Niche but profitable repair business

In My Humble Opinion
1

I tinker – cars, computers, small engines, appliances. I like fixing stuff. By circumstance, this has led to a career in software development, which started out as a low quality hobby-shop affair. I have a real job now, but all I want to do is fix bugs all day, and as a senior developer I’m expected to spend my time on stuff that I find less enjoyable.

What I would do if I had a million dollars is fix stuff for people in my neighborhood for free. I admire the people who work in the small engine repair shop down the street. Based on the condition of that building, I’m guessing it doesn’t pay well.

I don’t have any desire to unglue iPhones all day. I fix enough computers for my extended family. House calls don’t seem that enjoyable either. What am I overlooking that can exist as a small store-front repair business that’s reasonably profitable?

2

Hah, I sympathize. Working in research, so much of my life is an intangible, labor-intensive slog of things that fail for no discernible reason. I like to find bits of equipment that need fixing, just so that I can have the occasional concrete accomplishment. A thing was broken, I needed it to work, so I made it work. There’s so much that can break in an easily fixable way: just replace a belt, bearing, power supply, motor brush, fuse, etc.

There’s enough busted lab equipment to make a reasonable business out of it, though it’s not a storefront sort of thing. I think most of the market here involves buying broken/old/surplus equipment, fixing it up, and selling it again. Perhaps one could make a decent living as a wandering lab tinker? The hard part there would be drumming up business: convincing researchers to part with their hard-earned grant dollars, and figuring out how to get paid by each university/hospital bureaucracy.

3

It’s *possible *that in the right place at the right time, you might be able to get a profitable niche going.

But this is very much against the flow and the direction of where trends are heading. See, as factories get more efficient, using less and less human labor to make products (the rise of China first replaced expensive factories with ones using cheaper labor, but lots of it, and now the trend is to automate as many steps as possible), the newly manufactured price of things will continue to fall.

In the scientific instrument business, nobody wants used equipment because the new stuff comes factory calibrated and in some cases is going to be more advanced. Nobody trusts your fixed stuff, basically, you have a credibility trap problem.

So what makes sense is to just send broken goods to be recycled, either for the valuable metals or just junked completely, and the manufacture new products. Since efficient factories with a lot of automation use very little human labor, it’s less human labor than a repairman working on a machine more than a few hours, and this is reflected in the relative cost. This is why a few hours of a repairman working on something is more expensive than a whole new copy of many products.

So one opportunity becomes apparent, talking about this. Automated recycling. It should be possible to build robots smart enough to tear down machinery and fully recycle everything, instead of the current setup, where recyclers just rip out the copper and toss the rest.

4

Interesting couple of posts, thanks! I hadn’t though of scientific equipment, but that certainly fits the bill of something that’s expensive enough to justify repairing at American labor prices, while still being potentially portable. Based on lazybratsche’s post, I searched for lab equipment repair in my area and it does not seem like a mom-and-pop sort of thing. Lots of certification logos. But it’s an intriguing idea, if one could find the right niche.

Buying broken equipment and re-selling it seems like it might work, and I do have some friends who work in research departments…

5

Just acquire used broken stuff (cars, computers, furniture, appliances, sporting goods, electronics, power tools…) which are broken, fix them and resell them. Small stuff can sell on eBay, larger stuff on Craigslist. Do this out of your house (basement, garage, shed). There is a Reddit sub-reddit devoted to flipping and some of the people repair stuff before reselling: https://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/

6

You might enjoy this article about “repair cafes”, which were started in the Netherlands but are now in other countries, including the US. People can bring broken items (small appliances and clothing, for example) and volunteers attempt repairs. Your OP mentioned doing this as a business, but this is meant more as a community service thing, and a reaction to a throw-away culture.

7

There’s a small-appliance repair shop near me that continues to stay in business. As an outsider, it looks like repair is only a fraction of the business, with the bulk of it coming from a) hard to find replacements for things you think are too good to throw out, like pot lids and b) collectibles.

I also know that if you bring an electric razor for any kind of repair, even replacing a cord, you’ll won’t get out of there without also purchasing a bottle of the owner’s own, superspecial electric shaver head cleaner.

8

Blockbuster videos haven’t all disappeared, either. This doesn’t mean it is a wise plan to open up a new video rent place or invest your money in one.

Have you been to aliexpress or ebay and seen the direct made in China, sold in China listings? Yes, the stuff you can get there is lower quality and small in physical size. But it’s shockingly cheap, making any form of repair of that kind of item pointless. And I think it’s a sign of future prospects - I think the cost will continue to remain low and the quality will continue to improve as time moves forward. A lot of these products, which are often products meant for domestic use in China, are actually rather well made for their cost…

9

Electronic instruments and studio equipment? Vintage is a selling point, so you’d have lots of stuff to fix, both analog and digital, hardware and software. Probably not that much money in it, though.

10

This guy started that way -

11

Data backup and disk failure recovery can be a profitable niche business. When an average user gets disk failures that render their data unreadable, they take their computer to your shop and you use your advanced tools and knowledge to recover their data. There’s a few shops in my town who do it.

12

How about a sharpening service? I occasionally see a small trailer, maybe 8x10, parked at the market. Drop off your knives and scissors to be sharpened while you do your grocery shopping.

I sharpen my own stuff because I’ve got the equipment, but I’ve seen this same trailer at different markets for a few years so there must be some money in it.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G930A using Tapatalk

13

I did house calls in the 90s for a TV VCR repair shop - actually didn’t mind the house calls. Also did cable modem swaps for Comcast - the same thing.

Obviously things have changed, but a decent percent were elderly people that had their TVs in TV mode (vs cable mode) - so they got channels 2-13, but not the higher channels. We’d always try to do this over the phone for free, but many just couldn’t follow simple instructions - and didn’t mind to pay us (at the time $35) to come out.

By the time I left it seemed like many people wanted wireless networks setup - and you could possibly get on the Nest Professional installation list - seems like a good and easy gig.

I noticed there were two type of people - about half would sit and watch you (not overly intrusively) - while they other half didn’t care and would leave you be.

One word of wisdom I learned from my boss that you might want to consider.

Our warranty was 90 days on the work we did - if something else went wrong - we didn’t cover that. Early on in my work there my boss heard me turning down a customer who brought her VCR back in as the new problem she was having clearly wasn’t related.

He came around and said. 'No problem ma’am - we’ll take care of it for you"

After she left - I asked him why he did that.

He said something along the line of “these people don’t know enough to understand the two problems were unrelated. Sure that’s our policy for the people that can figure it out on their own and to protect us in extreme situations, but we make enough to take care of the small percent that come back that aren’t our fault. She’ll have a great experience and know we aren’t gonna rip her off.”

I totally agree with the sharpening thing - you could also reach out to barber shops - as high end scissors cost a lot of money and the place (barber) I go to has a guy who come around and does straight razors and shears - and another barber their goes to a guy who sets up under a bridge six months out of the year. I’d love to have a local place to get my straight razors sharpened - I’ve tried to do it myself, but so far need more practice.

Stay away from people with computers - or have very set policies (IMHO) - I told a woman on my condo board I’d look at her computer (she said it was slow) - it literally took almost an hour for her computer to boot up - and she had - no exaggeration - at least 6 (maybe 9) toolbars installed.

People get stuff on their computers that I don’t think I could do if I tried.

It’s really rewarding fixing stuff - my favorite was always people that thought they had really bad problems - when it was something unusual, but easy to fix. Most common was this weird close caption mode I’d never seen before working there - it would have a black box (with no text) that covered everything except maybe a quartering have border around the edge. I think it was CC Mode 4 or something.

Also some toshiba TVs had this sales mode that it could enter if you held the volume up and down button at the same time. This was easy to do accidentally (well not easy, but over the course of hundreds of button pushes - you might eventually do it)

No where in the manual was it mentioned - and even if you unplugged it for days - it wouldn’t reset - all you needed to do was hit up/down at the same time again, but they’d never figure it out on their own (this was pre Internet forums).

We never charged for that if they brought it in - but still felt great to make someone’s day

14

True. For maintaining really critical equipment that costs six- or seven- figures, there are five- or six- figure service contracts from a handful of OEMs and specialized shops with rare expertise. The small-time tinker ain’t going to touch one of those.

Unless it’s broken already, and nobody even wants to go to the trouble of carting it off… one of my prouder repairs was of a mid-five-figure specialty imaging system, which was rendered non-functional because of a single bad cap on the primary power supply. Which itself was a commodity part, replaced for $50 with another that met or exceeded all specs.

On the other hand, there’s all kinds of equipment that is in a middle ground between the horrendously expensive, complicated, and mission-critical stuff, and the cheap mass-market stuff. I’m thinking incubators, centrifuges, shaking tables, and other relatively simple things. There just isn’t enough of a market for these things to make it worthwhile for anyone to make these cheaply and in volume. So if they break, you do without, and since they’re common that means you just have to walk to the other end of the building to borrow them from another group.

For the simpler lab equipment, most of the repair business just involves buying surplus, repairing it, and selling it on eBay or more specific sites like LabX.