Computer Repair Business Guide

Part of owning a computer repair business is to make crucial management decisions.  Your first step will be deciding who it is you are going to sell to.  There are many different ways to sell a service business such as yours.  You might decide to use some advertising or just stick with word-of-mouth.  Either way, you are going to have to decide which jobs to take and how much to charge.

Your first step should be scoping out the competition.  Break out the phone book and find every local computer shop in your area.  Call them and pretend to be a customer.  Find out every price you can, write down everything you learn along the way.  Once you have an idea of what your competitors are charging for each task, you will be able to set your own prices.

The trick here is to lower your prices below what your competitors are charging but keeping your prices high enough to make the customer believe they are buying a valuable service.  People like to feel like they are getting a quality service and if you set your prices too low, the random Joe on the street will feel like you are not quite so valuable.  Walk the line between the extremes; you want to be a discount service for a respectable price.

Once you have the value of your service nailed down start to consider who you want to help.  Do you only want to work for friends and family?  Do you want to branch out and get random customers?  The answers to those questions will determine how aggressive you want to be about advertising.

For a respectable business, you’re going to want to advertise on a consistent basis in some way.  If your target is friends and family then the only thing you need to do is to get the word out that you are now attempting to build a business.  Chances are the people closest to you will come to you in order to help out your business as well as get a friendly discount.

If you want to start getting customers outside of friends and family, you are going to have to advertise.  There are many cheap ways to advertise a business.  You can print up flyers on your home computer then take them to the local Kinko’s and print up 500 copies.  Spread them around your town.  You can buy an ad in the local Pennysaver for a relatively cheap price.  Lastly, you can buy a more expensive print ad in your local newspaper.  Anything beyond those moves should wait until you have a physical shop with computer workstations.

If you want to go high-tech you can always open up your own website for a few bucks a month.  Regardless of your decision, remember that you need to advertise in some shape or form.  The only way to run a successful computer repair business is to target the right kind of customers.