How much do I charge my friend/small business for my IT services?

[Christopher Rutter]

Hello everyone, 

1st time post, but I've been lurking around for a few months now, and I
finally have a question.

 

Quick Background: 

I've been building/repairing/upgrading computers since '92, and have
been a M$ windows users since then, I am fairly new to Linux (2007) and
I primarily use Ubuntu (and variants - i.e. Xubuntu).  I use Ubuntu on
all of my computers now but I still virtualize XP using VirtualBox for
programs that can't run on Ubuntu, mainly for Outlook, because I haven't
found a decent alternative for linux that supports Exchange smoothly
(Evolution is slow and crashes on me a lot, probably due to my massive
1gb Exchange account), I use a hosted exchange account because I have a
blackberry (wireless sync FTW).

 

On to the question:

I am a partner in a small business with a long time (15yrs) friend of
mine.  This business was formed in mid 2007, and I have a 30% interest
in the company (he owns 70%) for funds I lent him to start the business
up. We currently have 10 employees, ever since the business started I've
been handling the IT dept (if you will) for the company gratis, and I
started off just working in my spare time and has now grown to a part
time/full time gig for me (I forgot to mention the business is open
24/7, so I do get emergency calls at all hours of the day including
nights/weekends, but most of my work is done during normal business
hours M-F).  The business is located in Atlanta, GA and I make trips
down 5-6 times a year for quarterly meetings and emergency situations,
but a majority of my work is done remotely from my home office in
Boston.  Now that the business has grown enough it is time for me to
start charging for my services.  My business partner agrees that I
should be compensated for my time, but I don't know what is fair
compensation, and it is tough to come up with a figure when my
friendship with my business partner is involved, so I am looking to this
community to get some unbiased feedback on what I should be charging?

 

Office Network:

1 WRT54GL Router running Tomato Firmware

1 DVR running 9 cameras throughout the office that is port forwarded for
external access via IP (I didn't set this up, we outsourced the camera
setup/install)

1 Networked Panasonic Copy/Print/Fax machine (leased)

1 Digital Camera with eye-fi card to upload photos to Server and
Gallery2

4 WinXP clients

1 Ubuntu Server (running Desktop version of Ubuntu 8.10)

 

Company Website:

Nothing fancy, but various tweaks need to be made here and there

 

Inter-Office Website:

Timeclock - using OpenSource phpTimeClock (MySQL+PHP)

Forms - I've converted all of our inter-office forms to Adobe PDF
versions will fill able fields so our staff can fill them in online and
print them.

Gallery - We use OpenSource Gallery2 for photos of our clients for
backup and easy searching (photos are automatically uploaded via eye-fi
card)

 

Job Description:

In addition to normal client computer M$ XP trouble shooting and
maintenance (anti-virus/anti-spyware/etc), I manage the Company website
and Inter-Office website, and update the forms as needed.  The Ubuntu
Server is being used to samba share the proprietary software for the
company which keeps track of our clients and accounting, as well as
keeping backups of our Gallery Photos and keeping the timeclock up and
running w/ various tweaks here and there.  These tasks currently take up
approx 4-5 hrs a week of my time.

 

Possible Future Projects:

I have had some idea's for future projects for the business but I
haven't really pursued them because there isn't any incentive for me to
devote time to them, and here are a few...

-Office Expansion - We plan on expanding and adding a new location soon,
and that will require me to setup new client computers, and a new server
that will connect to the main office's computer via OpenVPN 

-Thin Client for customers - I would like to setup at least one slim
client to allow our customers to enter in their own data which will free
up time for staff and make the process a lot smoother

-Convert Telephones from AT&T to IP PBX (Asterisk)

-Build backend DB collection (MySQL+PHP) and reporting of forms - This
will allow us to keep track of what forms are being printed from the
inter-office website and report statistics on data entered

-Perl webscraping/datamining another website's DB (Public Records) for
market research and lead generation

-Digitize Office Documents/Records - A lot of the records in our office
are kept in filing cabinets and every 3mths or so we have to buy a new
one, and by law we are required to keep the records on file for 3 years,
I would like to digitize all of the records and future records so that
we can reduce the amount of wasted paper and free up some storage space

 

These future projects will take up a considerable amount of my time, and
some of them will require me to fly down to do the initial setup.  So I
don't know if I should charge a flat salary, hourly rate, or on a per
project+maintanance basis. 

 

The last time I officially worked in the computer industry was when I
did an internship at the age of 15-16 where I was
building/repairing/upgrading computers at my local mom+pop computer
store, I then later did an internship at DutyFree Miami International
Airport Headquarters where I helped network the warehouse when there was
an NT server and multiple Windows 95 machines and built M$ Visual
Basic/Access DB applications.  So needless to say it's been awhile and I
don't know what the going rate is for my services, so any/all feedback
would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

-Chris