Ran into a nasty one yesterday

[Kirby]

The perfectionist approach that you guys are describing, while perhaps personally satisfying, is a terrible business practice and I'd strongly advise anyone starting out not to take this approach to the extremes that you're talking about.

Futhermore, if you actually want to survive long term in this business get away from domestic stuff and get into pretty much anything else - MSP, B2B, coding, consulting - anything other than domestic stuff.

It's definitely not for everyone. I'll agree there. But I'm in a very small town where reputation is everything and nobody has a better reputation than me. Currently 2 other computer stores (there were 3 until a few months ago) in a town of 6,000 and I just celebrated 10 years in business.

I'll be the first to admit, I'm a terrible business man. The way I do things is not for someone who wants to make money at it and put their kids through college, never having to worry about cash. I barely pay the bills. But it's not like I have work piled up waiting on me either. I don't have 30 computers waiting to go on the bench. I have the time to do it my way without having to turn work away, and that, I think, makes a difference. If you have the time, do the best job you can. If you don't, then maybe look at a more reasonable business model.

 

[KrustyTech]

For on-site work, there is no cap. I really HATE on-site work with a passion! Especially the free installs when I sell a computer. Everybody wants you to come to them, but nobody wants to pay for it. They see "free installation" and think that means "Take down the old computer and move it to a different room, run a new cable to connect it to the Internet, remove all the viruses and malware from it, then set up the new computer, unbox the new printer and install it or, even better, install the old printer, but the disks don't work with the new OS so you have to download 350MB of drivers on their 1.5Mb connection out in the country, oh, and then look at the toaster and see if it can be fixed. And by the way, transfer data from the old computer to the new computer using a USB flash drive, which you didn't bring because it says right on the Sales Order AND Invoice that the installation does not include on-site data transfer, but that's okay because I have a 4GB flash drive you can use to transfer 150GB of music and movies a few at a time."

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That would be the funniest thing I have ever read if it didn't happen to me at least once a week!! LOL I am still crying

 

[Kirby]

That would be the funniest thing I have ever read if it didn't happen to me at least once a week!! LOL I am still crying

I've had to start outright stating that I absolutely do not transfer data on-site except by the hour after a free install of 2 new computers to replace older computers where there "wasn't much on them" took 4 hours just for the data transfer.