Who are your customers, business or individuals?

[TampaBayTech]

I'm still getting my business setup and one of the big looming questions I have is what type of customer to target. My personal observation so far is that doing work for small businesses is much more lucrative but I'm seeing a lot of members on here who cater to home/individual customers.

What do you guys think? Are small business owners really hard nuts to crack? Does the larger pool of home/residential customers make up for the lower average bill?

My biggest fear with individual customers is that they won't be willing to pay for services because the cost of a new PC is so cheap. I also worry that business owners won't trust me because I don't represent a big company like BestBuy or Staples.

 

[NickCat11]

I'm still getting my business setup and one of the big looming questions I have is what type of customer to target. My personal observation so far is that doing work for small businesses is much more lucrative but I'm seeing a lot of members on here who cater to home/individual customers.

What do you guys think? Are small business owners really hard nuts to crack? Does the larger pool of home/residential customers make up for the lower average bill?

My biggest fear with individual customers is that they won't be willing to pay for services because the cost of a new PC is so cheap. I also worry that business owners won't trust me because I don't represent a big company like BestBuy or Staples.

I'd say I am 80% residential and 20% business. This works out great for me since I mostly do in-shop repairs and don't have time for on-site stuff. My business accounts usually never inquire about price. They know they need their computers up and running and whatever that costs to do they are willing to pay it. They also know I'm not going to rip them off, so you have a trust factor there as well that's important. In regards to residential, as long as your rates are competitive then they usually aren't a problem. Yeah, new computers are cheap but you're still looking at $300-400 for a bottom of the line machine. The majority of my invoices are under $120.00 for residential which I guess is why I don't receive complaints.

I guess to answer your question, you're going to make more money on business clients so I would target them first if you can handle it. Look to get maintenance contracts with them. This will help with bringing in steady income on a monthly basis.

 

[NTS]

Mostly residential for me... and a small percentage of business customers. Of course, I would like to change this as business customers bring in more money for me.

 

[Kenhelms]

60% Governmental
20% Corporate
10% Small business
10% Residential

 

[lan101]

How did you gain the governmental and corporate clients? Did they call you or did you go after them? If you went after them, what were your means of doing so if you don't mind telling us??

Thanks,
Landon

 

[TampaBayTech]

The majority of my invoices are under $120.00 for residential which I guess is why I don't receive complaints.

Yeah, I'm thinking around $100-$150 is about the most you are going to get out of most residential jobs. Now $150 is better than $0 but I would think you'd have to do a lot of jobs to make a decent living at that rate. I want to be making more in the $300-$500 range for most jobs or have some form of maintenance contract like you mentioned.

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

We do a good amount of businesses and schools due to the fact we are one of the few authorized Apple service providers in our area or any area for that matter. We earn business clients trust by providing good and fast warranty work and in return when they run into something out of warranty that they can't handle or don't know how to handle, they will gladly come to us. Yet there are still some institutions that will only bring us warranty machines and will handle the out of warranty stuff themselves (like my al ma matter) if they think they have or do have the capacity to do it themselves. But residential clients with all of their quarks and eccentricities still keep us steady and we can't turn our back on them being one of the few Apple shops around. Not to mention residential clients still provide the bulk of our data recovery/retrieval work which is good money!

 

[NickCat11]

I want to be making more in the $300-$500 range for most jobs or have some form of maintenance contract like you mentioned.

I don't know what your rates and services are but to make that kind of money per job may be difficult, especially the $500 mark.

 

[noah]

I am contracted thru another company for an enterprise contract. Then I have several small business contracts. Residential puts icing on the cake.

 

[frostbyte5014]

99.9% Business. Less stress, better customers, no haggling, more money, no late night calls or customer tracking me down when I'm off. I guess it depends on your demographics but here I would make about $10 per hour on residential when you break it down.

 

[Kenhelms]

How did you gain the governmental and corporate clients? Did they call you or did you go after them? If you went after them, what were your means of doing so if you don't mind telling us??

Thanks,
Landon

Word of mouth, they all found me. I would like to say that I did some glorious marketing that I came up with off the top of my head, so I can sell a book and get rich. Truth is, they just all seem to talk amongst themselves and the word of mouth has been my ONLY advertisement for a long time.

 

[TampaBayTech]

I don't know what your rates and services are but to make that kind of money per job may be difficult, especially the $500 mark.

Honestly I don't have anything set in stone yet, my goal is around $75 per hour. I'm just starting, in fact I'm going tomorrow to the printer to get my business cards made.

I did some work for a small business owner last week that included attempting to retrieve deleted data off a PC, reinstalling windows XP on that PC, migrating outlook and quickbooks data to the newly reformatted PC, setting up a backup script that automatically backs up critical data to an external harddrive, creating a ghost image of the PC once everything was reconfigured and doing some simple crapware removal on a laptop. I charged $425 for this which was actually a really big discount considering I did two on-site visits and probably spent 10+ hours on everything.

Now I know several residential customers who would love for me to do all that stuff for them but there is no way they would even pay $300 for it!

 

[TampaBayTech]

I tend to get doctors, chiropractors, SOHOs, small businesses, very rarely do I get just plain famillies/individuals.

Doctors are one of the businesses I am most interested in. Do you run into a lot of specialized software or other obstacles that make them hard to support?

 

[Kenhelms]

Doctors are one of the businesses I am most interested in. Do you run into a lot of specialized software or other obstacles that make them hard to support?

Im not pyramid, but Ill tell you...the xp workstations that run the different flavors of digital xray software, is pretty neat. I like having to "test" functionality on those.

 

[TampaBayTech]

Im not pyramid, but Ill tell you...the xp workstations that run the different flavors of digital xray software, is pretty neat. I like having to "test" functionality on those.

I hope you don't "test" the xray machines too often, that could be bad