IT Consultant Company Factors for Determining IT Audit Prices

If you are the owner of an IT consultant company, you may be unsure of what to charge for an initial IT audit with a new small business customer.

IT audits are incredibly important to the sales process and necessary to building strong relationships with new customers. Pricing can be intimidating to many IT professionals because it on the surface seems to be such an individualized decision. Often scouting around to see what the competition is charging can be helpful to figuring out your own prices. But you need to also consider your own expertise, your overhead expenses and who your clients are before you can come up with a structure that works for your company.

Consider the following 5 factors that can help you determine how your IT consultant company should price out its initial IT audits for new small business customers.

1. Geography. Typically, IT consultants within large cities can command higher billing rates than those in the suburbs or rural areas. Many of these geographic issues are due to monthly overhead or a general cost-of-doing-business that tends to be higher in densely-populated urban areas.

2. Scarcity of Skills. Does your IT consultant company focus on a specialty, or do you do general computer work? In the same way as a medical specialist like a cardio-thoracic surgeon charges more than a general practice physician for an office visit, a company that specializes in firewalls, virtual private networking (VPN) or some other type of service will be able to command higher billing rates than a generalist firm just installing basic PCs and LANs.

3. Local Demand. You need to know how busy your competition is in your area. When your IT consultant company starts approaching a 75% utilization rate (30 billable hours/week consistently for months at a time), prices start to firm up. When you are doing nothing on Monday morning but hoping the phones will ring, it’s time to get more aggressive about promoting yourself. In this kind of scenario, perhaps your IT audit prices should be lower for new small business customers.

4. Overhead. Think about how much it costs for you to get trained annually, the cost of lab/test equipment, how much time and money you need to invest in marketing to keep your calendar full, insurance, taxes, professional services (accountants, attorneys, etc.), cell phones, electricity and auto-related expenses. Basically, think about the additional costs that will keep you up and running.

5. Client Size. A home-based micro-sized small business will almost always have a smaller IT budget than a 10-person downtown law office. And of course, a 10-person law office will have a much lower budget than a 100-employee or 50-PC manufacturer. Keep in mind how big the clients of your IT consultant company are when determining IT audit prices. While supporting more workstations almost always means more work, larger clients typically demand more highly skilled support and are willing to pay a premium for the highly skilled support.

In this article we discussed 5 factors that can determine how much your IT consultant company charges for IT audits. Learn more about how you can attract great, steady, high-paying clients to your IT consultant company now at the attached link.

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