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I just started my Business!!!

J

Juan Sanchez

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 31, 2003
Messages
369
Hey guys well, I've been a long time fan of computers and hater of working for the man. So I started my own computer repair and custom system shop. So far Ive sold the following to my customers.

Athlon XP 3200+
512MB Pc3200
Shuttle AN35N Mobo
120GB HDD
Radeon 9800 Pro 128
Athenatech Case w/350watt PSU
DVD/CD-rw Combodrive
Floppydrive
Windows XP Pro (Legite)
(No Key/Mouse,Monitor)
Logitech z-340 Speakers

I sold 2 of those for $1000 a peice

Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz (533)
Asrock Mobo (SiS Chipset)
512 MB PC 2100
80 GB HDD
On-Board Video
Athenatech Case w/350 Watt PSU
DVD/CDrw Compdrive
Floppy Drive
Windows XP Pro (Legit)
Logitech Key and Mouse
17" Viewsonic Monitor
No Speakers

I sold one of those to an office for $1000. They liked it so much they're ordering 3 More!!!!

I also did some repair stuff for some customers. I just wanted to ask some of you guys for some advice as to what I should do. I would like to do more custom machines for families but it's hard to spread the word. I have a website up and going (www.opserc.com) but it isnt done yet. Acctually Im not in it alone. A good friend of mine is my partner and he got us the contract with that business while I got the one for those gaming machines. I would love to get thoughts from you guys as what I should do next. And please constructive criticizem only.
:)
 
dont use your house number for your tech line...
use your cell phone soo you can turn it off when there bothering you. :D

edit: by the way nice site.. :)
 
if your city has a computer newspaper like mine, it would be very wise to put an advertisement in one of those.
 
Originally posted by Millow
if your city has a computer newspaper like mine, it would be very wise to put an advertisement in one of those.
Click to expand...

hell even a small spot in the local Sunday paper would probably do well
 
Remember that a happy customer tells 3 friends , 7 tops.

A pissed off customer tells 40 friends.

Sometimes you need to loose money to keep a customer happy

Always offer choice and let the customer decide no matter what the issue.Then what ever happens is the customer's responsibility and you just offer more choices on how to help resolve their concerns.

Gorilla marketing is key. Dont be afraid to ask a customer for a referral

Do it right never short change. If you chase money it will never come to you.

If you dont chase money it will come to you in spades. In other words: Do what it takes to be successful and the money will come. Dont focus on the money fucus on your strengths and what needs to be down to facilitate sales and the money will automaticly come.

I became a millionaire but sticking to the fundimentals. Good luck kemosobey and if you keep it real you will become successful beyond your wildes dreams.

Dont be a pig and controll your costs.
 
I've been in business for a little over a year and 1/2 for myself. There's a few things I'll say that may help you out which contradict what has been mentioned above

1) Whilst referrals are all good, sometimes you have to know when to let a customer go for it to be profitables for both you and your lost client
2) Think outside your square. While a lot of people do what you do (in any business field) it's the networking and stimulation via events, sponsorship and public participation that reeps the most reward.

Swallow your pride and shyness and do it for yourself =]
 
Im 24 and for now its only local. I would like to offer my systems online but I don't want to kill peeps on shipping and I'd want to send my systems out with FedEx so my customers get the best service. I've asked my current customers to tell friends about it but I didn't jam it down their throtes. I've posted flyers around my campus at college and gave a few to friends to post at their jobs. I loved visiting my old job (craptastic Blockbuster) and telling them I went into business for myself. The reason I quit a lot of my job was my issue with top managment. For example the District Manager asked things that are impossible for the employees to do and expected us to do them anyway. Its easy for him to say because he never worked at the retail level. Meanwhile my poor manager had to work 3-days straight to make the DM look good. That pisses me off.
 
Originally posted by |THAT|Mac
I've been in business for a little over a year and 1/2 for myself. There's a few things I'll say that may help you out which contradict what has been mentioned above

1) Whilst referrals are all good, sometimes you have to know when to let a customer go for it to be profitables for both you and your lost client
2) Think outside your square. While a lot of people do what you do (in any business field) it's the networking and stimulation via events, sponsorship and public participation that reeps the most reward.

Swallow your pride and shyness and do it for yourself =]
Click to expand...

Swallow your pride? What does that mean?

Take pride in your work , exude confidence. Be the "go to guy" for product knowledge.

Offer your customer value, dont just build them a machine, teach and tell them what and why. Have a plan. You dont have to swallow your pride. LEt the customer know exactly what they are getting for their money and most importanly, provide them with a buying experience they wont forget.

IF you do, word of mouth will be very effective. I have been in business for 20 years and know what I am talking about. It is about rapport with the customer and the business community.

PS: no disrespect to the inidividual whom i quoted but he or she is providing an example of "chasing money" You dont sit back and let the customer make the wrong decision for the sake of profit. a year and half is 10 minutes in business years. IF that individual follows that mantra he or she will be out of business in 3 years "30 minutes" Don't be short sighted. You dont have a 200k ad budget.
 
I'd want to send my systems out with FedEx so my customers get the best service
Click to expand...

FedEX costs so much more than UPS and they both offer the same 'quality' service

no company treats packages better than the other.

good luck with your business venture.

what exit off of 91 is Meriden? i should stop in next weekend nd check stuff out
 
Originally posted by hi tech hate
FedEX costs so much more than UPS and they both offer the same 'quality' service

no company treats packages better than the other.

good luck with your business venture.

what exit off of 91 is Meriden? i should stop in next weekend nd check stuff out
Click to expand...

Take 84 west toward Waterbury once you get into Southington take the 691 exit toward Meriden , get off the one of the Meriden exits. No need for 91.

LOL Meriden is only a few minutes from my
Home roflmao small world
 
Congrats!

I also happen to work in the same thing, were are local only to. (there's only one other business like ours in the area, and to be honest they are very "shody")

IT will grow, as long as you keep em happy, we have quite a few clients like lawyer offices etc, and when they are happy they do referr you.

we have a website up to (but its crap in my honest view) but I can't say that to the guy that made it :rolleyes: ;)
http://www.turnercomputersolutions.com/

But the only reason we really have it, is so on the business cards we can put down our website (we are local only, and will be till the end of time im sure)
 
What about local computer shows?

Also, I'll say my congrats! I thought seriously about doing that as a side job... just never got around to it. Good for ya!
 
That website is pro. Best of luck man. I have thought about starting my own computer selling business but dealing with technical problems from customers is just not fun.
 
Their isnt much to speak of right now. We're running it out of my basement. I have 3 15" monitors for customers computers and My 2 gaming machines of my own. I'm in the process of building a Duron Box for diagnosing peoples harddrives. I wouldnt want to pop a HDD into one of my gaming systems.
 
website = good
but you may wanna use a different name... just something to thin about, not the company name either
 
Originally posted by jacuzz1
Take 84 west toward Waterbury once you get into Southington take the 691 exit toward Meriden , get off the one of the Meriden exits. No need for 91.

LOL Meriden is only a few minutes from my
Home roflmao small world
Click to expand...

lol, and Plainville is only 20 minutes more :p
 
Congratulations!!
Not to crap, but check the spelling under your logo on the word "computitng".

I'm formulating plans to start a shop, so I'm quite interested in your experiences. Do you have a storefront?
 
just a thought

on the top right on your website, u might want to call it espanol and not spanish, some who don't speak english may not understand that

but i'm really not a liberty to say
 
A couple things to fix on your front page:

- Under "Small Business PC Solutions", change from "Comptia" to "CompTIA".
- Under "Network Solutions", correct from "latests" to "latest".

I also second the recommendation for "Español" instead of "Spanish". Be sure to use the proper "ñ" thingy.

On the graphic "OPSERC COMPUTITNG AT THE SPEED OF IMIGINATION", the "COMPUTING..." part is coming across blurry or fuzzy on my laptop screen; everything else looks fine. Maybe that little bit needs to be tweaked?

Other than that, I like the layout so far.
-----

To expand on some stuff that jacuzz1 said:

Sometimes you need to loose money to keep a customer happy
Click to expand...
True dat. And by losing a little money to make a happy customer, well, you've just made a HAPPY customer. Happy customers come back. When they come back, you've got the opportunity to make up some of that lost money.

Remember that a happy customer tells 3 friends , 7 tops.

A pissed off customer tells 40 friends...
Click to expand...
... so avoid having pissed-off customers. This goes hand-in-hand with the one above. You have a guy who is not completely satisfied with some issue. You do what it takes to make him pleased with the result, though you've lost maybe a little money in the process. He comes back a year later for another system, and he also tells his buddies:
- the system you built for him is top-notch
- your customer service is also top-notch

About the hardest thing to get right is Customer Service. Some people, no matter what you do, will not recover from a bad first impression. You can offer an unhappy customer an entire replacement system with free lifetime on-site support and it may run perfectly fine for the next 4 years, but there are certain folks out there who will not be placated by this and they will not come back for their next purchase. Understand that this does not always have anything to do with you. Others will view your efforts as being well above the norm and you will have gained customers for life.

We have some customers who have really put up with a tough time on their machines (numerous or on-going problems) but we try to make sure they come back to us when it's time to upgrade to bigger and better. How do you do this? Treat them fairly, offer something free in return (extend the warranty, "courtesy" service visit, reduced price on parts, whatever), keep them apprised of your efforts to resolve the problem. In fact, that's one of the biggest gripes that people have when trying to get help on any purchase - they want to feel that they're being kept up to date on the progress of the resolution to their problem. Usually it's a simple as an e-mail saying that the parts are on order and should be here by date XXYYZZ; follow up with a tracking link after the part ships.

Always offer choice and let the customer decide no matter what the issue.Then what ever happens is the customer's responsibility and you just offer more choices on how to help resolve their concerns.
Click to expand...
This lets the customer feel more involved, also. It shows that you're thinking about THEIR needs and not just what you would like to do. Don't just ask "Well, how do you want to fix this?" First of all, their response will always be, "Replace the whole PC with a new one at no cost to me". Not reasonable, but that's how many people out there think. Come to them with a list of options (let's assume bad video card under warranty):
- replace video card with same model, no cost
- upgrade card to newer model of same product line at $xx (small number) extra cost
- big upgrade to top o' de line card for $XXX cost
- oh yeah, and while we're in there, would you like to get more RAM for only another $83, no labor cost (with your usual parts mark-up, of course)?

Do it right never short change. If you chase money it will never come to you.
Click to expand...
I'm the senior guy for the tech staff in our company. As such, I get to train most of the new guys on our stuff. One thing that is so hard to impress on them is that image is often more important than performance. Before you throw out the Bullshit Flag, let me explain. We do mechanical assembly of complex high-speed machinery. There are some places where a part is only installed for appearance' sake, such as body panels. Other parts can be installed a little bit misaligned and still do their job perfectly fine for the life of the machine. It takes a little longer to make sure the alignment of those parts is correct and there is no performance difference between being perfectly perpendicular or 3-5 degrees off. However, when a customer sees those few parts not in line with each other, he begins to think, "if those 4 simple parts aren't lined up right, I wonder what ELSE is not set up properly?" The rest of the machine may be perfectly correct in its functionality, but this guy will forever be questioning the installation of that machine. Every little tech support call, every warranty question, every hiccup will make him think the installation was not done well. He will have doubts about the machine and about the guy who built it. And if our company hires people who can't build the machine properly, then why should he want to come back to buy from us again? He's only going to get the same slipshod build quality, right? Nevermind that the machine may run flawlessly for the next 3 years, he'll always have that little nagging question in the back of his mind. Your job is to not leave the customer any reason to go looking for little problems like this. Your build quality needs to be impeccable, you need to always clean up whatever mess you make on-site, you need to stick around for a little while to be absolutely certain your repairs are correct... it's these seemingly little things that will bite you in the ass if you ignore them in the name of getting things done quicker. Take the extra 10 minutes to dress up those cables inside, to test the RAM you installed, etc. It'll save you in the long run by avoiding return visits and earning repeat business.

If you dont chase money it will come to you in spades. In other words: Do what it takes to be successful and the money will come. Dont focus on the money fucus on your strengths and what needs to be down to facilitate sales and the money will automaticly come.
Click to expand...
Our parent company has focused on making the premier machine for the product line we sell. For 50+ years, they have stuck to this one particular type of machine and are generally known to make the best machine to be had. When times have been tough, we did not reduce the quality of the machinery to gain more sales, though many of our competitors did. As a result, we temporarily lost some sales to the competition. A few years later, we are getting many of these customers back - those compromised machines caused problems for them, and in an industry like ours where uptime is of paramount importance, our adherance to our own standards of machine quality allowed our faithful customers to perform better than those who were temporarily trying to save a buck. I have heard, first hand, how our smaller machines will out-perform larger and more expensive equipment simply by virtue of better engineering and better uptime. That's the type of endorsement you need to strive for. In today's biz world, uptime is hyper-critical. If it costs you more to ensure that your machines will run without fault, then that's what you need to do. Explain this to the customer, that a cheaper machine with 99% uptime is of absolutely no use to them during that 1% of downtime. Those customers who "get it" will spend the extra for quality. You just need to ensure that you can provide it 100% of the time.
--------

One idea you may want to consider is to throw in "value-added" stuff - little freebies that will make ownership easier. One thing that I have done on the systems I've built or upgraded for friends is to include a CD with the following stuff on it:

- latest drivers for ALL of their hardware, including mobo drivers.
- links to all of those drivers or manufacturer sites.
- registry backup.
- any online manuals (usually .pdf files) for the hardware they bought.

Make a copy for yourself and toss it in their file. This makes it easier for you should a hard drive fail or some other catastrophe occurs.

Also, look at getting custom mouse pads with your company logo on it. Avoid white ones, since they get dirty - do you really want a dirty mousepad as your advertising tool? Case badges are good too - weblink and phone number. Custom desktop wallpaper with your contact info. See what I'm getting at? It's these little things, stuff that you gotta do ANYWAY (get latest drivers, backup registry, provide mousepad, etc), that you can customize at very little cost to help provide a little advertising and make the ownership experience a little smoother.
 
Most of the advice thus far is pretty well on. My addition is this: B2B will pay more, and be less or a hassle than B2C. If I were you, I would explore the B2B market a lot more vigorously than the consumer market. You don't have to spend nearly revenue for advertising, and word of mouth (good or bad) travels a TON faster than with end user consumers.

I currently have an informal consulting/IT admin business that I run, and I'l be honest, there has to be a huge carrot in front of me for me to deal with a non-business entity related end user. Too much of a pain in the ass.

But, to each their own, I think for PC hardware building, you have a pretty uphill battle ahead of you, especially if you want to corner a part of the fickle end-user market.
 
I totally agree about offering the latest drivers for their system. I had a customer come to me with a windows XP system that had to have a DVD-Rom installed. The customer never bothered to use windows update because they were still stuck on 56k. Well I slapped one of my many network cards in their and d/l and installed the latest updates while I watched the simpsons. Then I went the nVidia's site and D/Led the latest drivers for the Geforce 3. All out of the kindness of my hear :D. Oh and Bitchnmoan, thanks a ton for that advice. Very informative :)
 
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