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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."
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.
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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.
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
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.