Market Research

Post by **Cakedaddy** » Mon Mar 22, 2010 1:35 pm

When you or your company needs to contract IT help for services that include, but are not limited to:

data/voice cabling
Hardware support
Network switch/router support
Website dev
Disaster recovery
etc

Where do you look? How do you find perspective contractors. I know most of you do this yourselves, or have in house IT staff, etc. But when you HAVE needed outside help, how/where did you get it?

Please be more specific than "Googled it". If you did, what site did you end up on? The actual contractor's site, a referal site, yellow page/locals site? etc.

Post by **TPRJones** » Mon Mar 22, 2010 2:39 pm

I work for government, so we put an ad in the paper and wait for bidders to come to us. So I'm no help.

Post by **Cakedaddy** » Mon Mar 22, 2010 2:43 pm

Actually, what paper and what do you look for in a bid? Do all governments do that? I'm not apposed to getting some of my money back from the government.

Post by **TPRJones** » Mon Mar 22, 2010 7:13 pm

I think we just do a quarter-page block ad in the Houston Chronicle, that being the largest circulation in the area. Different local and state governments do different things, but I think this is still the most widely used approach. If you are curious about governmental contracts in your area, I'd suggest calling each level (city, county, school boards, universities, and state) and ask for their Purchasing departments. Then ask if they have a public policy available for how they publish bid requests, and they should be able to hook you up into whatever method they use.

It's pretty common for most governments to require public bids for anything over around $5000 (although that varies by state). I wouldn't expect to see many small jobs bid out this way; it will be mostly big jobs or setting up a long-term contract for service as needed at preset prices.