Greetings,
I, along with two partners, are tentatively planning to start a technical consulting company. We are all three experienced consultants and two of us are well credentialed in the community. We work with Microsoft products, SharePoint in particular and are also trained and skilled in in a product called FAST ESP, acquired by Microsoft about a year ago. This is an unusual mix of skills and should give us a solid year or more of being far from commodity programmers.
As I say, we are experienced in the technology as well as good consulting basis period. In other words, we're not straight-forward techies, although we are far more comfortable on the technical side than, say, the sales side (we do have a plan to solve that problem). As for community credentials, two of us are Microsoft MVP's. That may not be well understood outside of the Microsoft online world, but it carries some weight.
We're looking to launch the business formally in 04/2009. We won't launch until we have some worked lined up. We're estimating that our expenses will be in the area of $45k per month (which includes salary) and that we should build up an A/R of $180k in the first 90 days. We have enough capital to start and launch the business and get through the first month (probably) but it's going to be a very tough 2nd and 3rd month while we wait for checks to come in the mail if we don't have a credit line, or other financial backing, to smooth things out.
We recognize that even if the A/R is $250k in 90 days, we'll still be cash poor to begin.
We each have individual resources we can draw upon to get us through the initial hump. However, we'd much rather get a line of credit to help with the initial cash flow problem. Is that at all realistic? If not, what other avenues should we consider?
I've just started to follow these forums today and spent an hour or so scanning through them. Great stuff!
TIA.
I, along with two partners, are tentatively planning to start a technical consulting company. We are all three experienced consultants and two of us are well credentialed in the community. We work with Microsoft products, SharePoint in particular and are also trained and skilled in in a product called FAST ESP, acquired by Microsoft about a year ago. This is an unusual mix of skills and should give us a solid year or more of being far from commodity programmers.
As I say, we are experienced in the technology as well as good consulting basis period. In other words, we're not straight-forward techies, although we are far more comfortable on the technical side than, say, the sales side (we do have a plan to solve that problem). As for community credentials, two of us are Microsoft MVP's. That may not be well understood outside of the Microsoft online world, but it carries some weight.
We're looking to launch the business formally in 04/2009. We won't launch until we have some worked lined up. We're estimating that our expenses will be in the area of $45k per month (which includes salary) and that we should build up an A/R of $180k in the first 90 days. We have enough capital to start and launch the business and get through the first month (probably) but it's going to be a very tough 2nd and 3rd month while we wait for checks to come in the mail if we don't have a credit line, or other financial backing, to smooth things out.
We recognize that even if the A/R is $250k in 90 days, we'll still be cash poor to begin.
We each have individual resources we can draw upon to get us through the initial hump. However, we'd much rather get a line of credit to help with the initial cash flow problem. Is that at all realistic? If not, what other avenues should we consider?
I've just started to follow these forums today and spent an hour or so scanning through them. Great stuff!
TIA.
