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Building Up a Small Computer Business?
Hogg asks: "I'm a senior in high school, and feeling very industrious over the summer, I started a home business. Basically, I go onsite and service computers and charge far less than what the 'pros' with the MCSEs and so on do. It's been going fairly well so far, but I wonder if Slashdot has tips, advice, or pitfalls to avoid?"
The pros charge so much to pay for their insurance. What happens when somebody's computer breaks a month down the line, and they think it's your fault? Are you going to buy them a new computer, or let them sue you?
1) Don't underestimate elasticity of demand. By this I mean, don't charge too little. People get a sense of security when they pay more for a service. A computer is like your body: when you get sick, do you go to the discount teenage doctor? No, you got to a professional and pay the money, because it is important to you. Make sure you charge your customers throught the nose, even if you know the job isn't very hard. They don't know that.
2) Charge for travel time. Don't even think about leaving the house if you're not getting paid. Don't give into the temptation to give freebies to keep your customers happy. Make it clear from the begining that they're paying you a minimum $100 every time they pick up the phone and ask you to help them out - even if they have fixed their own problem by the time you arrive. This breeds respect. They won't feel they can exploit you.
3) Invoice immediately. This probably should be rule #1. Send out the invoice the same day you do the job. It'll keep you well organized and your customers will appreciate remembering what you did for them when they pay your bill. Also, it keeps you liquid.
4) As mentioned on this thread, get them to sign a disclaimer before you begin.
5) Target small/medium businesses. Private customers are the worst. Don't go near them if you can avoid it. They're a lot of trouble.
5.a) Target branch offices of larger corporations that have their HQs elsewhere. The IT manager in another city will appreciate having a smart person he can call to fix his remote office. He's often under the gun to get things fixed and will probably give you steady business.
6) Don't be afraid to drop customers who don't pay promptly. If they call and haven't paid their bill, tell them to call when they have. Period. A business is in business to make money. If you wanted to waste time, you'd read Slashdot.
7) Find other small partners. You can't be an expert in everything and people will ask you to do a whole range of things. If you're a systems guy, team up with a web developer, an app developer, and a small hardware reseller. Refer business to them. Get them to do the same.
8) Be prompt, courteous and polite. Your word is bond. If you commit to something, you have to do it. Servicing your customer is very important. Simply don't agree to something if you don't think you can or want to do it.
Asking your customers how much they want to pay you only works if you're fixing a friend's computer...I know plenty of places that would say "oh hell, I could've done that, here's 30 bucks," except they couldn't have done it, and you worked 5 hours. Being upfront about your rate is always a good idea, but especially when you add in "depending on what I actually have to do, I charge $XX an hour"
I charged $18 an hour at a place I stayed at for 80 hours, and $20 an hour for places I worked for a day or less. Through some small scale advertising in the news paper, usually just saying "computer systems upgraded, maintained, repaired," and a phone number I got a number of jobs with this rate. I don't have any certifications, nor can I afford them, but seeing as how the grocery store wouldn't hire me to push carts at minimum wage, I think I did fairly well for myself. Don't forget that if you make enough you've gotta file your tax stuff properly or the gov will hunt you down and break your knees.
A lot of people think that either no one is willing to hire a high school/freshmen college student to work on their computers, or that charging something like $20 an hour at that age is too much. Well, it's not true. At $20 an hour, you're damn cheap labor as far as IT goes. If the company can't afford that, then they're certaintly not going to hire a "professional." I charged a total of $1500 to a small firm, to do all kinds of stuff in a 3 week period, they were not only happy that they finally got their network running properly, but that they got such a good deal on decent computer work. The guy before me was charging them $80 to plug in cables and tell win98 machines to login at an NT server, they threw him out after about 8 hours since he screwed it up and ripped them off. I worked harder and longer at a quarter the price, but the work I got this summer gave me experience in something I've never done before, and enough money to pay the tuition bills for the next year, so it was a good deal for me and the company. If he was charging so much to cover insurance costs, he kind of screwed himself over in that respect. I don't have insurance, I just have clients sign a contract outlining what I'm actually doing, and that I'm only liable for what I've done. In summary, if their hard drive crashes and they lose all their data, tough luck, not my fault. If the hard drive I installed improperly fails, I replace the hard drive, but they're SOL if they didn't make backups like I outlined they woud in the contract. This covers my ass adequetly without the hefty insurance costs. Just make sure you take precautions before you open that case up and you'll be fine.
Something else to watch out for that I'll just touch upon briefly is to make sure you have no liability over software you end up installing on their computer. MANY times I've run into people that want me to install the same copy of Windows XP Pro on 10 different workstations, and do the same with that copy of Office XP their friend burned for them, etc. etc. If you install the software on their machine, you've gotta make sure you're not reasponsible if it's illegal. Whether you actually do what they want and install that copy of XP on 80 different computers or if you tell them "sorry, you're going to have to pay the $16000 license fees to do that," you gotta make sure you're absolved from any "illegal" stuff. Note, this is also a good way to get a company to pay you if they don't want to for whatever reason: "I know you have 79 hot copies of XP pro running in your office, I'm sure the BSA would love to hear that..." usually get's them to cut you a check right then ;).
Actually you are wrong. Most systems are shipping with NTFS partitions. Or users are wiping them and loading NTFS during the system restore process.
Besides, he is getting paid to fix PC's. He will need something to read NTFS when a system won't boot. Winternals AdminPak is the only decent tool that works as well as it does. He will be up the proverbial creek the first time he attempts to service an XP box that won't boot and it's running NTFS. Besides, Winternals AdminPak will in fact read FAT32 as well as NTFS. I've used it on Win98 boxes because it's easier to boot and backup the sucker with the ERD CDROM rather then try to use a boot floppy without long filename support.
I believe most of the cost is a licensing issue with Microsoft as it loads a partial XP boot sequence and accesses the registry and other undocumented portions of Microsoft's technology. i.e. reset passwords, etc. So Winternals has had to pass the high licensing cost to the user.
You can download a trial based version for emergency purposes but it will expire.
Microsoft is the only OS without appropriate repair tools provided to the users. It can royally suck when you can't boot an NTFS system.
They have this thing called WinPE which is a WinXP/2k pre-installation environment. This will boot a box with network support and it will mount all the partitions then present you with a command console that is the complete deal (beyond recovery console). This allows you to do quite a bit. Unfortunately, this is only available to enterprise customers (not MSDN). It should be included on the XP installation CDROM as a boot option! Microsoft needs to provide users a decent rescue disk for once!
Winternals provides a whole lot of power and ease of use with their AdminPak. If you support NT/2k/XP systems you will need this tool. It will save your butt and it will do it quickly and with as little pain as possible. It is truly amazing. Just boot up with the ERD CDROM and it networks itself, allows you to edit the registry, start and stop services, disable devices, and reset passwords.
One book I like is by Janet Ruhl, and the info was gleaned from Usenet back "in the day". It's called The Computer Consultants Guide. I found it to have lots of good information on a variety of subjects, although it is a bit dated.