   Starting a (small) PC repair business. Advice?
  Well I'm 18 and going to college currently for a degree in Computer Science. I'm wanting to start a small PC repair business what I mean by small is I don't care to hire people just small enough for me to manage by myself. Honestly I know a good bit about computers I've been repairing PC's as a hobby since I was 12. No I was not that good at that age half the time I would end up blowing something up lol. My knowledge has grown a lot in that area over the years. I've never read a single book on a computer(except for programming), or taken a course. The knowledge I have on the subject is purely from experience and lot's of it. How many times can you break something before learning how to fix it on your own or hell even learning how to prevent it from even breaking. I'm referring to computers which by the way do break, a lot.... You give me something to fix on a computer and I can fix it without even sweating. It's like programmed in my brain what I need to do right when I hear or see the problem. I can't really explain it to other people well but I can fix it.Anyways I didn't mean to type all that my point is I just want to find customers, go to their houses, fix their computers, get paid, come home. But I really have no idea where to start. If I could get all the business side of things out of the way and just be... me.... then I can easily do this. But since that's not how the world works I'm gonna have to deal with, learn, and master the business side of things.  I don't care for a 2,000 page book on how to make a Multi-billion dollar company. I just need enough help to get started. Advertising, Pricing, Tools, legal shit, etc etc (put more business things here). Just halp plz :*(p.s. yes I use I a lot   
  If you are planning on repairing PC's as a means to earn some quick cash while in college you do not need to do much, just advertise yourself and hopefully word will spread around.Having repaired a few PC's on the side myself, I have found that the problem usually boils down to some virus, a cheap pirated copy of Windows, or failure of a hardware component. For the latter, you might want to familiarize yourself with the history of certain hardware product lines as you probably will be dealing with both new and old computers.   ;  Another concern I have is college. If I put too much attention on college I'll lose customers plus even reputation. If I put too much effort into my job my grades will suffer. I was thinking about making it a full time thing and just dropping college all together. But I don't wanna regret that later. I don't know I really wanna do this if I'm good at one thing in life this is it so why not make some money with my skills?I could work at someplace like best buy but I don't really wanna work under somebody. Plus I can make a lot more money this way therefore working for someone else would just be a waste of time. Even though you can be a little more selective with your hours. Well maybe not. ;  Just to be clear, are you going to a college or university. My university has it's own computer repair shop with employees. If yours has something similar you could just get a job without having to advertise or look for people. Might be something to research.   ;  The beauty of this business is you can put as much or as little time into it as you want.For pricing, I went to best buy and charged half of what they were charging, which was pretty reasonable from my end.Business wise, make sure you state very clearly what charges are or are going to be before you do the work.  I had a piece of paper with all my services and I circled the ones I was planning to do or authorize before I did work.  For example, if they have virus/spyware problems (90% of your work), I would say "I'm going to charge you for the basic removal, if it's really bad, do I have your permission to back up your files and do an OS restore for $XX?"  That way they know up front what they were going to pay.  If it was going to be more, I would call them before I did more work.  That was all stuff I picked up at the Geek Squad and it served me very well.Also, cover your ass in terms of liability.  If you do this consisently one of two things will happen: hardware will fail while you're working on it, you will damage/corrupt/destroy data.  Make it clear that you are not responsible for backing up the data before work is done and that you are not liable if something should happen to the computer if it breaks during repair. As a college kid/small business owner, you do not want to be responsible for paying for a new laptop/system or professional data recovery.Other than that, it's a great business to start.  Word of mouth is huge, but if you can't get any clients you can always go door to door.  Sounds weird but once you get over the initial awkwardness you will get an insane amount of business from it.  When I needed more cash I would go door to door until I found someone that was having a slow computer and offer to fix it right there in their house for no extra charge.   ;  These people have posted some pretty good advice.You may not need to setup any sort of business entity. A sole proprietorship is probably all you need. Liability isn't that high, and you probably don't have any assets anyways if you are a student!I did computer work for people a county up (Tallapoosa), although not as often anymore (been focusing on school). Mostly word-of-mouth. I also make sure to get the job done, and ensure everything works.Just recently somebody had someone from a local computer shop come and transfer some files from her computer to an automatic sewing machine... thing. They didn't even wait and see if it worked in the machine. Surprise, the files never worked. I stopped by checked it out. Not only did they charge her 100USD, but also had her buy winzip to unzip an archive. I plopped the files on the memory card, and checked to see if they actually worked on the sewing machine.I didn't charge anything... felt bad she got ripped off the first time :PBasically, just don't screw people over.Anyhow, back when I worked on computers more often, I probably undercharged. I had people insisting to pay me more.. like.. 100USD for what literally took 5 minutes. Checking prices that local computer shops or best buy or whatever charge is probably a good idea.You may want to design a web site to advertise, and get some business cards professionally printed.[Edited by - curtmax_0 on May 21, 2009 5:21:51 PM]