Landed a big contract with a company but need help.

Ok I've been in business for two years, but my business has stayed small. I've just landed this chance for a big contract with this Nationwide company. They want me to maintain all their offices in NC 6 total with future offices coming around.

I spend an average of 6 to 7 hours a month at this one office locally not including the time on the phone, and have been doing business with them for 2 years now. The regular rate I charge them is $75/hr. I handle all their networking, and computer related problems including technical phone calls at all hours of the day 7am-9pm, designing and implementing future upgrades on the computers and network, and solving anything network/software related to printers (I dont do printer hardware work), I setup new employees computers/software, and do all upgrades of everything.

The other offices are at least 2.5-4 hours away from our local office. Each office has 10-25 employees with more being hired often. The business deals in morgages and has offices in every state.


Can you guys please give me an idea of how much I should charge for a contract of this size and how you came about with the number? Also if you can help me with some key points in selling this contract so that the customer will love it more? Thanks guys!

Well, you need to take into consideration the following:

- Trip time
- Hourly rate per employee
- Employees hired/dismissed per month
- Setup fee (Getting "planted" in each office)
- ...and so on...

Thinking along these lines will help you figure out how much money you need. Also, you need to figure in a 10%-15% "safety" after you're all done.

Had I more time right now, I'd be able to give you a little more. I'm sorry that's all I can do at this moment, though.

What is the 10%-15% safety? I'm glad your helping me out, this thread has been here all day with no replies. Also should I include a termination fee if they ever for only god knows why, wanted to cancel the contract? If so, what would it be?

I'll be the only employee doing the work on this contract, and for the once a month visits I think I'll get a rental and try to get 2 offices a day done if not more. I plan on doing the whole scandisk/defrag/delete junk files/virus/spyware checks/protection and windows updates mainly for the monthly checkups on each computer in each office. I already stated the trip time above, and what do you mean as far as being planted in each office?

Thanks man!

Pardon me if none of the following makes sense. I just got done running for the first time in God knows how long...



Typically, in any sort of a project where you are required to develop a final product, a "safety fee" is figured into the final cost, just to ensure that should costs during the project exceed the initial estimate, there is no worry about getting the bills paid. Essentially, it's a sort of "margin-of-error" for you.



I would. They're binding your time and you're obligated to them, thus, you're likely to turn other work away and lose money. If they bail out of the contract after you've turned away 6 other jobs, you'll be out that much money. I would keep it balanced, though, and write it such that regardless of who terminates the contract early, the fee has to be paid by the terminating party. Also, be sure to document beforehand what conditions constitute grounds for early termination. I've been burned by that before, and if you search this forum for "Contract Termination", you'll find my story.



Plans can change and you'll likely be doing much more than that. If you only want to do basic routine maintenance, be sure that it is documented.



It's highly unlikely that each office is going to be identical, and you'll want to familiarize yourself with each. Thus, "getting planted" (or "getting situated/familiarized").

I pretty much agree with Skudd, but I like to let the client determine how much you get paid. That way you can be totally transparent (which the client will like) and still get paid. I would create a sort of "menu" for them:

$60/hr on-site maintenance
$40/hr travel
$90/hr off-peak time (work done outside of the 7am-8pm window)

It doesn't seem as though you'll be buying any supplies with your own money, so you may not need the safety window of adding 10-15% to your estimates, but you might want to anyway, or put something about "extra expenses to be verified by management", so you can simply notify them that you're going to buy them, and they're responsible for vetoing anything they don't want.

In addition to that, describe what you plan to do in each office, and give time estimates in terms of office complexity. If they have 10 Windows XP computers with a central fileserver, you can estimate a very short "get planted, get done" time. If they have 10 WinXP, 35 Win98, 8 Mac OSX, and 6 servers running various versions of XServe and Linux, you'll need substantially more time.

I also agree that your job description should be included specifically in the contract. "Basic maintenance" for you might mean "virus scan, defrag", but for them it might mean "database re-structuring, re-wire the office for 100BaseT, and water the plants". I had a job once that was described as "basic maintenance" and I ended up running coax cable under a city street for weeks to connect two offices across from each other.

The early termination fee is a good thing, but be careful that they can't weasel out of the contract by claiming that you were delinquent, did something wrong, or didn't follow your own contract. If you say you're going to defrag, do it always, even if it's unnecessary. If they can go into the hard drive properties and prove that you charged them for December but haven't defragged since September, they can cancel the contract without paying the termination fee.

Good luck to you...and think about finding a halfway competent person in each of the target cities that can do the work for you, so you can just swing by and supervise every now and then. If it's too far of a drive or too much trouble, increase your price a little and form your own little consulting company. There are rencet college grads that would pee themselves at the thought of $40/hr a couple days a month, and you can still keep half with minimal effort.

Trusting others is usually not the best idea however, do it yourself if you can.

-Dan

You could always be sneaky and look around at other local tech companies and find out what they would charge for a similar service.

If they dont have a pricing plan somewhere obvious then just call them up and ask questions about pricing as if you were going to hire them.

this would give you an idea of the local rates etc.

but if you would rather not do that then as the others said.

be VERY VERY specific, just because the people in the local office are cool doesnt mean anything about the others.

make a list of exactly what services you will provide either grouped or individually..whatever..and price them each service.. when your explaining it imagine your explaining the pricing scheme to 4 year olds... (respect for the clients/users? me? of course!! )

if this is your first time ever signing a large scale contract you might want to involve a lawyer of some kind to advice you on it maybe just to read the proposed contract over etc.

and when I say you might want to i mean if you dont you stand a pretty good chance of getting screwed in one of the ways Dan is talking about.