Start & Run a Rural Computer Consultant Business. John D. Deans

in 2000, despite having turned down multiple requests for me to do some consulting work in Houston and Austin, I did finally accept a couple of short-term contracts.

      Even at that time, I didn’t believe that Brenham or even all of Washington County would have enough consulting projects to keep me busy, but I decided to start looking for opportunities locally in our new small hometown. Chapter 13 will address in detail how I was able to get my original 12 clients.

      As time went on, I was able to gather more rural clients, and by late 2002, I was able to stop taking new Houston and Austin clients entirely. By early 2003, my 40-plus active rural clients were keeping me hopping, so I handed off my remaining Houston and Austin clients to my consultant friends. My billable time was consistently hitting over $10K per month from Washington County clients alone. I had arrived at a small-company plateau I never thought possible just a couple of years before.

      It was then, around 2003, when I fully grasped what I had become — a rural computer consultant. I had not planned, projected, researched, or read about this new niche. I had just developed it in real time based on the computing needs of the local businesses.

      The exciting thing about being the jack-of-all-IT-trades in the country is that you are doing many different things all day long, and you are rarely at one client’s site for the majority of the day. My normal schedule consists of four, and sometimes up to eight or even ten client-site visits in one day. This would be nearly impossible in a large metro area due to travel times between clients and traffic limitations. Back in the 1990s in Houston, it was rare indeed when I could visit three clients in a day, let alone four or more.

      Another good thing about small-town clients is that they are mostly on an eight- to nine-hour day, five days a week. Some of the larger ones may have a second evening shift that you might have to support, but that is rare. This is a major benefit for a rural computer consultant — being able to work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, and still be close to the house or your kids’ school.

      Some days will start out with you having to resolve e-mail problems for Client A, then driving ten or so miles to the neighboring town to troubleshoot backup problems for Client B. Remember that those ten miles will take only about ten minutes, driving through country roads with nice hay fields and cows to look at instead of glaring red taillights and tall buildings. If you do your planning right, Client C is in that same neighboring town and needs you to pick up an old Windows 2000 PC and upgrade it to Windows XP Pro overnight and return it the next morning.

      Some days will be project days with specific tasks and jobs to perform on a schedule. Those days are nice, since you are able to focus, plan, and have the required hardware and software on hand. Other days will be in what I call “interrupt mode” or “firefighting mode,” when you go from problem to problem, fixing the computer and network glitches that seem to crop up in threes. Usually, though, after you get a decent client load, you will have days that go as planned and others that are dynamic. You’ll learn to prioritize the level of need, rating it somewhere between an emergency work-stoppage situation and a nice-to-have improvement. Deciding which client to hit next when your schedule gets full is almost an art in itself since you are trying to keep the travel time down and the on-site billing time up.

      As I will describe later in this book, the best way to hold on to new clients is by being available and successfully fixing a computer-related problem the business is currently having. If you get a call from a small-business owner who is having network problems and is a friend of one of your current clients, you have got to jump on that one immediately!

      Just like any other small-business owner, you must wear many corporate hats. Besides being a computer consultant, you need to also be your own bookkeeper, salesperson, marketing representative, and bill collector, all wrapped into one. When the phone isn’t ringing and your project list is short, your new job for that day or week is marketing!

      At the end of the month, with hopefully dozens of invoices to send out, you recheck your billable time and all hardware/software sales, add any applicable taxes, and get those bills in the mail to your clients. Don’t forget about your company’s bills, since they collect up in your in-box just as fast as your personal bills.

      Rural computer consulting wasn’t the career I started out in. Nonetheless, my former career in big-city IT was excellent preparation for what I’m doing now. And that’s the topic of the next chapter.

      2

      The Making of a Rural Computer Consultant

      I got into the IT industry very early in my working life. I had been a pretty good student in high school, but after graduating, I quickly discovered that college was not for me. However, I had to let my parents know that, so with my stomach in knots, I met with them and told them that I was dropping out of college. I had never really wanted to go in the first place.

      My dad, surprisingly, said, “OK. Now it’s time for you to go find a job.” Since I was 18 and still at home, he also informed me that I would immediately start paying him rent and it was due at the end of the month, so I’d better get after it.

      That was what I wanted to hear. I may have disliked school, but I loved to work and get paid for it. I was ready for the future.

      Early Career and Successes

      Now that I was out of high school and not going to college, I knew I had to find an industry that offered strong opportunities to someone with few skills. Jean Long, a long-time family friend, worked at Key People Personnel, which happened to be in the same building as Control Data Corporation (CDC). She told my dad to tell me to drop by her office, and she would get me an interview at CDC. Since all I had was a high school diploma and a strong work ethic, I was willing to take anything.

      After three interviews in a row that same morning, I landed a job as a process control clerk working for CDC in the Galleria area of Houston. This was great since it was only three miles from my parents’ home (where I was still living) and I was making a whopping $800 a month.

      This was my first information technology (IT) job and it consisted of mainly taking the printouts and plots off large printers and plotters, feeding computer cards into high-speed readers, and mounting nine-track reel tape on rows of six-foot-high tape drives.

      Since the rent my dad was charging me was low and I didn’t really have any other bills or debt, I spent most of my money over the next year taking flying lessons at Houston’s hobby airport on the weekends. And on weekdays, after work ended at 4 p.m., I’d run home for dinner and then back up to work to take great computer courses offered by my employer on the Plato Learning Network.

      They had a whole curriculum for computer hardware and software that was free to all employees. I ate these courses up, taking as many as I could … topics covering programming languages, hardware trouble-shooting, and software design. After six months and with more than 20 completed courses behind me, a light went on in my head: I really dig this computer thing!

      Just after my one-year anniversary with CDC, my boss offered me a promotion to billing processing operator. This was an awesome opportunity offered to me, given than two of my other workmates had been in the process control room longer than I had. Dad told me it was because of all the late-night course work I had done, which was all logged and reported to management on a monthly basis. Odds are he was right about that, just like he was all the other times.

      Those late-night courses continued to pay off for me because over the next year, I used what I had learned to streamline CDC’s bill-processing system. I was so successful in this that I managed to get the whole process down from ten hours a day to only two.

      For some reason, I kept this accomplishment quiet for a few months. This allowed me the time to create extra reports with color graphs showing the billing activity, which the managers loved. It also allowed me to sneak out of work early (quite often) to surf in Galveston during storm season, which was the only time the waves were