One year in business...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

A little over a year ago I posted a thread To my boss, you’re fired!

It has been just over a year now. So far only a couple little mishaps and overall it has been wonderful.

I have 9 businesses calling me fairly regularly for their various computer issues. Budget is fairly stable and doable. I actually broke even at 9 months in so I have been making money at this for about 4 months now.

August was so good i actually planned a vacation for the second week of November. Going on a lil cruise with the wife.

A few random thoughts

#1 Organization is EVERYTHING. I have missed a few customers because I misplaced a piece of paper I wrote the info from the phone call on :eek: or double booked and they cancelled when I tried to move them.

#2 I have gone to great lengths to come up with plain english ways of explaining various PC problems. So far everyone seems to love it.

#3 Hows your network Opal?

#4 PC Club ROCKS! I have a resale account with my local store, gets me a nice little discount and they know their stuff.

#5 Many PC shops are utter crap peddlers. I have heard more horror stories in the last year than I saw in 3 years of EMT work. $55 for a used 56K modem, $300 copies of XP pro as a needed upgrade to a guy who played solitaire and a few simple puzzle games. Where the fuck do these guys get off.

#6 I am going to start finding a way to rat out every bastard PC shop I find using corp edition XP disks and not installing the WGA patches, then not providing disks or licence keys to businesses who might actually have to have work done on their machines onsite when you might not feel like answering the phone or showing up for work.

#7 For the love of all that is holy I will never understand why the same machine in a case with chrome like trim and a few lighted fans will sell for $300 more than in a basic case. Maybe I need to start painting cases red so the computers look faster.

#8 Big box stores deserve to be reamed with a hot poker for pushing $1500 media center machines with 256M PCI express video cards and 6 channel surround sound cards as good “basic office machines”. Office Depot/Max don’t know their ass from a USB port.

#9 Referrals are wonderful, about 1/3 of my business is repeats and referrals now. About a year from now I plan to back off on my advertising budget a little. Hopefully by then I will be seen as a little more “established” outfit.

#10 I feel like an entirely different person than I did a year ago. Being the proverbial master of your own destiny is empowering beyond belief. The flexibility, the decision making, the challenge of figuring out problems I have never faced before. I am starting to see why people do it now. A year ago I thought it sounded good, now I feel like it IS good.

#11 Best buy/CompUSA selling in house warranties on top of the OEM warranties is the biggest steaming hunk of horseshit I have ever seen.

#12 Nothing…I mean NOTHING beats leaving an $11/hour job a year ago and walking up to the ATM after a 12 hour day with $445 to deposit, and you only spent $60 on parts for the day, and today is not the first day this week you have made such a deposit.

Not too shabby for a home taught with no formal computer training. :cool:

2

Congratulations! I remembeer your thread; I’m glad to see it’s worked out so well.

GT

3

Congrats, man! You’re living what I dreamed about a couple of years back. During a really crappy period at my last job when I was part-time and they were only giving me 10 hours a week on the schedule, I started my own home-based PC repair company – quite informally. I made up some advertising on nice glossy paper with its own business card dispenser and posted them around my apartment buildings. It all looked quite snazzy and slick. It did generate some business – enough to squeak me through the worst of times – but not enough to make a living. Eventually though things changed drastically for me where work was concerned and I found myself with a full-time position and a big fat raise ($8k/yr) and that was pretty much the end of that. I couldn’t afford to quit my job and dedicate all of my time to my own business, sadly, but maybe one day I’ll pursue that avenue again if I ever get enough saved up that I can coast on my bank balance for long enough to start turning a profit with the business.

4

Congratulations! And welcome to the fold. Isn’t it great to be master of your domain?

Scarlett, self-employed eleven years and counting

5

drachillix, try using AppointmentQuest for you bookings. We use it at our tech on-cal business, and it really works well. Plus, being accessible from anywhere is a nice touch when the emailgets wet.

Otherwise, NICE JOB on getting the business profitable within the first year. Can’t begin to tell you how it warms my heart that an honest tech is able to make it.

6

Congrats!

And I, too, am amazed that in this day and age PC shops with extremely high-priced service and parts and questionable service and ethics manage to stay in business.

7

congrats!

8

I know why, its just sometimes hard to wrap my brain around why people don’t try calling 3-4 shops before they make a decision. I advertise free phone estimates, take the 30 seconds and call. In many cases you never see a customer again after a repair. Since 75% of your customers will never call again no matter how wonderful you were, pumping up the bill to maximize revenues makes a certain amount of sense.

I draw far more esteem (and revenue IMHO) from 2nd and 3rd hand referrals than I do the extra $50 I might have been able to squeeze out of the first one.

9

I was agreeing with you until I got to this. I bought an Xbox 360 from Best Buy in June. The OEM warranty is 90 days. The thing died 90 days and 2 weeks from the day I bought it. Luckily for me, I had gotten Best Buy’s warranty. If I hadn’t then all I would have now is a $400 paper weight.

Congrats on the business - one day you’ll look back and wonder how you ever worked for someone else. Since you are providing a good honest service, there is no reason you can’t excel.

90, self employed 5 yrs and counting

BTW Scarlett, ^5 w00t! On your eleven years :cool:

10

Congratulations!

You are inspiring, especially to those of us who are planning to Make the Leap.

11

I am mainly referring to PC’s and them trying to sell an in house warranty claiming there would be NO warranty at all unless they bought one from WorstBuy or ChumpUSA. In one particular case it was a Gateway machine that comes with a 1 year warr with gateway handling everything but sticking it in a box to return to them.

12

That makes sense. Having never bought a PC from either place, I was unaware of the practice.

13

I like the attitude of Mr. Drachillix…it’s straightforward. Although it cannot be said for everyone in todays multiduplicitous economy. So many people have been the “have nots” for so long that want to sit in the pocket of the “Corporate Machine” or the “BIG BUSINESS MACHINE”,and continue to be a cog. You know what I say BE SELF-RELIANT, have self confidence and be the SELF-EMPLOYEED MACHINE and give back to the system for which you have either taken advantage or just plain ol’ like sheep-to-the- slaughter FOLLOWED THE PROGRAM. Or employee and empower others to do the same as you have done…be apart of what drives America. Capitalism. Business. and seek financial freedom. It will cost you only a minimum investment ii.e., Time. But at least you get to take a cruise every other month.

14

Congratulations!

So, how much has the free pickup and delivery helped you?

15

If you were in Australia, you would have my business. Well done.

16

Dang, I live too far from you to make yours “my” repair and refit shop. You’d have my business simply for the lines in the other post about being out of chewing gum, man.

I’ve been toying with the notion of getting self-employed myself, my biggest problem is figuring out how to market my skills and how much to charge for different things…

17

Immensely as well as advertising free phone estimates boldly on my ad. Gets a lot of people calling just to check.

I’m kinda paranoid right now but not too paranoid because another shop advertising $19.95/hr for onsite labor is right next to my ad $45/hr in the new phone book that just came out. I have tried calling them 2-3 times and got an answering machine each time. Considering I know s/he has to pull over 20 billable hours/mo just to pay for that ad alone s/he probably won’t last long, s/hes also got a fairly high dollar real estate shop area. So if all goes well s/he just priced himself out of ever making any money or being able to pay the bills.

18

Heh we could probably do a whole thread just on that subject in your desired field.

#1 Call other businesses in the area that do the same type of work, ask them how much they charge for various things.

#2 whatever you think everything is going to cost, double it.

#3 Whatever you think you can make in gross reciepts, half it.

If there is a positive difference between those numbers thats what you take home. If you can live on it you just found your new trade.

Of course the costs will back off as you get more experience and tools on hand and revenues will increase once you get a bit of reputation.

All told I dumped about $18,000 into startup costs and bills for things until I started seeing some money come in. I still have some small reserves, which I am slowly adding to again.

What I take home right now is highly variable but since many of my expenses fall into IRS grey areas it mitigates many of my living costs as well. Use of residence, cell phones, fuel, truck, high speed internet, all come out of the business budget not my personal take home pay. I almost never take the truck anywhere unless its business and the vast majority of my cell use is business as well so it makes it a little easier to make it as well as have a nice life.