I agree with other comments here and also wondered a while back if I opened a shop how would I manage people coming into the shop for whatever, managing repairs, residential and business callouts and all the rest of running a business. People's expectations of a shop is that it is open at least during working hours of other local shops in the locality i.e at least by 9am and 5pm maybe 6pm six days a week. On your own the only way I see to manage it is to work after the hours the shop is closed or get someone else to assist you.
There is only one thing I do not agree with you on. You can manage a shop by yourself for a season, but it will come to a point where you will need assistance. I personally ran my shop mostly by myself for about 1.5 years. It sucked, but I had to learn how to become efficient and not waste time with customers. I also had to learn not to waste time on computers, this is one of the reasons why I run a full diagnostics with each repair (I will not go there).
Here are a few suggestions for saving time and making your work more efficient.
Do not waste time on bad customers. These are typically those who do not want to pay anything, but expect you to give them the whole world. They are also the ones that come in and say "well so and so only charges . . . . " These are the people you need to tell to go somewhere else. With that being said, I am pretty blunt and straight forward and I tell those customers, "well, we believe that you get what you pay for and as a shop we charge what we are worth. If you feel you can get a better deal somewhere else, then go for it, but we will not drop our prices" Ironically, most of them say "no, we will just do business with you"
Do not waste time on good customers. This is the part that sucks because I love talking to customers and getting to know them. Unfortunately, I have to balance this out so that I can actually get to work. The only thing I can tell you here is to get their information as quickly as possible and politely tell them that you need to get started on THEIR computer.
Immediately start diagnostics (this means on THEIR computer). This is assuming that you do one, if you do not, well I am not even going to go there. Anyways, assuming that you do, diagnostics can be running in the back ground while you are working on your computers. However, if you do not start them and let them run while you are working, then your wasting time. You can run several hard drive tests at the same times (I can run up to 8 on one machine) with the right set up, and each computer can run their own memtest.
Set your shop up in such a way where you can work on your computer in an organized matter. To be honest with you, this kinda depends on what services you do most and what kind of setup you have. The only thing I can tell you here is to constantly every day be thinking of ways of improving your work space.
Slipstream your Windows Installation disks. This is a sudo legit subject that I will not go into. The only thing I can tell you is this. I can install Vista Home Premium SP2 with all its latest updates, drivers and applications in about 1.5 hours. That normally takes between 4 and 6 hours or more.
There are many many many other things you can do to make your job more efficient, most of them being so small (but they all add up) that I cannot list them all. Again, you need to focus every day on making your setup and process more and more efficient.
