How to grow my business?

D

David_Dublin

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I have a small business in the IT sector. We are a Services company, no stock or selling hardware etc. We have a small but loyal Customer base. Most of the work we do is billable hours and fixed price projects for medium sized companies, we build software and in most cases are their "outsourced" IT provider. Most of the clients we have are long term ones that we have got through word of mouth.

I need to grow the business, it needs to up its turnover so that we can pay the staff more and make us more resilient to loss of Customers.

So I am looking for suggestions on how to do it. Initially I am thinking of joining a few networking/business leader groups. If anyone has any suggestions on which ones, or alternative/additional ways to grow a business I'd love to hear from you. I am basically looking to bring in more Customers. We are in business 20years and have an very good reputation, with excellent Customer references. Obviously I have my own ideas on how to proceed but I would very much welcome any input from people with who have tackled this challenge, or who have expertise in this area.

Thanks!
 
Do you operate in one particular sector of the market?
Are all your clients, for instance engineering or financial companies? If so why not branch out to completely new markets.
If you are the IT provider of choice for engineering companies then look at transport & logistics companies, retail companies etc. any company that may be too small to have an in-house IT dept. or if they do have an in-house IT dept, maybe you can augment it with personnel on a contract basis?

If you don't already do so then look at the option of using resources from a low cost location like India

Is there an option to provide your existing clients with a 'managed service' type of product, whereby your company provides all IT requirements for a fixed annual fee, rather than fixed fee projects which inherently contain an overhead in pricing, proposal etc.

Look at providing your existing clients with new services - training etc.

Just a few random thoughts off the top of my head....
 
As JMR stated you don't state in what field of IT software services you are specializing. As you already know software development is an expensive but yet competitive business. You could branch into new fields depending on your skills base. I have a couple of ideas but without information of your specialty areas it's hard to give solid advice.
 
Thanks for the replies. Our core business is bespoke software development. Clients are in a number of industry sectors. I don't really envisage us getting into PC support or full manages services, we'd need to completely change our focus to do this, bring in partners etc. We currently offer hosting and support for systems that we build ourselves, which is about as far as I would be comfortable in going.
 
grow your business

Hi David
Have you tried the public sector for work - you could get on the e-tenders email list for business opportunities - there is quite an amount of business in the IT sector going to tender.
 
union said:
Hi David
Have you tried the public sector for work - you could get on the e-tenders email list for business opportunities - there is quite an amount of business in the IT sector going to tender.
Click to expand...

Thanks, good idea!
 
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