Before starting your IT consulting business, take the steps that will lead to your success. In this article, learn about three steps you should take before beginning your IT consulting practice. Step Seven: Arrange Your Telecom Services Get a business telephone number or a mobile phone or something that you can answer with your IT consulting business name so you sound professional. Dont go too cheap and use your home phone number and a cheesey answering machine or it will really destroy your professional image. Make sure you convey a professional image all the way. The $40 or $50 a month you spend will be well worth it. You should also get a domain name registered. Ideally, you should pick out your domain name and IT consulting company name at the same time so you make sure you get your first choice of a dot com. Get your email and Webster-hosting ready to go. Decide what physical address you are going to use. Watch out for any home office zoning laws if you are going to be operating your IT consulting business out of your home. Step Eight: Order Your Business Cards Go either with 2 color or 4 color at this stage of the game. If your budget for business cards is 60 to $80 for a thousand cards, you should be fine. Dont go overboard on printing a ton of them. If you do, your bound to decide to change your logo or address and you'll be stuck with cards you can't use. Get the minimum quantity. You can always get a reprint later. Step Nine: Set Up Your Sales Tax If you are reselling products, you will need to get a sale tax certificate or sales tax collection receipt from the province or state you are located in. It is one type of regulatory agency there. You may want to open up some distributor accounts especially with the big two Ingram Micro and Tech Data. Ingrammicro.com and techdata.com. The big two distributors are XENIX, which just went public, and D&H. You should also have a merchant account. You want to be able to get a credit card authorization for any sales. Copyright MMI-MMVI, Computer Consulting 101. All Worldwide Rights Reserved. {Attention Publishers: Live hyperlink in author resource box required for copyright compliance} |
