The MSP model is eating most small mom n' pop break-fix type businesses for lunch. And it's sad. When you add in the mass appeal that "The Geek Squad" and similar have achieved, with shoddy service to boot, you should be able to see just how lucky, and unusual, your personal circumstances are. If you read what most people who are trying to follow your business model write here, with regularity, you have to acknowledge that.
The fact that people are losing their break-fix businesses is sad, I will agree with you there. But as you said it here, Geek Squad and other similar services provide shoddy service at best. The bar is pretty low when it comes to service levels from those folks and we hear it everyday.
Where I live, having corporate competitors has been a huge wake-up call for small businesses who have always been pretty relaxed and the customers didn't have another option. An example is I spent a year trying different shops to have some custom work done on my car. The small shops beat around the bush, taking 3-4 months to get a quote together, etc. Finally ended up going to a big box company that's new in town, got the work done in 3 weeks start to finish and better service than I'd ever received locally. Unfortunately the mom-and-pop shops lost my business and now I've been working with the big-box shop for other projects.
I built this business on service, it's really not hard to out-service the geek squad or similar stores.
As I said, you have to lie and cheat.
Not true at all. Maybe that's how your competition does it, but I can promise you that is not the only way to survive in this industry.
The Geek Squad is another fun one, and I make a fair bit cleaning up after those idiots... such a horrible thing.
Hey! There's some common ground! They definitely are idiots and we do the same. Same thing with the big-box office supply store.
I've always been told if it was easy, everyone would do it. But it certainly is easy to out-service the big box competition and in my area, the MSPs have dug their own grave for the smaller accounts. We had a new customer call us because the largest MSP (which she worked with) told her at 1:00 pm on a Thursday, her internet outage would be an after-hours, emergency call. She called me, I billed her $170 for 2 hours of work and she was happy as can be. I happened to be about 2 miles from her store and could be there in about 10 minutes. Ended up discovering her managed backup hadn't occured in 15 months and she had 1 XP computer and 2 Windows 7 machines. Sold her 3 new machines, took over her data backup. She has turned into a great customer, just by treating her right. Funny thing is the internet outage was caused by the ISP updating DNS records, which they made us all aware of well in advance with a hard-date of when the old DNS would no longer function. Her MSP let her down and wanted to charge her to fix it. Definitely could have been done remotely if it was done ahead of time.
