Placing advertising and getting phone calls is only half the battle, once a client calls, you still need to turn them into a service call. Many of the phone calls that a technician will receive are only “price checks” as clients make their way down the list. In this article, we’ll show you some ways to turn price checks into service calls.
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A computer technician on a site that I occasionally read brought up the topic “phone support should be the most expensive service we bill for”. Personally, I think hes right.

For example, if you call up the manufacturer of a router they will help you up until the point where they know the problem isn’t being caused by their hardware. They will then pass you onto a paid helpline that often charges $80 per hour and upwards. Yet, we as freelance computer technicians often give phone support away for free. When its free, it becomes hard to track and leeches billable time off you and your employees; something that a small business can hardly afford.
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You read it right. If you are a self employed computer repair technician, what you wear is more important than your certifications; especially when you are visiting the client for the first time. Don’t get me wrong though, certifications are generally needed if you plan to work for someone else because many of the employment agencies use certifications to screen people. However, they aren’t very important if you are self employed.

If you are certified and self employed you can hang them on your workshop walls to impress clients but keep in mind it isn’t the testing you had to go through to achieve that certification they are seeing, they are seeing that you look like you know what you are doing, even if they have no idea what they mean. So again, how you look is more important than your certifications.
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A topic that is frequently brought up in the Technibble forums is whether they should offer the “no fix, no fee” guarantee. Some people see it as a way to get more clients while others think it will cause problems. So, should you offer it? Read on.
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Yesterday I recieved an email from a Technibble reader who had seen my web hosting prices and thought they extremely overpriced. He said that he pays $6 a month and gets much more space than the $15 per month plans that I had on offer. He said he thought Technibble preaches to provide value and not fleecing our customers.

It was a totally valid email that had a good observation and Im glad he sent it. This article is about why I charged more than most other web hosts.
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A poster on the Technibble forums recently mentioned that his client wanted him to provide and install pirate software onto their computer. He also mentioned that in his part of the world (the middle east) that pirate software is very common and readily available.

He asked our community whether he was handicapping his business by hesitating to provide pirate software when all the other technicians were doing it. It was a good question with a simple answer.
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I want to share with you a really simple trick to generate more computer and hardware sales. This article is a relatively short one because this trick is just so simple.

I have always been turned off by “salesman sleaze”. I hate salesmen that do this to me and I don’t want to become one myself either. I found the best way to sell to your clients without being a sleaze is to be a problem solver.
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There are plenty of business books out there that will tell you that your business should service some sort of niche market. What is a niche market? Wikipedia describes it as:

“A niche market is a focused targetable portion (subset) of a market.

By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. A niche market may be thought of as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.”

Many business books also say that you should thoroughly research the niche before you start a niche business to make sure that it is profitable and enough clients will exist. In the computer service field there is a huge amount of niches such as:

• Repairing networks for huge corporations with 500+ computers
• Repairing computers/networks for the military or in hostile areas
• Servicing commercial computers and systems like Point-of-Sale systems and barcode scanners

There are countless possibilities in the service field. In the hardware field there are options such as high end gaming machines, point-of-sale computers and many other computers to fill a niche.

In this article I am going to write about what I believe to be a bad computer hardware niche and what I believe to be a good hardware niche.
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If you have been in the onsite repair business for a while you have probably had someone ask you whether you do computer training. I get these a few times a month and I nearly always take these jobs. You can take these training jobs at your regular repair rate or create a new “teaching rate”. Personally, my teaching rate is a little cheaper just because this type of work is so incredibly easy.
In this article, we’ll cover a little bit about getting into computer training.
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If you have been in business for a while you have probably already have a few regular clients and are beginning to the hang of being in business. You carry great products and possibly have the best service in town but you want more, you want to push ahead of the competition and stand out as the business to go to when people have computer problems.

To do this, you need to do something different, something that the rest of the computer repair businesses aren’t doing. Not only that, you need to bring attention to it. I discovered a perfect example on a computer technician’s website called ThorSchrock.com.
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