Small Business Idea

Hi guys as most of you know I have been a Hexus user for a long time and consider myself pretty computer savvy. I have been thinking about setting up my own small business/part time repairing PC's and fixing any issues people may have. I assume most of these problems will be spyware/virus related. I would also be installing new hardware for people too. I was just wondering what you guys think would be a good starting setup for me to take out with me, obviously i need a laptop, memory stick and a great selection of free software. Any other suggestions?

Some sort of usb to IDE/SATA might be handy so that you can plug in corrupted HDD's and pull data off for people in need of it.

Might be useful to have cheapy spare DDR/DDR2, laptop DIMMS, power supplies etc.. just for fault finding purposes.

Hows about one of these @ scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=469178

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Originally Posted by Zero 101

Hows about one off these @ scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=469178

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Yeah that sort of thing, Sharkoon do one too I beleive.

It would be handy to have something that does both PC IDE and Laptop IDE as that can be an annoying one.

Mostly this sort of work is about your attitude. You will get difficult people who have tried to "fix" it themselves and made the problem 100x worse to figure out. Trying to teach as you go is something I always did in tech support but then if you are being paid per job then that's not something you want to do very much of :p

Thanks for the tips on the extra equipment, thats a good idea.

As far as teaching folks on the go, you are right, I do not need them to get too good at it otherwise I would run out of business.

What i find hilarious about this type of thing is the way some people act.

Sold a PC once (this was a 166Mhz MMX!) bloke complained the CD drive stopped working, and he had to buy a new one, and wanted us to pay. Best of all the shop that told him this, had taken the 8 speed out, given him a 2x speed. Only reason we found this out is because after he kept hasseling us, thinking he'd been sold a lemon i said even thou we sold it to you 2 months ago, i'd fix it. Then it transpired he didn't have the 'broken' drive any more. He didn't beleive he'd been ripped off because in his mind the drive had stopped working (this was in the joyous dos days) it would of plainly been a simple issue that a game had broken autoexec.bat or config.sys or something.

In the end, we had to find the receipt for the 8 speed, show him that he'd been sold a dual speed, for more than we'd payed 6 months previous for the 8, and even then he still didn't believe we weren't conning him. In the end dad got quite pissed off and told him not to bother us again, we where beyound caring, he'd bought it SAS so it didn't matter if it was completely broken, and that if he came round again, we'd call the police. To this day i think he still thought he was ripped off by us, and that the shop which conned him was on his side. If your going to do work with plebs, make sure you can put up with that crap!

Good point there about the plebs, luckily I work in customer service and I have had my fair share of plebs over the years, I have learnt how to deal with them. I think its always amusing when people assume they know more than you regarding a subject and then try and make out that you are conning them etc. If they knew more they would not have needed your assistance in the first place.

Don't forget to buy insurance - as a business operating on customer's premises you're legally obliged to have public liability cover, and legal expenses cover could also be useful - imagine what would happen if something you'd repaired subsequently shorted out and electrocuted someone. Getting a PAT testing certificate would be a good idea, the course only lasts a day, and you can get a suitable Megger tester from Ebay for a couple of hundred pounds - that way, you could provide evidence that every machine left your care in a safe condition. You may even make more money out of PAT testing than PC repairs, and it would be a good sales point (free PAT test with every repair...)

Good idea would be to check in your area who's already doing this sort of stuff. There have been a few threads in the past about this sort of thing, since it seems like it's going to be an easy job - hey we can all fix PC's.

What you need to make sure is

- Competition
- Demand in your area
- Your outlay to what you charge

Some other things you might want to consider is maybe getting qualified with something like the A+ certification - just revise and take the exam (don't waste your money on the classes). You'll likely get more business if you can state that you're effectively a qualified technician.

Establish exactly what services you plan to do.

Are you just going to repair computers?
Are you going to offer things like installation of new hardware?
Building from the ground up to a custom specification?
"Extreme" options like fitting watercooling for people?
Are you going to operate from home, or by going to other people?

Saracen is your man for this sort of thing, but maybe look into stuff like taxing and legislation for setting up your own business too. There's a big difference between fixing the odd computer and going into serious business with it. You'll likely need to get a whole new rig as well for diagnostic purposes, as well as things like RAM of all sorts for testing motherboards, motherboards for testing different processors and so forth.

Teaching wise, the vast majority won't give a toss what you tell them so long as it's fixed. Does Mavis really want/need to know that she's got incompatible DDR2 or that her CMOS battery has run down? No, she just wants her internet working again. Nice thought, but it'll be wasted :P

Starting your own "small business" is difficult! ;)

I never thought it would be easy mate. ;)

Luckily I have some friends here that own 2 small businesses and they can help me out. I also think that setting up a business in Vancouver will be very different to the UK.

Well good luck, hoping to set up in Winnipeg sometime next year. :)

I know quite a few people who have attempted this at various times, and they've all eventually come to the conclusion that it's a mug's game.

The sticking point is usually the amount of time it takes for each service call - you'll be dealing with an almost infinite variety of hardware and software combinations, each with their own idiosyncracies and headaches. With the best will in the world, you won't have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all possible eventualities, and diagnosing and rectifying faults in those circumstances will very often take much longer than you anticipate. If you're going to charge a realistic enough hourly rate to cover your costs *and* make a decent living, it doesn't take long before the customer starts muttering "I could have bought a new PC for that"...

I assume home/domestic users are your target market here, businesses are a different ballgame entirely in all sorts of respects, as I'm sure you're aware.

If it were always just a case of installing SpyBot Search'n'Destroy, waiting for fifteen minutes while it does its job and the grateful and admiring owner brings you a cup of tea, then pocketing the cheque and taking your leave, everything would be grand. Unfortunately it rarely seems to work out like that...

/edit: but by all means don't let me stop you from having a crack at it and proving me wrong... :D

A good set of data recovery tools, install disks for various o/s's, a bootable linux iso, win 98 boot disk (always handy), the list just goes on. You sorta build on it all the time.

As I've said in previous threads on this, your one BIG headache is going to be post sales support, for two reasons:

1) a home user will expect support if something goes wrong, regardless of whether the problem is related to your fix or not... and, as with Animus' example, there's no point trying to tell them it's not the same fault, if they understood it in the first place, they'd probably fix it themselves.

2) post sales support earns you bugger all. If you misdiagnose an issue but your fix works temporarily, you might get called back and the customer will expect to not have to pay. If you go for support contract option, where customers buy post sales support, you'll find yourself being called on everytime an error message pops up... and every minute spent doing a contracted fix is a minute not working for a new client.

Throw into the two examples above that most dangerous of user, the one who knows a little but thinks they know a lot and you've got a world of trouble.

I stopped building PCs for my own family 'cos of all of the above... the last straw being when my mum, at the point of me delivering her newly built PC, told me she didn't want the Celeron CPU in it as she'd been told by my sister that these were actually P4s that were broken and so were sold off cheaply... she also told her that Windows XP wasn't as good as Windows '95, onboard sound doesn't work unless you have a more powerful CPU and a DVD drive won't play CDs.

Even after I convinced her she was mistaken she insisted on buying all this crap off QVC, trying to install it and then calling me up when the CD playing keyboard with built-in speakers suddenly stopped working... or when my sister tried to install a second optical drive, (back to that DVD drive won't play CDs thing), and they sodded it up by not setting the jumpers, then mucking around in the BIOS and really making life hard...

So now, if ANYONE ever asks me about PCs I ask them one question: "Reckon you can build it yourself?" If they say yes, I point them to SCAN, if it's a no, I point them to Dell.

Then I leg it.

Sounds like a plan just don't do it for friends, you can end up with grief especially if they are impatient luddites...

I'm sometimes astounded by the complete lack of any computer knowledge people still have in this day and age, you think that using them everyday people would gain at least some knowledge of them wouldn't you? unyet I still get friends and family coming to me asking for help for the most minor problems ones that you can fix in 2 seconds flat they don't even take the time to look around or google it they just freak out... wandering off a little there but my point is that it still seems that there is money to be made from peoples ignorance of IT :) Go for it!

I have stopped building PC's as well for people. If people come to me and say can you build me a PC, I say no go to Dell and get one. Why because they can deal with all the support. I don't mind helping out with odd problems, or doing a reformat and installation, and they make sure that if anything else goes wrong then its chargeable time, because its working when it leaves me.

Oh me either.

I have an amusing story about a luddite. My Dad and I knocked together a cheap one for one of my Dad's mates (my dad is an IT consultant, Unisys Mainframe proper oldskool!) and he was happy with it for a while and then he filled it up with crap (spyware, useless software for this and that) and then started complaining about how it was so crap but rather than reformating he went and bought a new one saying how much better it was and that somehow the one we built was inferior... 6 months later he's buying another for the same reason... muppet. He wouldn't have it that a simple bit of maintainance would sort it out, just looked at us like we were telling him a big load of porkies.

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Originally Posted by Stringent

I have stopped building PC's as well for people. If people come to me and say can you build me a PC, I say no go to Dell and get one. Why because they can deal with all the support. I don't mind helping out with odd problems, or doing a reformat and installation, and they make sure that if anything else goes wrong then its chargeable time, because its working when it leaves me.

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Yes another vote for Dell, let someone else pull their hair out.

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Originally Posted by Zero 101

Yes another vote for Dell, let someone else pull their hair out.

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What about Mesh? Why did Mesh and Hexus part company a little while back?

I don't know anything about Hexus's relationship past or present with Mesh, but I can say on the one occasion I had dealings with them, their after-sales support was absolutely pitiful. Emails ignored, phone calls ignored, letters ignored, you name it, they ignored it. IIRC they were featured on Watchdog, although this was a couple of years ago and I've no idea what they're like these days.

To cut a long story short, I'd recommended one of their systems to a friend, based purely on the advertised specs and the price (live and learn), and it kept freezing and BSODing seemingly for no logical reason - in the absence of any help from Mesh I felt responsible to a degree, having recommended it in the first place. I faffed around with it endlessly, thinking time and time again that *this* time I'd found what was wrong and fixed it, only to get the inevitable mournful phone call ("It's doing it again..."), usually in the evening when I was watching "Spooks" on TV. I ended up completely rebuilding it from scratch around a new motherboard (which sorted it once and for all), simply because I was sick of the sight of the damned thing. If it had belonged to someone off the street who was paying me as a freelance consultant, it would have been a complete nightmare... :crazy:

Mesh can be dodgy I agree. A friend of mine has a Mesh PC, its a few years old now and the warranty has ended but it wasn't the customer service that the problem was with so much what the engineers did and we didn't discover this until a few days ago.

About 2 years ago the graphics card, an ATI Radeon 9800pro, failed so he sent it back to mesh. It came back about a month later with a replacement card. Unlike I would he didn't check the card in anyway to see what they had replaced it with. A few days ago he was having problems with it so I got him to download the ati tool... which promptly identified it as a 9800SE (s**t edition). A little cheeky if you ask me!:O_o1: