Top In Store Services

[connectsim]

Hi All,

I just wanted to get a feel for all of the experts out here who have a physical walk in store or retail store for what your top IT services are.

We've been operating from our home for a while and have been successful but we now think its time to get a store to help with more sales/pickups/drop offs and more.

Looking to see what everyones top services are in order (1 being the most profitable and requested).

we have 2 divisions of our business ink/toner (reman) and general pc services and networking services.

We want to expand our walk in service so more of our customers can walk in for their ink refills/toner refills and at the same time also offer them assistance with their pc services (virus removal, backup, etc. etc.).

Look forward to hearing from everyone

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

I run some Computer stores in Kansas and California. I am glad to give you some advice. PM me your phone number and I will call you. I happen to be considering adding ink refills as a product line so I would be interested in talking to you on the phone for a while and go over all the more pertinent things that I can think of at the same time you can give me some information to help me make this decision in my business.

But a quick summery:

I worked out of my house until I was doing about $10k-12k per month in service revenues and I was working 55 hrs a week plus going home and restoring the days computers for tomorrows delivery while watching the evening news and eating supper. Life was crazy so my girlfriend pointed out I needed a change.

I got a cheap $500 700-800 sqft store in a 30 year old village strip center. My son was in college so I figured I would pay him to restore a few computers a day and then set in and watch the store and get paid to do his homework.

It made it nice as I felt I could leave enough work with him to do during the day while I continued to do my out calls. My evenings were freed up quite nice. Later we opened a few more stores and we were pretty good at marketing so that helped.

80% of revenues are services from largest Virus/bloatware removal; data backups and recovery in some cases; 10 % is new hardware sales and 10% is power supplies, hard drives, memory replacement and upgrades.

Our sales doubled in 6 months because of our marketing, not our location. We doubled again the following 6 months.

In addition to workstation support we do in the stores we do out calls at a higher hourly rate and we also offer network support over and above what we do at the stores. This usually averages less than 15% of total service sales.

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

I thought I would bump this post.

 

[baccart]

I worked out of my house until I was doing about $10k-12k per month in service revenues and I was working 55 hrs a week plus going home and restoring the days computers for tomorrows delivery while watching the evening news and eating supper. Life was crazy so my girlfriend pointed out I needed a change.

10-15K in services? That sounds like 100% profit, minus the gas etc. WTF did I do wrong? I tried to get my business for about 8 months with nothing to show. I did business cards, fliers, newspaper ad, but nothing!!! I finally went back to work. I would like to get some advice from you.

 

[OldSchoolPC]

Yes, add me to the list of moochers.

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

Well I never did that when I was business to business doing MCSE stuff. It wasn't until I switched to retail home/end users. I put an ad in the yellow pages for I think about $59 per month, then I got a call a day which I averaged turning them into about $200 per day. I later added the 2nd phone book doubling the add in there to about $120, and a year later doubling the first book and the 2nd book. By the first year we were doing $10-12, per month and then I got my store open. I think we started doing about $16k immediately from the time we opened the first store. Close to 6-9 months after opening the first store we opened the 2nd store. It did about $10k per month but I chocked that up to a weak service manager.

I played with some other media but yellow pages pretty much did the trick. Things are a bit different now, I am still tweaking advertising.

PM me your phone number and I am glad to call you and talk to you about your specifics.