IT Specialist: Better Than a Generalist

by: Joshua Feinberg

Now how do you become an IT specialist, when to provide virtual IT you need to be a generalist? As an IT specialist, you will still need to provide a lot of different services. You may be:

· network design

· helping clients with procurement

· managing relations

· dealing with the phone companies, the Web hosts and the Internet access ISPs

· deciding what to buy and inspecting it when it comes in

· doing the configuration, testing, integration, customization, training, and troubleshooting.

You're doing everything. So yes, that is being a generalist. But there's nothing that says that you want to be a generalist for everyone under the sun. As an IT specialist, you will find your marketing efforts easier.

Be Choosy With Your Clients

You should be all things, to some of the people by providing the soup-to-nuts complete solution. You provide true virtual IT, one-stop shopping… the buck stops here. You take full accountability of everything that your clients need, but limit the scope of the kind of clients that you go after.

Take Real Estate, for Example

If you're specializing in real estate, you've probably done a lot of work with commercial real estate firms and you're one of the top IT consulting firms in this niche. You can have the testimonials and references to show that you have indeed done work for these firms. So you're coming across as an industry IT specialist.

Specializing Doesn't Require Extensive Experience

Finding a niche could be as easy as having one or two clients that you've been working with for a year or two and you happen to have gotten involved in migrating an older DOS industry application to a 32-bit, or to a Web-based application. Over an extended period of time, you get to know the line of business applications. Often, that's a big differentiator between you and anyone else that they could conceivably call.

The Bottom Line on Being an IT Specialist

So the point: it doesn't take that much industry experience to position yourself as an IT specialist within that industry. But that specialization will make an enormous difference in your marketing results.