help in the technical aspects of IT not the managerial.

Therefore you need to focus on the technical aspects of your experience. These small companies are generally caught between moving beyond the technical skills and experience of whoever is presently troubleshooting computers and being able to afford a fulltime, experienced IT person.

If you want to target the small business, don't sell yourself as a business analyst ("I don't need some high-priced ana;lyst to tell me how to run my business!"), project manager ("I don't have any projects that need to be managed!"), or even IT manager ("I don't have any IT people that need to be managed. What I need is a technical person to do the work!").

Sell yourself as an IT consultant. I think most people expect consultants to either be very specialized (usually product-specific), or have a broad base of knowledge allowing the consultant to offer a wide range of technical services and advice.

Your managerial and analyst skills will be of use to you in making decisions and dealing with your customers, but they are not necessarily sellable skills in and of themselves.