Re-invest cash in IT ?

mick.fr

Hi,

I have a small IT company specialized in Win.Tel IT consultancy, working from design to implementation.
We specialize in legal compliance, security as well.
From a technical point of view we do work mainly with Microsoft technologies but we are also able to do Linux/Unix and Oracle.
All the guys who are working for me are freelances, I have no employee.
I have also no office, so no fixed charges.

At the moment I have only one customer, working on a large scale project which is gonna last several months. I have 2 consultants working for me on this, plus myself.
I am not too keen to develop my activities around small businesses, as because one of the reason is that I do not have enough resources and time.
So I strive to try to find new large scale customers in Ireland and UK.

So I have got some cash in the company, and I would like to find one or two new large project in the next months in order to increase the overall turnover but also my company's reputation.

So my question now is how would I do that ?
This kind of things takes time for sure, but I would like to effectively invest some cash into some kind of marketing I suppose, such as an advert or two in the major magazines such as Computer Scope or so.

What would be your advice/approach on this ?

ircoha

I know nothing about marketing other than work of mouth is prolly the best, so my only observation here is that reliance on a single or a few customers is more risky from a cash flow perpective than a broader customer base. It is very easy to get squeezed.

While u say u have no employees, do u invoice for the other 2 and pay them or do they bill directly? The reason I ask is if the customer delays payment are u exposed to the consultants. No need to to the answer.

If you have the skills, consider moving back from the 'code-cutting' bit and do more management: this way you could perhaps manage more,albeit smaller projects.
Do you attend conferences and industry shows here and in UK, or are u buried in day to day 'code-cutting'?
HTH

antoinolachtnai

Do not take ads in magazines. This would be a bad use of your money. You just won't get any response from it. Look at the marketing section in your local bookshop.

You really need to hit the sales trail. If you don't have any sales leads, you'll have to find some, by talking to your existing customers, by working with a partner (a software vendor, perhaps) or by cold calling.

I would make sure you have a decent looking website with good content before you go cold-calling, but I wouldn't overspend on it.

Are you sure your company isn't more like a specialized recruitment agency than a consulting firm?

mick.fr

Thanks for your feedback guys.
Yeah I know I need to participate to some public events, this is a good point.
I am actually going to speak at 3 Microsoft events in September and October, which might help a little bit.

Regarding the advertisement I will not advertise locally in a newspaper or so, I charge 1000-2000 euro a day, so what won't make sense, I am not selling 20 euro mouses or keyboards.

Regarding advert in big IT magazines, yeah I am not sure, there are so little here compared to UK.
But when I see adverts from some companies here in Computer Scope, I can't stop laughing...Especially the one that is always on cover of Computer Scope every months. So I tell myself, it should not be difficult to do better, especially when you know this particular company is a joke.

And no my company is not a recruitment agency, I just had to find freelances for this particular contract.

So I think I will focus on some events here and UK for the time being and we will see for advert a bit later.

Thanks again

antoinolachtnai

The reason I say that you are more like a recruitment company than a consultancy is that you are obviously making a lot of effort to recruit people, and you don't appear to have a lot of training and methodology behind you the way a consulting firm normally would have - you're depending on the talent and initiative of yourself and the people you recruit (not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that).

mick.fr

antoinolachtnai wrote:

The reason I say that you are more like a recruitment company than a consultancy is that you are obviously making a lot of effort to recruit people, and you don't appear to have a lot of training and methodology behind you the way a consulting firm normally would have - you're depending on the talent and initiative of yourself and the people you recruit (not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that).

Not sure what you mean by the lack of training and methodology, I have been consulting for many years now (Over 6).
Anyway yes for sure it is very hard to find highly skilled and experienced IT people in Ireland and the quality of resumes and individuals I received from all the agencies around (CPL, Qualitas...) was really disappointing.
All the freelances that are working on this are all foreigners...

antoinolachtnai

Well, what I mean is that if I hire {insert big-name consulting firm here} to send down 10 people to do a job for me, I know that they will follow a certain path to doing the job, that all the people have a certain level of training, that there is a command and control structure and so on. The consultants should also have a common identity and can be expected to work together well from day one of the project.

Conversely, if I were to go and work for this firm, I would expect to be sent on quite a bit of training before I would really get hands-on with a client project. I'd also expect there to be a clear career progression laid out for me.

That isn't to say of course that you will always get a better result with this approach, it's just that it is very scalable and fairly predictable.

I am assuming that you don't have this sort of induction/training program.

It is worth considering what is really constraining your business's growth - is it really a matter of not having enough clients, or is it also having a shortage of talent -.

information

mick.fr wrote:

So I tell myself, it should not be difficult to do better, especially when you know this particular company is a joke.

When you only have a couple of customers it is much easier to deliver
a high level of service and sometime a better result than the big companies.

But you try managing hundreds of projects with hundreds of employees
and see how good you are.
You change from being a consultant, who might be good at their job, to
some one who has to run a company and that is a hugh change.