Your Friendly Neighborhood Computer Guy

How to Grow without Hiring

March 20, 2014 By Matthew Rodela 2 Comments

As your computer business grows, if you are successful you will inevitably reach a point where you can’t possibly handle any more work. Your days are full of client work. Your nights and weekends are spent on administrative tasks. You have to book clients days or weeks out in advance.

This is, of course, a great problem to have. This means you’re successful. You’re building a business and getting more clients. Isn’t that the whole point?

But it can also be frustrating. After all, you want to provide the best possible service to your customers, but you can’t do that as well when you’re constantly running around.

Not to mention the elusive work-life balance. At this point there is no “life” side of the equation.

You may find that its easy to get burned out when you are constantly working. Its hard to find new customers when you’re always servicing your current clients…which means you may eventually reach a dry spell.

All this  pain means one thing:  you’ve arrived at a turning point in your business. A fork in the road, if you will. You have to decide how to continue growing your business.

Many owners will decide to hire an employee at this point. Its a logical move. Hire an inexpensive recent grad to take care of the dirty jobs while you work with the high end clients and continue to work on the business side of things.

This has worked for many computer shops in the past and is a perfectly legitimate way to build your business.

But if you’re like me, you aren’t interested in hiring employees, and the headaches that can come with that decision. Headaches like:

• Payroll processing
• Providing benefits
• The hiring and firing process
• Quality control (employees will NEVER be as dedicated to the business as you)
• Training
• Workplace (if you work at home you’ll probably need to find office space or a storefront)

I’d rather continue building my business on my own terms, without becoming someone’s “boss”.

Whether you’re like me and you simply enjoy working as a one person operation, or you’ve reached the point where you are considering hiring a your first employee, I recommend that you consider some alternatives. There are many ways to grow your business, free up some time, and increase your revenue without hiring on an extra body.
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Case Study: Marketing That’s Worth the Money

July 01, 2013 By Matthew Rodela 10 Comments

As computer business owners you know we absolutely have to ABM (always be marketing).  To avoid the dreaded, but common, feast or famine roller coaster, we need to make sure we’re always getting our name out there to new customers.

Because our time to perform marketing activities is limited, it is best for us to find the tactics that will give us the most bang for the buck.

Not all advertising techniques are created equal, so one must do their due diligence to find those few marketing tactics that work best for your business.

For this reason, over the last year I’ve made an effort to try different marketing tactics and measure their results.   The goal being that I want to find the few marketing tactics that get the best results so I can focus on maximizing the effectiveness of those and turning them into a repeatable processes in order to free up my time.

Right now, I would like to share my results of all the marketing tactics I’ve tried over the last year and how well they did for me.  I measure success both in the number of clients I get (because they can turn into repeat customers as well as provide referrals) and by the amount of money earned from the first call with that client.  At the very least I’m looking to break even.  Here they are in no particular order:  [Read More...]