Your logo and business card are a huge part of your business. It is the image that represents you and often people will even choose a technician over another based on their logo or business card. Our techie “I can figure it out” mind wants to create our own business cards but we need to be careful, as this can be like your clients 16 year old cousin thinking he can fix your clients computer. “How hard can it be?”

If designing isn’t your thing then you definitely should get a professional to make one. In this article I’ll tell you how to get one made at a decent price and have hundreds of custom-made designs to choose from.
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A few months ago I ran a software giveaway in exchange for some survey answers. There were two questions that came up often amongst the technicians and one of them was:

“Where do you draw the line between suggesting rebuilding a PC or suggesting that they go buy a new one?”

The other question is:

“At what point in the repair cycle do you make the choice to format & reinstall the OS and the applications?”

The answer to both of these questions are identical.
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Guest Post by Lisa Hendrickson, owner of Call That Girl, 15 years experience of supporting client computer issues.

For some people, working in the corporate world as IT support, gives them enough foundation to start up a business. Others who are the friend/neighborhood tech feel they have what it takes to start up a repair shop. Some are self taught, some are book educated. No matter what your background is, you have to be sure of a few things before you go into business for yourself. Here are a few tips to read before considering going on your own.
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Doing computer repair work on a part time basis is a great way to ease into the business. It can take many months to get your client-base up to a level where your income is similar to that of your full time job. It takes time to learn how to make money and its kind of like easing yourself into the shallow end of the pool rather than jumping into the deep-end and hope that you learn to swim really quickly.

Before you start a part time business on the side, there are a few things you need to consider first.
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Just about every day I hand out little tidbits of business advice. It might be on the Technibble forums, a podcast or even in person. Here are some of my core pieces of advice for this industry in small, easy to chew, bite-sized chunks.
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When you are first starting your business, one of the last things you will probably be thinking about is how you are going to exit your business.
However, this something that needs to be considered early on in your businesses life. Do you plan to sell the business and retire at 60 so you can live out the rest of your days playing golf? or do you plan to build the business up over the next few years and sell it for a healthy profit?
Whatever you do, you need to plan your exit strategy now because what you do in the present can greatly increase the value of your business in the future.
So, what can you do now to increase the value of your business?
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There are two pieces of advice that are often mentioned here on Technibble. They are:

1. It is a good idea to get experience while working from someone else before you start your business.

2. It is a good idea to build up your client base after hours, until it reaches a point where your day job is affecting your computer repair business. That way, it’s a soft slide into the shallow end rather than a jump into the deep end.

Stand alone, each of these lines are good advice. However, they not good advice if you were to do both of these at the same time. Let me explain.
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Most computer technicians living in a decent sized city have big box computer store of some kind near them. The definition of a “big box computer store” is a company that sells computers and has many large stores across the country. Many stores like this that often stock computers with decent specifications for as low as $400. To make matters worse, some of these stores that used to only sell computers have now expanded into fixing them as well.

So, how can you compete with the big box stores?
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Guest Post by Justin. Justin is a small business owner and computer technician with Protocol16, supporting small and mid-sized businesses as well as consumers in the metro area of Portland, Oregon.

Many technicians that are just starting out would love to accept credit cards, but the idea of accepting them right from the start is daunting. While starting up my personal business, I ended up deciding to take credit cards right from the start, but I learned a lot along the way.
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If you have been reading Technibble for any length of time, you already know what advice I have to offer a new computer business. So, for this post I would like to draw upon the experiences of the Technibble community.

What is the single, best piece of advice you could offer someone starting a new computer business?

As always, you dont need to sign up to leave a comment and you can even post anonymously if you like.
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