It's time to dig into the steps you need to take to start your own tech support company! You should be excited, because this is not hard. Best of all, advertising your services is 100 times easier than a couple years ago!
Let's look at what you need to do first.
Phase I: Gather and Analyze Intelligence
I'm not talking about getting smarter (that always helps though!). You need to get information to see if a tech support business can survive and thrive in your environment.
Here's what you do to gather intelligence.
Find someone who owns their own business. Hopefully you can find someone who give you advice about the things you need to do. Pick up tips such as who is a good bookkeeper to use.
Talk to your local chamber of commerce. Your chamber of commerce should have demographic information about the people and businesses in your community. A good chamber representative will want to help you so you'll join. Don't join yet--you need to see if your business can take off first!
Scope out the competition. Are they good? If they are, is there room for you or do you have a value proposition that is different than theirs?
Find good vendors. I don't care if you're planning to only do service based work. You need to do this because you will run into helpless customers. You'll need to buy firewalls, switches, etc for them. The vendors you want should be able to educate you about their products and make good recommendations. I recommend using a VAR (value added retailer) because they'll let you know about alternate ways of doing things.
I've heard rumors of competitors going through a competitor's dumpster to see who their parts source is. I don't recommend this because it's probably illegal. The part source may inform your competitor that you've called as well.
Write down all that you learn from each of the sources we've mentioned. What are the things you think will be easy? What are the difficult things? You should be getting excited about possibilities and strategizing your way around problems.
Keep your notebook with you at all times. Add stray thoughts and ideas, potential customers and anything else to what you've started.
By now you should have a sense of how your business could make money. Diagram the different ways you can create income streams into your business.
Make no mistake, you're drawing up a battle plan. The first stage tells you what the battlefield looks like, so DO NOT take Phase 1 lightly!
We'll discuss incorporation, insurance and a bunch of other things in Part 3. Please comment, email or call us if you have a question or think we've missed something!
Ciao!
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