Help me start a PC repair side business

In My Humble Opinion
1

I work as a Field Service Technician. What this means is that I have a home office where every week-day morning I check my company’s website to see what jobs I have, call the customers to arrange an appointment, drive to a drop-off location to pick up the parts, drive to each customer’s home or business or school, replace the hardware, and then drive home to close the jobs on my company’s website. My company primarily has me working on one manufacturer’s PC’s. (Large PC manufacturer that, until recently, you didn’t see in local stores). I am certified to work on their computers, and have a certification number that I use when I call them when the shipped parts don’t fix the problem and further troubleshooting/parts are needed.

A few customers have indicated that, in the future, they might need some help from a competent computer guy, and asked me if I do side work. I’ve told them that I can, but don’t actually have a business set up of my own, nor do I have my own business cards.

I live in a residential area, and don’t want to have people bringing PC’s to my house (nor do my neighbors, I’m sure).

Today I got a call from a former customer who’s desktop computer I had worked on previously. He lives in an assisted living center, has Parkinson’s, and had ordered a stick of RAM for his (same manufacturer) laptop. He wanted to know if I could install it for him, and what I would charge. Now this is a very easy job. I had about a 6 mile round-trip, and it only took 5 minutes. I’m not sure what any of the local PC repair places would have charged, but I don’t think that they offer on-site service. So me driving to the customer’s location is a significant advantage to the customer, IMHO.

My questions are these:

I.)What should I have charged for a job like this?
II.)What should I charge to troubleshoot a problem with an Out-Of-Warranty PC? What do I (additionally?) charge if the problem is…
a.SW related and I fix it.
b.SW related and requires purchasing additional SW to fix.
c.HW related and I need to purchase parts to fix it.
d.HW related and my professional opinion is that the computer is not worth the cost (ie. A ~$200 motherboard is required to fix a 5-year-old laptop.)
1.What do I charge to transfer data from the “dead” computer to another one?

(I’m assuming that the customer’s best course of action for an In-Warranty PC is to call the manufacturer. However, this can sometimes take hours of the customer’s time, whereas I could call the manufacturer and, by demonstrating to the phone-technician that I know what I’m talking about, get replacement parts arranged to be shipped much quicker, thereby saving the customer time that would be better served running their business. So…

III.)Should I offer to troubleshoot IW PC’s?
IV.)Can you recommend a price structure based on
a.The problem can be solved myself, on-site, through SW setting
b.The problem requires hardware that will be provided by the manufacturer, and installed by either…
1.Me, coincidentally
2.Another field service technician

Which leads us to…

V.)How do I avoid Conflict Of Interest issues? I don’t want it to seem as though I’m using my current job (the job that I’m actually there at that time to do) to promote my side business, because that’s not the case. I’m just seeing a need and trying to fill it in a way that helps both my customers and myself.

More info: A lot of my customers have trouble grasping exactly what my job duties (with respect to my employer, the PC manufacturer, and their PC) are on each particular job. Occasionally I’ll get a call saying “you working on my computer 2 months ago, and now I can’t get on the Internet. Can you help me?” The people that are asking for my side services are not these people. They tend to be businesses, or more intelligent residential customers. All of that said:

VI.)How do I promote my business?
a. Do I wait for an indication that they’re looking for additional help, and then hand them a business card?
b.Do I give a business card to every customer that demonstrates an understanding of the scope of my current job?
c.Do I hand a business card to every customer and say “If you need any help that’s not covered by ****'s warranty, I’d be happy to work on your computer for a reasonable fee”.
d.There are a few businesses in my town that provide these type of services (but not on-site, AFAIK) that I work with on occasion (eg. a customer brings in a PC that’s not working; they discover that it’s IW, and contact the manufacturer to have a technician sent to replace the hardware.) Would it be advisable to advertise on-site service through traditional media outlets? If so, how does this affect the COI aspect (Q#5)?
VII.)What should be on my business card?

Now let’s get to the legal issues:

VIII.)Do I need to buy a receipt book so that I can give customers receipts for their payments?
IX.)How much do I have to earn before I have to report my earnings to the IRS?
X.)How exactly would I report my earnings?

(BTW, I’m currently in the middle of getting my taxes done, so I’ll try to remember to ask my tax preparer these questions. But, as always, any advice is appreciated.)
Other perhaps relevant info: I guess I’m a “contract employee”. My company doesn’t provide me with any benefits (health insurance, et al), and I’m technically part-time. I have a business degree. I cover a lot of semi-rural area (about 3 counties, ~ 60 miles wide and 30 miles deep) on a daily basis, so I could offer these services to other towns in my coverage area; but servicing only my home town would be easier. It appears that the local PC shops do not charge their customers to have a FST replace HW on computers that are IW. (See Q# 6.4) I am not sure whether this applies to any joe schmo that walks in off the street, or only customers that have a service contract with the shop.

I appreciate any help and advice that you dopers can give me.

ETA: I don’t know how to get the outline bullet points formatted properly with spaces, et al. (Maybe this is the type of thing that I should learn before trying to start a PC support business) :slight_smile:

2

That is one hefty request.

Just touching on the “How much do I charge?” question:

Set a flat fee - say $50 per hour for residence (maybe more for commercial businesses), with a minimum of one hour.

And then be 100% fair about it. If it only takes you five minutes to fix their problem, offer them another free service to fill the time - maybe show them how to defrag or delete temp files (many haven’t a clue) or just install AdAware or run some other virus scan as long as you are there. People don’t mind paying for your time if you can provide a quick and simple fix to a problem. If you are fair, you won’t need to do a lot of advertising as people will spread the good word.

3

Re the tax issue you do have report income. If you choose not to you’re making a bet that the customer will not report this as a deductible expense of some sort to the IRS, and that they won’t try to cross match the payment to the income. If it’s little invoices below a thousand your real world chances of getting flagged are probably fairly small. If you start doing substantive work for people and they list it as a business expense paid to your company, the IRS has much higher probability of being interested in that money trail.

4

Never mind - misread your question re minimum income re taxes.

5

We charge a flat rate for anything they need, outside of any parts they may need. We’ve also found that the higher we go, the less deadbeats there are. Really, the best way to charge is to see what your market will bear. $100 an hour is fine in Boston, but $88 an hour is more North Carolina and $120 an hour is more NYC priced. If it’s just a quickie putting in RAM, you always have the option of charging something around $20 or pro-rating that first hour.

Also, get a Quickbooks account with the credit card processing module. Totally changed our business.

I’m hoping maybe drachillix will drop in. He’s got a really good business model for this.

6

VIII.)Do I need to buy a receipt book so that I can give customers receipts for their payments?
The more accurate your business records, the better. Any business customers will want a receipt. Definitely yes. $5 at Staples, and you can put a label with your info at the top, if you don’t shell out to get your own printed.

IX.)How much do I have to earn before I have to report my earnings to the IRS?

Dunno, but any customer who pays you more than $600 in a calendar year has to submit a 1099 to you and report the payments to the IRS.

X.)How exactly would I report my earnings?

Schedule C, Profit and Loss, filed with your federal taxes.

My guy makes house calls and charges $45/hour, plus I see that he often adds a $5 fuel surcharge these days. Occasionally for a five-minute fix he has charged me only a half-hour. Occasionally he throws in little freebies; I like to think this is because often we have coffee and fresh scones when he arrives at 9 am for a longish job. He will also answer quickie questions by e-mail; for more complicated questions I have asked him to bill me for any time he spends researching or whatever, but he never has. This is in the boonies of WI.

7

I charge $50 an hour (I work from my home). I do not include travel time, but that’s me. Flat fee for something simple is a good idea.

I also do a lot of free work (again, that’s just me).

A lot of this is easier if you simply charge an hourly rate.
At the time of discovery, I show the problem or recommend a tuneup (“Ya know, your AV is 10 years out of date… do you want me to purchase one for you or download a free one?”)

In any case, I present alternatives. One of my alternatives is “live with it”-- f’rinstance, I recently fixed the PC of an elderly couple, running XP on 128 MB. They say it’s OK. Hey, if they are happy, I’m not gonna force them to spend $70 a pop on new PC-2100 SDRAM.

If the computer’s truly dead, you have some time and expertise tied up in getting the old drive up and running so you can get stuff off it (an hour, anyway). Another hour in transferring the data.

I think you have a good explanation there. Offer them the choice.

I just charge an hourly rate. A rate for each possible job (as would an auto repair shop) strikes me as unneccessary work.

My company allows us techs to do side work. My company’s guidelines may offer you some help…
[ol]
[li]May not use company resources[/li][li]May not use company time, including troubleshooting consequent problems[/li][li]Customer may not coplain to the company if unhappy about your work[/li][/ol]

Additionally, make sure your boss/HR dept knows about it. You may want to hint to the customer that you do work on the side, but await the customer’s asking you.

8

I’ll come for $40 an hour. $20! I’ll pay you!

(I’ve been offered all sorts of things. The last customer offered me a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Creme.)

Thanks for the reminder about fuel. Rucksinator, remember to record your mileage for your taxes. (as a 1099 employee, you should be doing this already).

9

Add a dot com to my name and you’ll see I do on location repair of electronics. I started out working for owner/operators but after two sudden layoff I decided to work for myself from now on. With no capital resources I got a cell phone, had business cards printed and then wrote a web site. Slowly but surely business is growing and I do not regret not writing another resume`.

> What should I have charged for a job like this?

Don’t undersell yourself. I often lament not having that cut throat mentality but you have to charge for your time and experience.
I charge first hour and additional hour fees.
I ride public transportation but if you drive you have to charge enough to cover all cost of the car, everything. You could include the travel cost in the first hour and then add a surcharge if the call is outside a certain distance. Don’t undersell the cost of travel either.

> What should I charge to troubleshoot a problem with an Out-Of-Warranty PC? What do I (additionally?) charge if the problem is…SW related and I fix it…SW related and requires purchasing additional SW to fix…HW related and I need to purchase parts to fix it…

If you have the capital, make the process as painless as possible for your customer. If it takes you an hour to get the part then charge the customer that hour. If you already have the part then charge for having it in stock.

I charge one dollar per light bulb. That is a lot compared to the price I pay for each one when I buy a hundred. But then I carry 44, 47, 161, 555, 89, 901 and more. Sure the customer could say, “No thanks. You gave me the information I need to buy my own (along with other many other things)”, but it is in the customer’s best interest, while I’m there to pay a dollar to have me change the light bulb.

>HW related and my professional opinion is that the computer is not worth the cost (ie. A ~$200 motherboard is required to fix a 5-year-old laptop.)

I’ve told customers, for a games bought at auction, “You’ll need to order $150 in parts to replace what is missing and then I can start toubleshooting.” Then charged my one hour fee for telling them this.

> What do I charge to transfer data from the “dead” computer to another one?

Charge for your time. You only charge a flat rate that takes into account the ratio of the quickly done and the long drawn-out ones.

> (I’m assuming that the customer’s best course of action for an In-Warranty PC is to call the manufacturer. However, this can sometimes take hours of the customer’s time, whereas I could call the manufacturer and, by demonstrating to the phone-technician that I know what I’m talking about, get replacement parts arranged to be shipped much quicker, thereby saving the customer time that would be better served running their business. So…Should I offer to troubleshoot IW PC’s?

Yes, you’re selling your knowledge of how to get the job done. If I were you and a people as well as a machine person I would do it in person and let your customer know that through your political/personable personality you got them the best service.

> How do I avoid Conflict Of Interest issues? I don’t want it to seem as though I’m using my current job (the job that I’m actually there at that time to do) to promote my side business, because that’s not the case. I’m just seeing a need and trying to fill it in a way that helps both my customers and myself.

The only conflict of interest would be if the side business took money out of your employer’s pocket. I did repair as a side business when working for others and even had my employer recommend me for outside work.

> How do I promote my business?
> Do I give a business card …?

Give your business card to everyone. Even if all they say is “Hello”.

> What should be on my business card?

Here’s mine. I think you’ll like the format. I did it in Paint. We won’t mention the coffee for the gang a Kinkos that it took for the drafts and proofs.

> Now let’s get to the legal issues:

IRS guidelines for hobby or business.
Most important advice for getting more customers. Get a web site with a simplest domain name you can think of, don’t go fancy since your customers are those with computer problems and not likely to sit through a flash intro; set aside some time each day to submit to search engines and improve the site’s ranking by tweeking the html (Google’s Dashboard is recommended); keep at it until the the term “computer repair ‘your city’” come up on the first page of the search engines.
…

10

Absolutely, this can be worth a lot. My guy ran into problems on my brand-new laptop that were caused by some OEM utility software. He called TS and explained the problem (which I sort of understood but not clearly) quickly, and they acknowledged that it was a known issue and gave him the fix. Would have been a huge time-consuming pain in the ass for me alone; instead he got everything working again in a fraction of the time that I didn’t have to spend troubleshooting. That’s why I pay him.

11

Thanks everybody. I appreciate all of the advice.

12

You rang??

…curse the lack of search for all this time!!

We operate both onsite and a small storefront now (just 600 sq ft, more like a workshop to avoid having a pile of computers at home.)

We charge $65/hour onsite and $45/hr in the shop 1 hour minimum either way. We also do Virus/spyware cleanup for $99 flat rate (in shop only), whatever it takes. The nice thing about those cleanups is they often require very little direct attention, just bully in the scanners or pull a drive and plug it into one of the mules for a scan. In theory 1 tech can babysit 3-4 virus jobs at the same time grossing $400/day.

One of the key parts of the growth of my biz has been phone book ads. You never could have convinced me 5 years ago that I would be happily paying $600/month for a phone book ad and loving it. People do call with frightening regularity and many will keep calling and referring their friends if you do a good job for them. The other key, have a tech answering the phone. Yes it will cut into your shop workload, but being able to answer a few questions that the average joe receptionist cannot makes a huge difference. If they start asking nitpicky things or ask for us to walk them through something more complex than changing their screensaver we politely inform them we do not do phone support but will happily schedule a time for an onsite tech or encourage them to bring it in.

Granted, we a little above the low end of the price scale around here, we are going for market share and volume on repair work.

We dropped the in shop rate to encourage more people to bring machines to us rather than working onsite, the businesses don’t even blink at the difference but the home users are usually willing to drag the tower down for $20-$30 less cost. In many ways we make more off of the home user carryins than the onsite because we can often multitask or complete jobs in less than an hour while still totally legally incurring the 1 hour minimum.

Any other questions please feel free to post…I will be watching the thread

13

With regard to the conflict of interest, do you have a written cntract with your employer?

14

Observations I hope help, that aren’t targeting your notbullet pointed questions:

  1. In my company, it seems like every IT person I get to know also does work on the side. My impression is that being a little sensitive to propriety and appearances is enough to manage the potential conflict of interest problem.

  2. The PC I’m using right now has a few things wrong - recent updates wouldn’t take, and since I had it in the shop my USB ports stopped being V2 and started being V1 only. Plus, when I tried to add a Bluetooth adapter, the install died and the connection is very unreliable (though it works 1/3 of the time so some things clearly work). My reason for not diving into it myself is it’s become so intimidating these days, how complex they are and how much I rely on it. And my big reason for not taking it to somebody else is that this always seems to take 2 to 4 weeks. If I have to be without it a month, replacing it starts looking like the better option. I wish there was a better way to have somebody come here and mess with it, with or without my help (which would be their choice). Don’t know whether the business could adapt to customers like I think I am, but there’s a need.

Good luck. There is a huge amount of work out there that needs doing, and you could probably really help people. I bet the average Windows PC makes more mistakes doing a single bootup than the average human makes in a lifetime.

15

Onsite work is what pays the rent in our world, plan on paying a little extra for it. We do as many as a couple dozen onsite calls a week. Call around and get some hourly charges from various shops, ask a few people if they have used anyone they like. The nice part is, your puter never moves and its usually done in a few hours. Even with a carryin shop more than a week or so is unacceptable exept where specialty services like advanced hard drive recovery or power jack/usb port soldering are needed. We average around 72 hours, toss in another 24 if we need to order parts for something special.

There are quite a few techs who advertise on craigslist and such but be wary. A not insignificant percentage of them are of what we call “tweaker techs”. Basically guys looking to knock out a job so they have money for their drug of choice and never seem to follow through/call back/finish. Many of them already have jobs and this is something they just do for a little extra cash ie if you are without the puter for a week or so no skin off their nose. One of the good things about dealing with a shop or at least a full time independent is, our rent and meals for the month depend on the continued goodwill of our customers we like eating and having a place to sleep.

Any legit tech is never going to ask for cash in advance unless there are significant hardware purchases involved that will not be paid by the end of the day. If someone wants us to build them a custom computer I usually ask for a deposit roughly equal to the wholesale price of the parts, tell them it will be ready in 5 working days with the balance due when completed. They leave with a printed invoice of the final price and balance due when they place the order. It should be no problem for a legit onsite guy to front the money for any given single basic desktop repair. Granted there are variations in business model especially in remote areas where a tech can’t just run to the nearby puter shop and grab a part and will want a parts deposit so you don’t call someone else after he leaves and leave him stuck with a part he can’t use.

16

Something less than 30 min to fix we charge $35

Here we do not do a “free daignostic” but if we look into it and its something simple that we fix inside the first hour or so then there is no separate diagnosic, just the basic 1 hour labor for diagnostic and the repair.

a: Whatever your hourly charge is
b: Whatever the hourly charge is plus the SW. (don’t forget a lil markup for you)
c: Whatever the hourly charge plus the parts (see markup)
d: This is where the 1 hour minimum keeps you in rent

In CA you cannot legally charge someone more than the fair market value of the machine in question to repair it. That said, the tech do not have to agree to repair it for what the machine is worth either. Customer makes the choice, if they want to proceed with the $200+ labor laptop mobo repair (thats gonna be at least 2-3 hours for the swap in most laptops), then you go for it. If they choose not to then you still get your hour. If you are incapable of the repair don’t charge them. I have come out to a home based law office and found a server running netware 3.11 or something like that, I know as much about novell servers as I do about BBQ techniques on mars. So I looked around and politely informed him I would have to pass on the job, no charge, thank you for the opportunity.
c:

1: Whatever your hourly rate

I have fixed dozens of in warranty PC’s that needed to be up NOW, manufacturer be damned, blah blah. Inform the customer that the simple fact that you are not a “factory authorized” tech it will probably void the warranty on their machine and you will probably not be able to restore the OEM restore images/software when you are done. If they want to proceed, same as any other job.

III you betcha
a. Hourly rate
b. If its to be installed by the OEM rep, just bill them for the hour and bail.
Installed by you, cut them a charge based on a solid estimate of the time it will take. Example HDD dies cust wants OEM to provide parts, all you need to do is reload the thing from restore disks once it shows and then go through and apply updates/remove crapware, restore backed up customer files, etc. Bill them for the time it will take hours up front then tell them to call when the part arrives and you will come out for no additional charge to install it. That way they cant “forget” to call you back.

Which leads us to…

Can’t help you much there other than “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Warning, many companies frown on moonlighting especially if they are in the repair biz, check your policy manual, this could be a firing offense

Get business card sized magnets of your services stick them on your car, I seem to have one disappear off my truck every time I go to the grocery store. As I said before, phone books rock, by design, the people who need you the most are not going to be able to look you up online.

My state requires some kind of writtten receipt describing the work done and parts provided if any.

legally $1

there are forms for self employment income, don’t know it off the top of my head. Get yourself a mileage log book and track it, it adds up in a hurry.

Offer to do your hometown for no additional trip charges, most people in neighboring towns will probably not have a problem with an extra $15-$20 “trip charge” We waive trip charges on anything over 2 hours of labor billed.

As far as subcontract work for local shops, no trip charge in town but make sure you are on the clock or are recieving mileage reimbursement for road time on out of town work.