PC Repair Business - Hints and tips

motorguy

diable wrote: »

Its good to target small businesses that work from home, need help setting up equipment and sorting out safe storage of data and networking.

If you invoice them it usually is claimed as an expense anyway and not bad to earn an extra £25ph doing it.

The issue i had with small business support is that they very often wont sign up to any sort of support contract, therefore you only get called when their pc / printer / small network fails and they are trying to send out invoices / contracts / payments so all of a sudden your handy £25 an hour becomes high pressure hassle.

I had two examples of this from the one company

(a) 1600 friday afternoon "our email system isnt working and we need to invoice all our customers before five oclock", me - "ok has this just started happening?" - "no its been happening since tuesday but we didnt bother ringing you as it wasnt important then"

(b) Saturday afternoon - PC not working on factory floor for job scheduling, me standing there with the director "if you cant get this working today, then we will have to shut the factory down on monday until it gets sorted"

... all that hassle / responsibility / pressure for £25 and hour

mr-mr_2

Thinking of setting up an IT consultancy for small - medium enterprises. Would appreciate views. Thanks.

paulwf

mr-mr wrote: »

Thinking of setting up an IT consultancy for small - medium enterprises. Would appreciate views. Thanks.

What do you mean by IT consultancy? It's a very vague term so very difficult to give advice on that.

motorguy

mr-mr wrote: »

Thinking of setting up an IT consultancy for small - medium enterprises. Would appreciate views. Thanks.

As a 'consultant', what would you charge them for?

Pinkypants

pgilc1 wrote: »

(a) 1600 friday afternoon "our email system isnt working and we need to invoice all our customers before five oclock", me - "ok has this just started happening?" - "no its been happening since tuesday but we didnt bother ringing you as it wasnt important then"

(
... all that hassle / responsibility / pressure for £25 and hour

Then you charge them a heavy call out/emerency fee say £50 plus your £25 an hour, that will make them think twice.

motorguy

Pinkypants wrote: »

Then you charge them a heavy call out/emerency fee say £50 plus your £25 an hour, that will make them think twice.

Theres always ways round these things in hindsight. Just seemed more hassle than it was worth.

Meeko

Lmao, This thread has had me in stiches... simply because alot of it is so close to home and as I work in IT Support. Its absolutley shocking that some people have the audacity to try pin stuff on you... I remember not that long ago at work a few keys were not working on someones keyboard, so I replaced it then 2 days later I got a call from them saying their PC was running slow and they was basically trying to pin it on me lol... Its unbelievable!!

I dont see how you can make money from personal home computers, most people are better off paying £6-£8 with PC world... that covers you for everything and if they can't fix it they give you a new PC / Laptop.

motorguy

Meeko wrote: »

Lmao, This thread has had me in stiches... simply because alot of it is so close to home and as I work in IT Support. Its absolutley shocking that some people have the audacity to try pin stuff on you... I remember not that long ago at work a few keys were not working on someones keyboard, so I replaced it then 2 days later I got a call from them saying their PC was running slow and they was basically trying to pin it on me lol... Its unbelievable!!

I dont see how you can make money from personal home computers, most people are better off paying £6-£8 with PC world... that covers you for everything and if they can't fix it they give you a new PC / Laptop.

I tried selling them from a small retail unit too. It was shocking the way people behaved. They wanted us to price match some one off deal Tescos would run even when tescos had no stock and their machine was a much lower spec, they expected 24x7 lifetime support, they expected AV for 'free' - even though they'd cheerfully pay PC World £40 for it, they expected discount on our prices even though they happily paid the sticker price in PC World. I had a guy i sold a £40 printer to 4 years ago who rang me several months ago saying it wasnt working and what was i going to do about it!!

Meeko

pgilc1 wrote: »

I tried selling them from a small retail unit too. It was shocking the way people behaved. They wanted us to price match some one off deal Tescos would run even when tescos had no stock and their machine was a much lower spec, they expected 24x7 lifetime support, they expected AV for 'free' - even though they'd cheerfully pay PC World £40 for it, they expected discount on our prices even though they happily paid the sticker price in PC World. I had a guy i sold a £40 printer to 4 years ago who rang me several months ago saying it wasnt working and what was i going to do about it!!

lol, I remember before I got into IT support I had my friend and his dad build me a PC.... and on the opposite end of the spectrum I done exactly what I hate people doing to me now... I always used to badger him about different issues and get him to come out and have a look at it lol. Me and my friend still joke about it now as this was like 7 years ago and I've passed the PC down to my sister and its still ticking away. I still joke to him about asking his dad for a refund for the PC because its running slow after 7 years lol.

easyhost

skint999 wrote: »

just a thought for your business income, what if you were to work closely with small business' and offer to maintain their network for a monthly maintanence fee, the fee would be determined on the size of their network, estimated callouts based on roughly how many times your client has needed a techie in the past 3 months, and how often you are needed to update/upgrade software for your client, this could be reviewed after 3 months or so. this way you will have a regular income, and a good cash flow to start your business, get a few local business on board and you can quit your current day job :-)

this is a good point, also if their is a local business forum in your area, join it as these often have networking events and are a great source of income. i am a webhost, which i have done for the last 11 yrs, 3 yrs ago a business forum was set up in my area, so i joined and got some great contacts and clients, i have one business client who joined as a hosting client and at one network even were were chatting and he told me he was haveing a few problems with his computer being slow and keep crashing, so i told him i would call round and have a quick look (no charge) as he was hosting with me, i noticed he upgraded to vista but did not upgrade his memory, so i told him he needed to increase the memory, i had a spare 2GB one, so fitted this and this speeded it up but still crashing problems, which i pinpointed to the HDD, which needed replacing, so i did this, and now he pays me and extra £100 to look after his computer system