Finding a Niche: Low-Income Neighborhoods

Advertising your computer repair business can be a bit overwhelming. 68.7% of American homes have internet access, and the number rises sharply in more densely populated areas.  That means you have over half of your community, town, city, or county as possible customers.

You could take a generalist approach and randomly advertise to as many people as possible and hope you appeal to some of those people.  That works for well-established companies with large advertising budgets.  But there is a much cheaper and more effective method of advertising that involves targeting a small niche of your potential customer base.

In the Finding a Niche series of blog posts I will profile different possible customer niches that you can target for your computer consulting business.

Today we will focus on low-income neighborhoods.  It may be natural to think this is not a good area to target your advertising.  Many assume that low-income customers will be less likely to pay or to become return customers.  However, in my experience, this is usually not the case.  Low income neighborhoods can be great with referrals.  There are a lot of opportunities in serving these areas to bring in more loyal customers to your business.  Because they are so undeserved, the need for computer repair in low-income neighborhoods is higher than normal.
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Four Reasons to Sign Up for the YFNCG Newsletter

If you’ve been a reader of this blog for a while, you may not have noticed a new feature there in the right column: The YFNCG Newsletter.

Even if you did notice it, you may not have felt compelled to sign-up.  You may already have signed up to receive blog updates via email or RSS.  However, those are simply ways to syndicate existing blog posts.  The YFNCG Newsletter is different.  It’s a way for me to connect with you more directly and more personally.

So if you’re on the fence about signing up, here are a few compelling reasons why you should.
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What It Takes To Be A Computer Consultant

I was thinking the other day about how it takes an equal blend of different skills in order to be a good, effective computer consultant.  I drafted a simple Venn Diagram to really visualize for myself, and others, how those different skills work together to create the different facets of a computer consultant.

starting a computer repair business

 

If you are weak in any of these three skills, then being a computer consultant might not be the right job for you.  Lets take a deeper look at each of the facets mentioned in the picture.
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Starting a Computer Repair Business: First Steps

I received the following email from a YFNCG reader.  I’ll call her Sally.  Sally wants to earn some extra money for college (she’s an Information Systems major) by repairing computers.  She goes on to say:

I have been cleaning my friends and families computers for years now and just haven’t charged.  I am emailing to get some tips about how I should go about this and how to present it to people. I am not yet A+ certified (because of cost) but have taken a detailed class on it. I just want to tell people that I am not certified but can do those basic things. Also what are your ideas about advertising and prices for repair and cleaning. I am going to continue this when I get to school as well so basically any help that you can give me for home and for school would be great.

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I CAN Hear You Now!: My Pick For VoIP Phone Service

This is the final article in the Can You Hear Me Now? Series of blog posts in which I embark on a journey to find the most cost effective home office VoIP plan for my computer repair business.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been looking for a low cost VoIP solution for my home office based computer consulting business. You can catch up on the series by reading the last two articles here and here.

After much consideration, I finally settled on a provider that I think will fit my needs as my business grows.

And the winner is…

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Can You Hear Me Now?: Small Business VoIP Smackdown!

This is the second article in the Can You Hear Me Now? Series of blog posts in which I embark on a journey to find the most cost effective home office VoIP plan for my computer repair business.

In the first article of this series, I made a case for why I feel VoIP is the right choice for home office small businesses.  Now that I’ve narrowed down my choices to a few commercial providers, it’s time to really dig in to each one, cut throught the noise, and find the right plan for me and my business.

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My First Customer: The Aftermath

So how did hings turn out with my first official customer as a business owner?

If you’ll recall in my initial post on the subject, a customer was referred to me a bit before I was fully prepared to start taking on customers.  I decided to take the client, mostly for experience, but also to get a bit more money into my business account.  The lady wasn’t too specific about the problem (are they ever?), but I thought it sounded like a corrupt HD.  Turns out that it was.

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My First Customer…More or Less

Although I don’t think I’m really ready for it yet, I decided to take on my first customer as owner and operator of Jiffy-PC, my computer consulting company.  I say I don’t feel I’m ready for it because there are still a few things I wanted to get settled before taking on customers, like getting a separate phone line established and printing up some business cards.  But my girlfriend approached me with a referral and I couldn’t resist.

I have had numerous customers before this, but they have all been off-the-record jobs, or jobs for other companies. The person I meet tomorrow will be the first official customer that I take on as a business.  How does that differ from my customers before?  Not much.  The only difference, really, is that I will provide her with an invoice after my work is done.  That invoice will contain my company logo and if she pays by check, it will be made out to Jiffy-PC. Other than that, nothing much is different from before.

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The Computer Guy Identity Crisis: Choosing A Job Title

Throughout my years in the IT industry I’ve held many positions and titles. Some are fairly accurate descriptions of what I was doing, and some were decidedly very un-acurate.  Now as I start my own business, I’m stuck with the task of giving myself a title.  As it turns out, it’s a little harder than I had anticipated.

Growing Up Geek

When I first fell in love with computers, I was in elementary school.  My parents got a big hunky IBM clone (I don’t remember the brand) complete with two fancy 5 1/4 inch floppy drives.  I loved to play around and find ways to break or confuse the programs.  This started a long love affair with breaking and fixing computers.  At that point, and all through school, I was a true computer geek.  I used computers for the sheer novelty of it.

Flash forward to my time serving in the US Army.   I wanted to flex my computing prowess and volunteered for various computer-centric tasks like creating databases and such.  I then got the opportunity to help network a new office from the ground up.  After that, I was officially appointed the unit’s assistant IMO (Information Management Officer), and was tasked with helping people in the unit with various computer issues.

I loved that job, and found I really had a knack for troubleshooting.  So, after I got out of the army, I took a job as an intern at the Help Desk of a pharmaceutical company.  Within 4 years time I was hired on full time, promoted to a Level 2 Analyst, and promoted again to my current position in the computer industry, Enterprise Systems Analyst.

Every time I was presented with a new position and name (Geek, Assistant IMO, Helpdesk Intern, Helpdesk Analyst, Systems Analyst) I was basically doing the same thing, fixing computer problems.

What’s in a Name?

When I had the idea to start my own computer business, it never occurred to me that I would need to define my job title. In fact, it wasn’t until I started writing this blog that I realized I needed to figure out what to call myself.   So I came up with a list of names that I’m considering using to refer to my position as an independent computer guy, along with how I feel about each one:

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PC Repair: On-Site Vs. In-Shop

There seem to be two schools of thought when it comes to the best way to run a computer maintenance or consulting business from home.  Some people believe that it’s impossible to do good quality work and get enough turn-over if you don’t take the customer’s computer back to your “shop”.  On the other hand, there are techs that work exclusively at the customer’s home and never bring work back home with them.

Which way is the best way to run a PC repair business?

As I’ve done in the past, I decided to weigh the pros and cons of each scenario and see how they stack up against each other using good old-fashioned reasoning.  Keep in mind, I’m not taking into account the possibility of opening a store front…that’s a whole different ball of wax and I’ll save that debate for a later time.  In the following lists I’ve lined out some of the more important factors that I could think of, drawing from my own experiences.

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