Suggestions for a PC Home Tech Support Business? 165
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."
I Tried This (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Aside from "run away! run away!" (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Have a dayjob... (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't have up-front money for real advertising. I got zero new customers.
I ended up with a pizza delivery job - steady income, sometimes free food, and no more watching Windows reboot all day.
Moral of story: have flexible goals...
Re:I Tried This (Score:2, Interesting)
I had one tiny free phone number in the Yello Pages directory, and it made me pretty good spending money. I'm going to start advertising around the University. At the moment I actually perform similar work for the Univserity.
Re:If you must.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
been there tried it... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to save yourself some grief try to skew your business towards the small office/home office market. Though you will still find uncooperative customers the "business" ones rely on the machines and are more likely to spend money when its needed. Some home users will tend to be a cheap as possible, many will already be irritated in having to call you start with and if there are any actual hardware issues that have to be fixed prepare for a battle over the cost of parts and labor. I had a client a few months ago who's computer would not turn on. His power supply was toast but I had a spare at home so I took one over and replaced it. After the machine was bootable again I noticed the machine was running very slow so I started a basic cleanup. I was about to download a few updates from MS and started the Windows Genuine plugin, the copy of windows turned out to be pirated. The client starts going nuts and is convinced that MS was going to come beating down his door and it was all my fault. Overall just be thick skinned and dont get too personal about it, friendly is one thing being friends is another. If you cross that line people will take advantage of you.
Re:Be prepared for bounced checks. (Score:2, Interesting)
You can't sell nuttin' to people what ain't got no money.
People whine and bitch and moan about "the rich getting richer", but without the rich, all checks would bounce.
This does not match my experience. I work with plenty of people on government assistance who never bounce checks and manage to save enough money to buy a used computer and pay for its support. Sure, there are scoundrels out there, but a successful business has to be wary of scoundrels at all income levels, not just the among poor. You can't seriously argue that a rich customer will never try to rip you off!
Yes, serving customers at the low end of the income scale requires a different business model than serving customers at the high end. But just becuase it is a different type of business does not mean there is no business there at all.
Been Doing this 10 Years (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's my advice:
1. Always charge what you are worth. $25.00/hr sounds fair until you realize you have to get there and the fact that 10 hours labor a week is only $250.00 and you have to make a living. I charge $60.00/hr with an hour minumum and 1/2 hour increments after that. If I lived in a city in Maine I would charge $75 to $90 because that is the going rate.
2. After you are sure things are going to work, incorporate. You need the protection from liability, and the break on taxes. Get a good accountant that's not afraid of the home office deduction (many are).
3. Yellow Pages are a waste of time, take a small ad out in a local weekly the same as you see plumbers, painters, and oil burner techs do. Commit to it, because people don't even "see" your ad until the 3rd time they read it.
4. Read this article, and the 2nd one: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/958885/p
5. The parts that the above posters hate, the people that don't pay attention, cluttered homes, etc...those are all the parts I like. I am out of the house meeting people and am the hired expert in the room. That's an ego boost for me! It's not THEIR job to know computers, it's yours, so do your best to make their computer as safe as it can be without making it hard to use. Explain things to them in plain english (or whatever
6. If you see that you can't fix it there (or you can't figure it out) stop, and take it back to your place. Tell them it will be a 2 hour flat rate no matter how long it takes. At home you don't have them looking over your shoulder, you have Google to look stuff up, and another workstation to clean the drive. I have yet to have a computer I couldn't fix, or at least know what was up with it (if it was too expensive to fix). Sometimes it might take you 2 hours, but mostly it won't and after awhile you will be able to fix anything given time as you gain experience. Last week I had 5 computers here, was fixing 2 at once (on 2 KVM switches) and while they sit there and scan for hours I surf Slashdot.
Well, that's all for now! Gotta go, I have 3 appts. today!