I am thinking of starting a small part time enterprise where I offer to clean spyware/viruses off people PCs and maybe help set up new software, peripherals etc. I am looking for some general advice from people who may have experience doing this or of running a small part time business.
I want to try and earn a little extra income and that seems like a good way to do it as I have a lot of experience dealing with things like this from my job.
One of the ladies I work with has a husband who does something very similar and I am going to ask her about it as well.
I had thought about setting up a website and advertizing, having a disclaimer that I may not be able to fix everything etc. Does anyone else have any advice?
Unless you really, REALLY like end-lusers and and all of the mundane questions they ask, then I wouldn’t recommend it. I spent 8 years running my own system integrator biz and loved what I did, but not the people I did it for.
Actually, I do have some advice. If you pursue this, I believe you will find it most rewarding to do it primarily for commercial and not personal customers. Stick with small-to-medium businesses, if possible, because they actually understand what it takes to run a business and what it’s like to be in business. Most of the time, I found that they were willing to pay for my services, and willing to pay what I was asking/charging. The personal consumer-grade customer that called me to their home typically didn’t want to pay for all the time I was there, or had some gripe about what I had done, etc. Naturally, the “customer is always right” so a lot of those I had to write off. Now, you can still run into that attitude in a small business or office environment, but it’s much less common. Legal offices and churches always paid me well, and promptly, though YMMV, of course.
One more piece of advice. Work SMARTER, not HARDER. As you get more demands on your time, CHARGE MORE because your time is WORTH MORE. Time is what you have, and time is what you cannot recover. There are only so many hours in a day, and as you run out of available hours, the hours you can dedicate to your tasks are worth more. For example, when I started my biz, I charged about $35/hr. When I closed my biz 8 years later, I was getting close to $95/hr. Interesting thing is, I was also working for fewer “personal” clients and for more commercial clients - the individual PC owner quite simply isn’t going to pay those high rates, so you may consider starting at a slightly higher rate to help weed out some of the more “undesirable” customers. Additionally, the higher rates made it easer to tolerate those few pain-in-the-butt customers…
Anyway, I wish you luck, and hope some of this was helpful.
Oh, yeah, I forgot - this is CRITICAL if you want to be sure you get paid (particularly if you want to go to an invoicing system and carry a few receivable accounts): Create a multi-part WORK FORM that contains your name, address and phone number at the top, with just some grid lines for time spent, date, and description of work. Then, at the bottom a SIGNATURE LINE. ALWAYS get the form signed - you keep the original, and the customer gets the copy. This way you always have proof that they knew how many hours you spent on what day and agreed to the work…
…you’ll find this method in just about any service-based industry from plumbing to electrical to HVAC…and it WORKS.
That interests me too. I am going to have some other commitments, so this would be a perfect part time job for me. Also, that will look good on my resume, since I don’t have any real work experience yet.
many individuals will think you are over-charging them for your services. Especially if they stand around watching you (“All he did was sit at the computer and stick in some disks and run a few programs”). Companies & small business owners have a more realistic understanding of what it’s worth to have an expert fix their problems. They’re much better customers.
people will ask you all kinds of other, unrelated questions about anything on their computers, and expect you to be able to answer it. But not to charge anything extra for this additional work. (Charging by the hour handles this, but many people want a known price in advance, rather than an hourly charge. But this is hard to set, because it depends on how infested their computer is.
people have computers full of spyware/adware/viruses because they have ignored the most basic principles of safe computing. They will probably continue to ignore these, despite any advice you give them. So a month later they will call you up and say “your fix didn’t work – my computer is having the same problems again!” And they will expect you to clean it again, but without charging them again.
If you can handle situations like this, you may make this a successful business.
Remember that some customers just aren’t worth the aggravation of dealing with them!
