Suggestions for a PC Home Tech Support Business?

RPGonAS400 asks: "I want to start my own small business in the evening and on weekends (after my day job) going into peoples homes for PC tech support. There has to be a need for this — I help enough friends out with their PC problems. I live in an area that has roughly 50,000+ people within 15 minutes of my home. The best business oriented tech support in our area charges $95/hour for hardware repair and $135/hour for software support. Options for home based PCs are quite limited here. Geek Squad (yuk!) charges outrageous prices. I am not sure what I will charge but I plan on having a minimum charge and then only charge for actual work done. If I have to learn how to fix something I either won't take the job or else not charge for my learning time. I am looking for suggestions for lots of things. Namely, rates, liability, insurance, equipment needed, waiver forms, tax issues, incorporation, local paper advertising, web site, etc. As you probably guessed, I have always been an employee and this is my first venture into small business. Thanks."

Comments

bank?

[johndoejersey]

Arrange a meeting will a small business advisor at a bank?

Re:If you must..

[jeffs72]

Parent is pretty solid advice. When I ran my own company, I didn't do residential because of all the issues surrounding it. I eventually got pulled into it some, but I required the user giving me their PC so I could work on it at my workshop at home, rather than sit on site for hours watching a virus scanner run or whatnot.

Be prepared for lots of payment issues. You'll need to be able to accept credit card payments, check out the quicken site, they have an online store that will link in with your quickbooks install and they'll handle all the fraud issues for you. If you do market to the low end, parent is right, you'll have people slow pay/no pay, accuse you of 'hacking' them when they don't pay (that was a treat, guy basically wanted more free service under the threat of legal action), etc. Humanity is a cess pool, you'll be at the bottom when you're performing services in people's homes.