Name of your website?Small Business IT Consulting
Your name?
Steve Fatula
Your Location (city, etc)
McKInney
Please give us a short summary of your website?
5 Diamond IT Consulting specializes in small business IT consulting. In the small business markets, we have a ton of experience with shopping carts such as osCommerce, Zen Cart, and more.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
The small business marketplace is very much under-served. Larger companies charge way too much, and, they don't understand the market at all. We are a smaller business and have run quote a few stores ourselves.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
This is in fact our first web site wholely owned by us.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
The name is very descriptive, and indicates what we do. We specialize in small business, and iwe are in fact experts in various open source products.
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
We write in English, hopefully, explaining in clear terms what we offer. We also partner with companies who have a long friendly experience with smaller business to offer them value not found elsewhere.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
We hope to continue serving smaller businesses for the foreseeable future. It's a great market, and we enjoy the rewards of helping them succeed.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
Since this is a non e-commerce site, the investment is not great. It's just a way to find new customers. So, our success was guaranteed since we already had customers via other methods.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I am not sure we would change much.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Yes, since we don't do orders, there's not much to keep up with. We have other resources if demand outgrew our capacity for programming services.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
None really, it's what we do, so, we were very familiar with what was needed.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Getting customers to understand we truly are different than the larger businesses who pitch them more expensive solutions.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Word of mouth (well, internet word of mouth so to speak!)
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
It has not differed, exactly what we expected.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
We've been up around a year now, we will be up for many years to come.
What value add do you offer? What makes you different?
We have enormous experience in two markets, e-commerce and HP3000. In the HP3000 market, we have more than 20 years experience. In e-commerce, we have helped large companies succeed and grow. We have written a number of very complex applications to integrate Zen Cart and osCommerce. We do the more complex programming, as well as the simple. We typically bill less hours than our competition because of our experience. We also offer value by being able to recommend other services the client may need, such as hosting, phone service, etc.
What is your website address?
Small Business IT Consulting
