Time is money. If you're not careful in your computer consulting business, you'll waste both. With a little discipline and structure, you can maximize the return on your time.

Journal Your Time

One way to determine your computer consulting time is by journaling. Write down everything you do for a couple of weeks to determine what you do with your time, where the time wasters are, and what you could do to improve your time management. Journaling is a good way to evaluate.

Keep an Excel spreadsheet or a calendar and figure out where all the time goes in a given week. Determine if you have enough time to do the business development items for the larger accounts.

Evaluate Your Time

For most professionals in the computer consulting business, time's really at a premium. Sometimes you're going to really need to make difficult decisions on where you can afford to spend a marginal five or ten hours a week.

Structure Time to Allow More Training

Training is expensive, but what most computer consulting firms tend to do is more time intensive than cash intensive. Most of these computer consulting firms aren't the ones that are sending people out for five-day, $2,500 Exchange Server course.

Instead, get the action pack subscription and buy enough resale copies. Load it up on spare machines in the office, and make sure that every time your computer consulting techs have down time, they're going through the tutorials. During down time they should be going through the read-me files, reading through the resource kits, and doing CBT training.

Give Your Computer Consulting Staff A Plan

If you're billing out your computer consulting techs at 65 or 70 percent capacity and they have six to eight hours a week where they're either sitting on the bench or doing some work or tending to the store, structure it so they have a plan of attack.

This is where you say, "This month I want you to concentrate all of your down time on learning how to do Microsoft Small Business Server 2003" or "This month I want you to get stronger on troubleshooting Exchange Server."

The Bottom Line about Computer Consulting

Track where your time is being sent and make sure your technical staff is spending a certain amount of time every week keeping their skills sharp. Additionally, you need to be identifying skills gaps you need to grow to the next level.

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