Local IT Support Blueprint

Be the tech person small offices call first.

This course is for someone who is already the person friends, family, and coworkers call when the printer stops talking to the laptop — and who wants to charge for it properly. Local IT support means on-site and remote tech help for small businesses and households: troubleshooting, new-machine setup and data migration, Wi-Fi and networking, backup that actually restores, basic security hygiene, and recurring managed-support retainers for offices too small to hire anyone. The startup budget is $1,100 required and about $2,600 typical, assuming you already own a reliable laptop. Every money example in the course uses one explicitly stated base case, because these figures are not inherited from the Discover profile for this trade: $95 an hour for labor, $325 a month for a small-office retainer that includes up to three support hours, and — this is the part most courses skip — a capacity model that assumes roughly 0.8 unpaid hours for every hour you actually bill, because drive time, quoting, ordering parts, waiting for updates to install, and writing job notes are all real work nobody pays you for. Run through that model, an established solo month looks like 50 billable per-visit hours plus four retainers: $6,050 in revenue, $635 in costs, about $5,415 a month before tax. A ramping part-time month looks like $1,680 before tax. Call the working range roughly $1,700 to $5,400 a month before tax under those assumptions — a planning range, not a promise, and no income is guaranteed. The course is equally blunt about the two things that end IT businesses: losing a client's data during a migration, and taking responsibility for other people's credentials without the habits to hold them safely.

This blueprint is a draft under review — numbers and lessons may change before publication. All figures are planning estimates, not measurements, and no income is guaranteed. A Discover profile now exists for this business; the base case is also stated explicitly and flagged for verification: $95 an hour for labor, a $325 a month small-office retainer that includes up to three support hours, roughly 0.8 unpaid hours (drive time, quoting, parts sourcing, admin, marketing) for every delivery hour, about $160 a month in variable costs, about $475 a month in fixed costs, and $1,100 to $2,600 in startup spending assuming you already own a reliable laptop. Under those assumptions an established solo month of 112 working hours produces 62 delivery hours — 12 consumed by four retainers and 50 billed at $95 — for $6,050 in revenue and about $5,415 a month before tax, while a ramping part-time month lands around $1,680 before tax. The working range quoted throughout is roughly $1,700 to $5,400 a month before tax; the hard ceiling at a genuine 40-hour week is about 88 delivery hours a month, which is why the course teaches retainers rather than more hours. All revenue and profit figures are before tax and before anything you pay yourself. Parts, hardware, and per-seat software licenses are assumed to be billed to the client at cost and itemized separately, so they do not appear in the profit model. Legal, tax, insurance, and security content — including errors and omissions and cyber liability cover, HIPAA and PCI DSS applicability, and reporting duties for illegal content discovered on a client device — is education only, is location- and carrier-dependent, and is not legal, tax, or professional advice; verify requirements with your state and city, the IRS, a licensed insurance agent, and an attorney. Nothing in this course teaches you to promise a security or compliance outcome, and no security outcome can be guaranteed.