It is a brave step starting out on your own to become a local computer repair person. You’ll be in contest with others like you, computer stores and larger companies who cater for your market place.
Some of the most sizable challenges you’ll confront nonetheless will be when you are actually on the task. Contradictory to what some may believe, supporting home and small business enterprise users is rather a great deal tougher than working in a large scale corporate environment. Here are some of the reasons why, so you can be disciplined and be more efficient - establishing you a good reputation and more word of mouth referrals.
Home and small business users can be the most difficult customers you’ll ever deal with. They will expect great value from you and will dispute their bills unless they are 150% satisfied.
1. They will require you to recognize what a problem is and how to repair it the same way they would a pipe fitter who came round to unfreeze a waste pipe. It won’t take place all the time but on occasion expect for them to decline to pay up for any time you spend ‘figuring out what the trouble is’.
2. They don’t experience the luxury of being able to trade out their PC with one from the store room or to work on someone else’s while you work on theirs. And So when they are dead in the water, unable to work and losing money because of it – the pressure will be on you. You will decidedly need to be able to cope with this and get used to somebody standing over your shoulder hassling you to speed up.
3. They will ask you to look at all varieties of other things aside from what you’ve booked in to see them about. If you have apportioned them a certain measure of time to perform a certain problem then you have to be clear at the start of the visit. See if there is enough time left over at the end of the call or schedule another one. The most all important thing is to state at the beginning of your call that you are there to perform a particular task. A professional looking work order will assist a great deal here.
4. They do not have standard desktop builds with good antivirus and policies that keep them from downloading and installing whatsoever they wish. This is what makes this type of work so fascinating, and obstructive. Just think spyware, spyware spyware, be ready for it and anticipate to see it everywhere you go.
5. They will blame you for things that have gone wrong that aren’t your mistake. Ever heard this phrase before?
“Well it was fine until the IT person came and now it doesn’t work (I’m not paying this invoice!)”
Expect this to take place a lot. Over Again professional looking work orders and good documentation of all work carried out will be the proof you call for to proove exactly what you have and haven’t done. A customer at one time called up and yelled at my boss straight after a call because his printer quit working just after I left. Turns out he switched off the computer it was attached to.
Supplying computer repair services to small business and domestic users can be a enormously rewardful experience. And of course being your own boss is as good as it gets. I hope the above points haven’t put you off, the intent is to train you for some of the most intense parts of the job.
You can protect yourself and be ready just by setting up an efficient system of rules for work orders, call documentation and routines for particular situations. Do this and you’ll get known in your region as the go-to somebody and have too much work to manage.
Now go get ‘em!
Peter Webber is a freelancer IT consultant and contractor to large and small businesses. His internet site concentrates on many aspects of working in the IT industry in particular how to set up your home computer mending business
