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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."
Arrange a meeting will a small business advisor at a bank?
I set up a free telephone listing in the Yellow Pages which went to my mobile offering computer repair. I charged cheaply and visited promptly, and I helped a few people out, but most calls I received were trying to sell my business something.
But this was a tiny ad with just my number. Offering cheap help and repairs is easy enough, and as long as you can take care of the tax side of it, is very simple to do. I arranged a business account and the bank would have offered me investment if I'd made a business plan, but I was starting University at the time, and didn't want the hassle. I'm convinced that it would be a profitable venture if I had the time and the resources to put out a slightly expensive ad, even locally.
It's something I will do again, but a few similar copycat services have since appeared.
I charged £20 for the first hour and £10 an hour after that.
Get your first number of customers from referrals of friends and family.
Give an estimate of time, and negotiate the charges up front for your first 10-20 customers. Use this data to decide on a pricing scheme that is fair to you, and that customers are willing to pay. Don't sell yourself too cheap, I'm thinking $30 an hour sounds reasonable.
Be professional (courteous, stand up straight, make eye contact and talk slower, lower and more relaxed). Tuck in your shirt. Be on time. Even if you charge a little bit more, these little things make all the difference, and most people will pay for it, as good help is hard to find. Only keep good customers, who treat you right and pay you well. Good luck.
Home support is life sucking. That said, you will want to incorporate. You will want to look at umbrella liability protection if you don't have it. If you have a soul, you'll feel uncomfortable charging what you're worth, mainly because in most cases, you're sitting around waiting on scans to finish... Don't give in to that or you're just giving away the farm. Find out what the average is in your area and don't try the "undercut" routine. Word of mouth will get you business if you know what you're doing no matter the price. If you undercut, you get the cheapskates and general troublemakers.
For equipment, having an assortment of liveCDs is rather handy. Having a computer you can pull an HD and stick into to make offline scans is also very handy but bulky. Can usually get by with a small assortment of tools, you'll figure out what you need quickly. There generally isn't enough reason to buy some of the more esoteric (and expensive tools) if you're doing this part-time. Instead, see if you can form relationships with people in the area who are specialists.
Be prepared to walk away if you find yourself stressed. Working in home, you're going to run into everything. I personally couldn't stand the smoker or cat houses myself. Be prepared to make recommendations which will be forgotten before you leave the site. Be prepared for bounced checks. Plan on a budget for advertising. Figure out how many visits you can make a week. SCHEDULE ONLY THAT MANY. Do not "emergency? Oh, I'll shoe horn you in." The busier you are, the more most people are willing to wait (if you're any good).
Good luck. Don't burn out. Life is too short.
I'm not dragging your idea down at all - while many have considered it, few bother doing it for real simply because of the effort and hassle any such enterprise requires to get going. If you have the impetus and the business sense to do so, you have my best wishes.
However, for my part, the main reason I decided against doing such a thing (and there is a demand) is because I pride myself in all of my work, and am loath to take on a job that I'm not confident I can complete to a satisfactory level. My knowledge of home-PC hardware is excellent (as is that of so many other people), and I can cope with most problems M$ throws at a box. However, if I were to come up against something I'd never encountered before, I would worry about being able to sort it out. If it meant taking someone's box home for 3 days, not being able to fix it on the first night, having a prior commitment on the second, and finally deciding on the third that it was something beyond my ken, I would feel incredibly guilty about having taken on the job in the first place. Of course I wouldn't charge, but that's not much consolation to the poor guy who's been without his PC for several days.
If you feel confident that you can commit enough time to the business (evenings and weekends fill up surprisingly quickly), that it won't significantly interfere with your work or personal life, and that you have the technical experience to deal with almost any problem a punter throws your way - however poorly specified - then go for it. Just don't expect to enjoy it as much as you might hope to... ;-)
Meta will eat itself
As for the insurance and stuff Slashdot may not be the best place try some more business based websites and not technical. But some parts of your business plan make it seem doomed for failure.
I am not sure what I will charge but I plan on having a minimum charge and then only charge for actual work done.
So if someone calls 15 minutes away it takes you 15 minutes to get there and 15 minutes back. So that is 1/2 hour so assume you are charging $60 an hour, so that is $30 in lost profit. Just for getting to the place. And assume you get there and they need a new part that you don't have you will have to go to the store get the part and sell it back to them at cost and that takes an other hour so that is an additional $60 of lost profit. Assuming that it takes you 1/2 hour to diagnose the problem and 1/2 hour to fix it. You made $60 in 2 1/2 hours so that is actually $20 an hour.
But wait there is more!
There is the cost of taxes/insurence advertising telephone and infrastructure cost....
Now you at $10 - $15 an hour. I would say don't quit your day job. There is a reason the prices are so high for the other people in the area or at least for then ones that are still in business. That need to charge (Directly/Indirectly) for non actual work because there are expenses that don't care if you are actually working or not. Even though you are trying to run an honest business there will be people who still don't see things the same way they will go $60 an hour is way to high, and that you are trying to rip then off. And they will say that you over charged them for the emergency replacement Harddrive because they saw the same one on ebay for cheaper. Then there is the problem that you miss diagnosed the system, say it was bad RAM but you reinstalled the OS because you though windows got corrupted. Customers espectilly home ones are the worse.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Service contracts. Sell your time in blocks, recurring for small businesses. Sort of, "pre-paid user support." Everyone I've ever known who has done this sort of home support from home has been driven completely mad until they broke their time into larger chunks. It seems to instill a certain degree of respect as well as sanity.
Get a gunpermit.
I was in the same position as you were several years ago. I might have been very successful. Except for several things. Poor marketing. I was weak in my marketing. I don't want to tell you that I didn't go out and talk to people. I told everyone I knew. The problem was that I didn't market effectively. I didn't target the appropriate audience. Start up a limited liability company. The name is self explanatory. Your assets are protected if you do something really stupid. If the company fails, it doesn't nesecarily mean that you fail. I started as a DBA (doing business as). It was a hassle at the end of the year doing taxes and separating the neat gadgets I purchased for myself and the tools I needed for my business.
A friend of mine gave me some advice after I explained my failed business to him. He is a highly intelligent and successful businessman. He told me that my problem was that I had the employee mentality. What that meant was that I was still the employee although I was the manager, the owner of the business, I still acted like the employee. I didn't manage my resouces well. I stayed long at client's offices and homes because I wanted to 'do my best'. While that might have been well intentioned, what really happened was that I looked incompetent to the lay-person, fumbling around for hours fixing their problems.
Invest, invest, invest. Be professional. Have a separate office for your business. Don't play there (too much). Your office isn't a playground, it's a place to do work. If you have your 360 on your desk, you'll play your 360. If you start best practices now, you won't need to instill them later into future employees.
Get an account with a distributor to sell products. That being said, don't sell products retail. If you sell products retail, you'll lose money. You can't compete with Dell and CompUSA. Sell your services. THey're already paid for, and it cost dollars a day to replenish them. Your brain is your greatest asset in a service economy. Use the products as added value and to 'up-sell' IF you can be an effective salesperson. Say you charge more to offer local services with great service. Don't cut into our profit by selling goods below cost.
Research! Know your clientelle. Know your price range before you set it. Don't set it too high, but NEVER sell it too low.
I've got lots more info, but not more time. Good luck. YOu can make it successful if you want to. By the way. You've done a good job recognizing what your competitors do not offer. Find out what your competitors offer that makes them successful.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
Ah, where to begin...
I did this for a while. You will encounter (a) people too dumb to learn not to click "Sure, infect my machine" on every prompt; (b) people who think that $10.00 / hr is about the right wage for your service, (c) Packard Bell and WebTV boxes that people want to 'upgrade' so they can see the latest porn sites (and other technical impossibilities), (d) most insides of machines filled with dust monsters and cat hair; worst if it comes from a smoker's house, and (e) people who bounce checks, revert credit card charges, etc. People don't like paying someone younger than them, and not in a business suit, more than they make per hour.
With the price of an e-machines or low-end Dell, it doesn't take much in the way of billable hours to make it cheaper to just throw out the old machine and buy a new one. That's now what I council people to do. And as for training, if you spend a couple of hours walking them thru a 'Dummies' book, and telling them what a wicked world we live in (scammers, phishers, etc.) then you will have covered 90% of things.
Most people have one task they really want to do on the PC - one app that they want to know well (geneology, pr0n, games, PrintMaker, whatever). Get this one app working well and you are good to go - but often it is an old, old version that won't run on anything newer than a 486 / Win 3.1; and the new version is unavailable or changed so much they no longer know how to use it. And this is your fault of course. Blame the messenger is alive and well.
On the bright side, I made some good contacts doing this and still help out a couple of small businesses on the side, but not for pay, instead for trade. There is a body shop that owes me some free work on my car. They are grateful to see me when I can make it there, whereas if I was getting paid by the hour to clean Bondo out of their machines, upgrade software, and exchange fishing stories, they would (right or wrong) start to resent paying for how long it took.
In short, this is a job from hell because people with older broken PCs are mostly cheap and dumb. Sorry, but anyone who has tried this will say the same thing; some are nice guys and just ignorant but they are the exception. There is a reason the shops charge so much, it's easier to put up with someone who breaks open a 3.5" floppy and puts the inside disk on the CD tray at $95/hr - and the cheapest of the lusers will be driven away.
Sorry to burst your bubble but after 3 months you will be wondering what you've gotten yourself into and after a year you will HATE hearing the phone ring. Been there, done that, still have the T-shirt.
When I was young and naive enough to do this sort of thing, I started out charging far less than the other companies thinking that customers would seek me out. While I did have a couple calls, it wasn't until I raised my prices to be a little closer to the level of the competitors that I started to get more calls.
If you charge too little you run the risk of a couple of things. First, you're going to put your competitors on the defensive, something you don't want to do until you are established with a solid reputation and customer base. Secondly, prospective customers may look at the gap between your prices and those of your competitors and conclude that there must be a reason you're charging so litte, perhaps you're not as qualified or don't have as much experience.
tinfoilmedia
Use UltraVNC-SC. It creates a stand-alone VNC server executable that is configured to connect back to YOUR static IP address (a reverse VNC connection basically). I have mine hosted at help.mydomain.com.au. I just tell anyone who I need to assist this name which they type in and run and voila, i'm controlling their desktop. No firewalls to configure (except yours) and no hassles on their end. Best of all it's free.
http://sc.uvnc.com/index.php?section=12
Been doing thise for over five years. Since home users will bug th crap out of you, I switched to small business customers only. With your working hours, you obviously can't do that. Here's some things that I thought of:
-Liability Insurance
-Establish relationships with at least three suppliers and check prices. Being that you're a little fish, they won't save you any money on expensive components, but can save you quite a bit on little things.
-Keep business and personal purchases SEPERATE.
-Do not underprice your services
-Do not purchase inventory before you need it
-Do not build systems for people no matter how much they beg. When a customer screws up a Dell, it's becuase they (the customer) screwed it up; if they screw up a system that you built, it's because it wasn't a Dell.