PC Repair Shop Business - Worth doing or not?

DCFC79

Are there other firms offering same services you would like to offer ?
have you thought about pricing and worked out if you make a living by some example costings

Lil306

I'd suggest going mobile if you ask me do the business part time

Buy a van, use it for main job + it business, covers both purposes and go solo when you have an established client base

It's what I'm going to do

spannerzone

I used to do IT support and made a living of sorts, I had a good affulent customer base. Then we started seeing all the 'no fix - no fix', 'no call out charge', '£10 an hour charges' and I gave up!

As already said, everyone is an IT expert these days and so many idiots out there undercutting each other. You can't make a decent living doing WIndows reinstalls for £25 or free callout/ no fix/no fee nonsense unless you're doing it as a hobby or not paying taxes, insurance, rent etc

If I were to go back to doing IT support on my own I'd only cater for rich elderly silver surfers who are prepared to pay for a smartly dressed, well spoken and capable engineer to sort out their issues. They often are happy to pay to sort it all out for them and then keep then running when things go wrong. If they live in a respectable high end retirement complex then you'll get all their friends calling you as well.

I mostly catered for the above type of client and they do appreciate a quality service unlike many younger folk who either fix it themselves (by googling the answer etc) or buy a new one.

I'm in the South East so maybe things are different elsewhere, but ultimately I found I still couldn't make really good living unless I worked every hour possible!

GunJack

gotta agree with rob above, keep it as part/spare time as a "paid hobby" if you like. Leaflet drops are time-consuming and costly, and often you may get one or two calls from every 250-300 leaflets If you go back 15 yrs when there was not as much general knowledge out there and hardware was comparatively very expensive, people were more likely to get it fixed. These days they are more likely to throw it away and buy a new machine.

The upside of this though, is that (and I'm sure hammyman will appreciate this ) I can pick up some decent lappys on ebay for not-a-lot of dosh, sort them out (often for not-a-lot) and sell them on at a reasonable profit

spanner makes a good point about affluent customer base too. If you live in a comparatively less-well-off area, then the costs of repair compared to buying new make the repair option less attractive to perspective clients. Let's face it, £50-ish for a power jack repair on a 2-y-o or older laptop seems expensive when they can get a new one with a year's guarantee for £250-£270-ish.....

eyeinthesky

You will have a lot of work to make a name for yourself as a genuine knowledgeable repairer. There are far too many cowboys out there who charge for non-existent problems, install pirated software, and charge for utilities that are free to download.

sho_me_da_money

eyeinthesky wrote: »

You will have a lot of work to make a name for yourself as a genuine knowledgeable repairer. There are far too many cowboys out there who charge for non-existent problems, install pirated software, and charge for utilities that are free to download.

You are right however, the way I see it is that the customer is paying me for my knowledge therefore if I utilise a free online tool that will remedy the problem, I too will put a price on it.

To be competitive I have to try on the "No-Fix, No-Fee" crap and do a free diagnostic for customers within a certain radius. I may have to be clever with that though....

What about legalities - what do I need to look into to get this started? What about guarantee? - I do not want customers calling me back a month later telling me his PC has gone to pot again and expects a freebie.

Lil306

sho_me_da_money wrote: »

You are right however, the way I see it is that the customer is paying me for my knowledge therefore if I utilise a free online tool that will remedy the problem, I too will put a price on it.

To be competitive I have to try on the "No-Fix, No-Fee" crap and do a free diagnostic for customers within a certain radius. I may have to be clever with that though....

What about legalities - what do I need to look into to get this started? What about guarantee? - I do not want customers calling me back a month later telling me his PC has gone to pot again and expects a freebie.

Cover your !!!, they sign a form there and then to say it's fixed

BTW, I really think this topic is for the small business section of this forum. You'll get better advice if you ask me

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/forumdisplay.php?f=27

Mayflower10cat

You've had some excellent advice here from others. Bunshopbandit sums up a very nice niche market. Only replying as I'm just the sort of person who'd benefit from what s/he does, as we live in a rural area with dreadful broadband.

Not long after relocating we need to have a new graphics card fitted into our old desktop. After much calling around to various shops which required me take the heavy tower into them, which they'd keep for several days, I called a mobile repairman who originally said he could get the card and install it in situ, which would have been perfect. Annoyingly when he turned up he'd got the wrong card and he took the tower home and fixed it there. But at least he dropped it off back to us faster than the local shops had estimated. More recently we needed some technical help and I contacted someone with an Ad in our parish magazine. He offered a mobile repair/software support service. He was excellent, just what we needed. Cheerful, polite, trustworthy and really helpful - I've recommended him so many times locally. We were chatting as he was working and, as I also advertise in the same magazine, I was asking him about how busy he was and how much work he got through his advert. He said that most of his customers are well over 60, he gets most of his work from word of mouth recommendations and the the little ad in the parish mag had really highlighted how many older people use laptops/t'internet/do internet shopping etc perhaps because they don't drive anymore or are housebound, and they really welcome a mobile service such as his. He was also on a retainer to some local schools. What I really appreciated was, he charged a flat rate of £30 an hour and the few things we needed him to do took less than half an hour - rather than taking the money and waving goodbye, he said, 'No, you've paid me for an hour, anything else you'd like some help with?' which was another bit of great customer service. He spotted the newly unpacked wireless printer I'd been (nervously) about to install and said - 'd'you want me to do that for you?' And he did. And I was very glad as it was a bit more involved than the instructions implied! He also did a quick tidy-up of the laptop registry and off he went, just on the hour.

If you could offer service similar to that, I think you'd be busy!

spannerzone

sho_me_da_money wrote: »

You are right however, the way I see it is that the customer is paying me for my knowledge therefore if I utilise a free online tool that will remedy the problem, I too will put a price on it.

To be competitive I have to try on the "No-Fix, No-Fee" crap and do a free diagnostic for customers within a certain radius. I may have to be clever with that though....

What about legalities - what do I need to look into to get this started? What about guarantee? - I do not want customers calling me back a month later telling me his PC has gone to pot again and expects a freebie.

The problem you may well get if you are targetting the 'no fix/no fee' type of customer (cheapskates) is that you're right to be worried about warranties.... if you do software repairs like remove viruses /update or apply fixes then there's every chance another software issue will crop up again and they won't want to pay again. With Windows that means you'll be doing free warranty repairs forever if you're not careful!

You have to clearly state that software repair warranties are for the same fault again and not other unrelated issues (a grey area for sure) but at least have it in writing on their receipt.

Hardware issue is a bit simpler, if the same thing fails within say 3 months then it's fair to expect it to be replaced/repaired at no charge assuming it's a genuine fault.

The only issues I really had was and I hate to say this as it'll upset some people, but teenagers usually caused most problems for their parents PC. They'd download anything and click on everything and screw up the PC. Then mum/dad uses the PC and it's slow and unusuable so they think they broke it and call me out to sort. - When I'd identify the issue (usually pointing to when their child was doing something) they'd be sure it wasn't the child as they were very knowledgeable about PC's.... I'd ask why they called me to fix rather than get their kid to do it and they didn't really know why!

Anyhow, after discretely explaining what had happened " oh he must have accidentally downloaded that cracked software version" I think most parents understood that often their kids aren't as super PC clever as thought but rather have no fear of clicking anything until it works or breaks. Mum/dad then pay to sort it.

Apologies for all the teenagers out there that are PC literate, I know you exists but I did earn money out of some of their antics!



Anyway, again I'd really really suggest you do not aim for competing with the no fix no fee and no call out brigade... those customers just don't want to generally pay much and you might think people will pay for a good service (which some will) but not if you aim for the wrong sort of customer to start with. I know it sounds snobbish but you really should only aim for middle income and affulent retired folk. The other bonus with retired folk is that they don't expect saturday/sunday/evening call outs unlike those working all the hours to pay their bills.

Hammyman

sho_me_da_money wrote: »

Handbagman! (sorry beyond a joke now).

What is world + dog?

LOL. Err, world+dog means "everyone". Can't believe you've never heard the phrase "the world and his dog is doing it".

Perhaps you can offer advice on location, target market based on your own customer base, additional services people want to explore.

You need a location that lots of people pass. Ideally if its also situated near traffic lights so they see it whilst they're aimlessly looking around picking their noses waiting for the lights to change. Some car parking nearby is nice.

Advertising: A fairly reasonable sized one in the local weekly is OK. When you open up, contact the local rag and get them to do a feature on you - they're always looking for something to put in the paper and you usually get a double page spread. FISH AND CHIP SHOPS AND TAKEAWAYS. These are great as you've got an audience who is captive for the 5-30 minutes they're waiting for their food. They pretty much all have a noticeboard or a bit of wall where people put up business cards or leaflets. Stick yours in a few of these outlets.