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

Re:If you must..

[cyclomedia]

Have mod points today but choosing to add my agreement

absolutely positively do not attempt to repair, upgrade or generally maintain a user's computer in their house. They will stand behind you watching your every move, their mouse will be gunked up with toxic fluid, their screen will be covered in grease, they will at no time have any os,boot or driver cds to hand, it will be so clogged up with viruses and trojans that just getting the damned thing to boot into safe mode will take you an hour, you will then need to get out of safe mode to connect to the net to get a new driver version, and then you're f**ked.

You can still asses on-site, if it is 100% absolutely a 20 minute job then, sure do it, If you don't want to touch it with a barge pole, walk away. Otherwise you will have to take it back to your garage, and just the box, you need a workbench with 3/4 pre-mounted keyboard, mouse and monitor stations and ps2/vga/serial/usb adapters for them. Stacks of OS cds, boot disk, you will need sysinternals tools on a handy CD and bootable floppies like MemTest86. Some virus scanner software will even run from cd with latest updates just by copying it's progra~1/ directory across to a CDR (i used to use kaspersky avp just like this, very handy)

You will need a station where you can plug a HD straight in and scan it that way, and your seperate permanent internetted-up rig with cd burner , usb key and floppy drive to get those pesky downloads across. (these two need to be physically seperate, the HD diagnostics computer should ideally have no net connection too, it will take three steps to get files from the net onto the user's HD but that's 2 minutes of disk swapping compared with the aforementioned hours of safe mode hell)

Give the customer a reciept for whatever you take away, preferably on a CC pad so you both get a copy and tell them you will phone them exactly 24 hours later, but not before, never say "in about an hour or two" because they will start naggin you.

as for running the business itself, I'll leave that up to other posters but one final handy tip is to have in your car/van a handful of cheapish mice and keyboards, because sometimes all that the customer's problem is is coca cola in the keyboard. Just sell them one for a fiver ($10) on the spot