OK, my small business story.
When I got out of college, I was all fired up and ready to go to work as one of the thousands of system administrators obviously needed by the .Com boom. I'd been trained as a programmer, but I'd lost my taste for it before I even got out of school.
I tried to find work, and couldn't. During the .Com boom. Literally went about four months without even any calls for interviews.
I mentioned my employment woes to my barber, of all people. My barber motioned to a corkboard at the front of his store: "Tradesmen who come in here put signs n' business cards up there. They swap service 'r find jobs all the time."
(My barber was a Chinese gentleman named Kim, who learned to speak English from John Wayne westerns, and talks with a texas accent).
So I printed up some fliers and tacked them to the corkboard.
I had a job within 10 days. Custom programming for an environmental cleanup company. It was a lousy job (I worked over a poorly ventilated heavy equipment garage), but over time I moved from programming to setting up servers and doing networking, work I found far more satisfying.
Eventually, one of the companies I had sent a resume to many moons before contacted me with a far better job offer. I went on two interviews, drove all over hell to get to them, and the day before I was to start I got a phone call: "I'm sorry. We've been told by management that there's a hiring freeze for the next two quarters. Can you check back with us in six months?"
So I went back to my barber's corkboard, this time with real business cards. I got small jobs from there: Wire a network. Set up shared dialup service. Configure a batch of new PCs. Sell and install a file server. Eventually I started to get "real" contracting work, but the odd jobs that started from my barber's corkboard are what got me through lean times; on average, I'd have a full-time contract job maybe seven months out of the year.
Over time, the folks I did work for would pass my card on to someone else, and I'd land a new customer. The feedback I got came down to a couple, simple things.
1. I did not charge for every single thing I did. If I saw something that needed a two minute fix, no problem. This was apparently very different from other techs my customers had seen. I'd also help with "stupid problems" over the phone, if I could.
2. I documented what I did in plain language. For a long job, that might mean a 2" binder of details, visio diagrams and polaroids. Originally, I made the binders to justify my billable hours. Later, I found out that one of my customers had employed a couple other service guys to come out and work after me, and both had made a big deal about the documentation, but neither of them left any particular record of what they had done. I got a customer BACK from that.
3. I was straightforward in my dealings. I'd set a price for a service and stick to it. This has come back to haunt me a few times but generally I get it back somehow. Most of my customers have dealt with guys who nickel and dime them on everything. I avoid doing that.
At this point I have 13 "regular" customers, companies that I deal with more often than once a year. Some of these have been customers for 10 years now, most for over six years. I'm not looking for more customers; if I didn't have my day job, I would, but as of now I'm busy enough.
Nowadays I do most work late nights and on weekends, or on my "extra" day off from my trainer job. Sometimes that means driving 45 minutes after I've gotten off work at 8PM. I do not mind doing this. I appreicate that my customers continue to have patience with me and my schedule.
Reasons I have lost customers, over time:
1. Someone's brother/son/cousin is also a computer guy, and he needs work. Sometimes I've gotten those customers back, later, sometimes not.
2. Personality conflict with someone in an office. It happens. Usually some busybody starts in with "There's no way he put in six billable hours..." and I know that I am going to have a problem. I've also been bitched at for wearing T-shirts that don't cover the scar on my back when I bend over (short version of a long story: I have a 3 inch long scar that goes from the crack of my ass, upwards. It looks like I have 3 extra inches of ass-crack), for not giving "proper respect" to various secretaries/bookkeepers and other office potentates, for making calls on office phones when my cellphone battery was dead and for suggesting that people in an office stop playing with my tools and/or talking to me about their home computers while I'm WORKING. In one case I had a customer remove me from their site because someone on-site was convinced I was a spy working for a competing company.
3. If a customer makes my life difficult, I drop them, usually by referring them to another tech and telling the party that I'm busy. If that doesn't work, I double my quoted work rate. There's a doctor's office I deal with sometimes that pays 4x my normal work rate and STILL calls me periodically.
4. I do in-home service at my discretion ONLY. Some people are offended by that.
