/g/ - Technology » Thread #17272988

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Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:26:00 No.17272988 View View Reply Original Report

So /g/ I have worked in IT for the last two years, Second level Desktop support and repair, Want to eventually branch off and open up my own small PC repair store.

Harvey normans here charges almost 200 for a Virus scan and removal, another 100 more to wipe it if they cant fix it, and an extra 200 for backup storage.

Seriously that is bullshit prices and I reckon a small store could do that for a quarter the price easy.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:28:00 No.17273001 Report

Quoted By: >>17273048 >>17273108

Is it a hard market to get into?

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:33:00 No.17273048 Report

Quoted By:

>>17273001
Not OP, but it's Australia, not many people here are computer literate.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:36:00 No.17273078 Report

Quoted By: >>17273349

huh, I could have charged $500 bucks for that? shit, all I asked for was a box of chocolates...

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:39:00 No.17273095 Report

Quoted By:

britfag here doing the same thing. You wouldn't believe how stupid some people can be when it comes to computers here.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:40:00 No.17273108 Report

Quoted By: >>17273157

>>17273001
The hardest part is building up a client base. Once you do that, its pretty easy. The thing is, you have to give people something that the competitors can't, and lower prices is a good start.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:41:00 No.17273115 Report

Quoted By: >>17273131

Just to let you know, it's a lot quicker to retrieve information and important documents, make a note of what programs they use and just reformat.

It only requires about 10 minutes of interactivity and most people will just be happy with a completely reformatted computer.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:42:00 No.17273131 Report

Quoted By: >>17273142 >>17273157

>>17273115
If you're going to do this with every computer you repair, look into professional indemnity insurance. You won't know how valuable it is until you delete some files that you didn't know were there that the customer raises a fit over.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:43:00 No.17273142 Report

Quoted By: >>17273180

>>17273131

Disclaimers and waivers are always key here.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:44:00 No.17273157 Report

Quoted By: >>17273180 >>17273349

>>17273108
I would recommend copying/printing services. There was a local computer shop near me that basically survived doing that.

>>17273131
I would recommend if it's feasible to make a disk image of their shit first. Most people don't have that much stuff usually, and you can delete it later.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:47:00 No.17273180 Report

Quoted By:

>>17273142
True, but a waiver doesn't always stand up in court, and the insurance saves you the lost time of having to go to court in the first place.

>>17273157
A disk image would be a good idea in most cases, but if you're going to format and do a clean install of every computer that comes to you, then you might want to cover your ass from multiple angles.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:50:00 No.17273211 Report

Quoted By: >>17273234

Schoolfag here. I cleaned up some guys shitty PC (We're talking 256MB RAM, P4 tier) and he gave me £50 for it. It took me about an hour and he delivered it to my door, picked it up the next day.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:52:00 No.17273228 Report

Quoted By: >>17273349

I live in Aus too and was thinking about starting up my own little repair shop/store too.

I was actually surprised to find that in my fairly small city, there were already about 4 or 5 places doing the exact same thing.

I had worked for one of these stores before and checked out a few and they were all pretty busy. It really does surprise me that in 2011, we still have so many people ignorant about how to fix simple computer issues.

These repair shops would capitalize on the ignorance as well. Pretty sure most of the places would charge about $70-80 just to look at a PC, then add on costs at a whim per hour of labour, jacked up parts costs and arbitrary fees like a $30 'diagnostic fee', which was added if they used a free tool like memtest or seatools.

I'm sure you could setup your own shop and undercut their fees pretty well. I guess the determining factor would be if you could get enough customers to make a profit after all your expenses.

Although there are a lot of technology illiterate people around my area, they seem to be loyal to particular stores, despite the fact they are being massively ripped off. This is especially true with old people. It seems if the store can fix their PC once, they will trust the people to do it every other time.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:52:00 No.17273230 Report

Quoted By: >>17273264

I work at a small computer repair shop. I once was able to recover a file by restoring it from the recycle bin.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:53:00 No.17273234 Report

Quoted By:

>>17273211
I've been doing this kind of stuff for quite a while now. Had some mad customers for different reasons, but politely told them to fuck off.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:57:00 No.17273264 Report

Quoted By: >>17273296

>>17273230
Did you charge them over $100 to do it?

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 18:59:00 No.17273277 Report

Quoted By: >>17273283

how do you guys find clients?

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 19:00:00 No.17273283 Report

Quoted By:

>>17273277
Word of mouth. I started with friends and coworkers, gave them cut rates for advertising for me.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 19:01:00 No.17273296 Report

Quoted By: >>17273326

>>17273264

God, there are some cringe worthy moments from working in a repair store.

Once did an out call to check some problems and old couple were having with their PC and digital camera. All I did was show them how to move photos from the camera onto the PC.

As per store policy, I had to bill them $70 for this.

Ballin'

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Ballin' Mon 02 May 2011 19:05:00 No.17273318 Report

Quoted By: >>17273345

>>17272988

Listen OP, if you charge less, they'll probably still go to the overchargers just because they charge more. A lot of times something can be more valuable to people because they pay more for it. They'll think your store is just some ghetto store in the corner and think you'll do a bad job at it.

Instead, you should ionsite (fucking captcha)

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 19:06:00 No.17273326 Report

Quoted By:

>>17273296
That's why one of my selling points for my repair business is free diagnosis. In your case, I would've charge for gas (figured using mpg and round to the nearest $5 increment) and then after I figured out that there wasn't really a problem, I probably wouldn't have charged, or if I had it would've been like $10 or something.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 19:09:00 No.17273345 Report

Quoted By:

>>17273318
This is what Mac fanboys do. They think that because they paid more for something, its better. I often combat this in my business by telling them that I'll charge them extra if it will make them feel better about it, and then explain what actually goes into what needs to be done and about how many hours it takes so that they can see for themselves that they're being overcharged. That said, you have to build rapport to combat the "consumer giants" which goes back to how building a client base is the hardest part of the job.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 19:10:00 No.17273349 Report

Quoted By:

OP here again.
Lots of good suggestions.
>>17273078
Stupid isnt it, All I expected was sex.
>>17273228
Im in Adelaide, every now and then you see an IT fixer car rolling around but It's not too common to find an IT store here.

>>17273157
Not a bad idea, probably everyone would just use the store as a cheap print service though.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 02 May 2011 19:26:00 No.17273492 Report

Quoted By:

Bumping for tips

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