There's nothing more stressful for IT consultants than getting the dreaded emergency call from a client whose office is "crippled" because of a major systems outage.

If you've been an IT consultant a while you know the harsh realities of small business technology adoption. Your clients demand perfection, but don't have much of a technology budget to invest in fault-tolerance.

Clients Should Understand the Costs of Downtime

As their IT consultant, it's crucial to get your clients to understand the critical importance of protecting against unplanned downtime. The following is a two-pronged approach:

1) Help your clients figure out their cost of downtime.

2) Encourage your clients to invest accordingly in spare PC hardware.

The Cost of Downtime

If your clients have more than a handful of PCs, in time they'll develop a service history and learn what kinds of hardware items break fairly regularly.

They'll also learn from you, their IT consultant, how to convince their PC vendor to supply replacement parts under warranty coverage, as well as how to estimate the time for getting the replacement part to their office and installed into the appropriate PC.

Valuing System Downtime

For a quick, back-of-the-napkin calculation of what system downtime might be costing your clients, consider that the hourly cost of system downtime equals:

Projected annual revenue / (Business days per year x Hours in a business day)

Use This Tool on Your Website

If you're a little handy with JavaScript, this calculator could be a really nifty marketing tool to place on the home page of your IT consultant website. Just be sure to give credit where credit's due and link back to our end user site, http://www.SmallBizTechTalk.com.

After all is said and done, a major cost to consider is employee downtime, as well as time spent by your clients' internal gurus chasing down the warranty replacement part, perhaps during an inopportune time.

Copyright MMI-MMVI, Computer Consultants Secrets. All Worldwide Rights Reserved. {Attention Publishers: Live hyperlink in author resource box required for copyright compliance}