There are many ways to determine whether or not you should get involved in subcontracting relationships.
Your first order of business will be deciding what in-house techs can manage by themselves and how you can supplement this with the right additional employees or subcontracting partners. If you are a small consulting firm, you will not be able to hire someone with five different certifications and pay huge salaries. This is the time to think about subcontracting.
Deciding What to Do with Subcontracting Relationships
If you think you can afford an expensive person with a lot of certifications and keep this person busy, you will still have a hard time getting the person excited about fixing jammed laser printers, hooking up PDAs to computers or reinstalling simple software. This type of work is a waste of subcontracting time and an ego destroyer for someone with senior qualifications, so you probably want to try developing subcontracting relationships for work that is more specialized.
Beginning computer consultants should have good junior technicians on staff already that can work with hardware troubleshooting and hooking up PCs to LANs. Try subcontracting work installing servers and installing and troubleshooting SQL Server and Exchange Server and firewalls.
The Bottom Line About Subcontracting
As you start to perform tasks that fall into the IT services realm, you will encounter more situations in which clients are looking for specialty work beyond what you do. Developing subcontracting relationships with non-competing firms are an excellent way to develop trusting subcontracting relationships.
Blogged By: Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit
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