Should I support home users?

I don't know if this is a big enough market to be worth going after, but one service I've always wished for was something that let me pay somebody else to be tech support for my Mom.

I already pay for her internet access so she can get online and email with her friends and family. But I live across the country so can't be there to help her when she inevitably runs into technical problems. I would love to be able to contact a service in her area that could go out and help her on those occasions.

Again I'm not certain there's really enough demand to sustain this kind of business but I throw it out there. Of course if you make millions off this idea I want a share :-)

you will get calls all the time, everytime THEY pooch their system up.

The home AVERAGE home user will not want to pay a $100 bill for getting their system going, so unless your able to get in and out, you will not make much on the deal.

Your average customer will not come to you until the system is so trashed from virus/trojans/malware that the only thing to do is a format and reload. Almost NONE of the home users have the disks for the software on their systems, so you will have that to contend with, as well as surfing for drivers.

If you DO get into this, make an image of each computer, so the next time they come back, you can just restore from an image instead of a complete reload.

Hello again, has anyone found a recent case study or market report that covers the home user support indu?stry? If so, could you post a link to that article?

I also support home users in addition to the SMB arena. I have learned that $105/hr is not out of the question - one shop I do some contract work for charges that much. Dell is right in that ball park and the Geek Squad ain't cheep either.

I do a lot of flat rate stuff as well - $120 to refresh a system (save data, reload OS from scratch, reload applications and configure email), $150 for DSL with router or wireless, etc. The basic charge to walk through the front door is $75.00.

Some of this stuff I do at the shop since I can do something else while the OS is loading, but I have found that as I place a realistic value to my time and work, people value my time and work.

One person who works for me bills at $50/hr for coaching, but when she goes out on a tech call, it's right back to the $105/hr rate (or flat rate depending).

Oh yes, I found resistance at $100/hr, but not at $105/hr - go figure.

jdg

When I moved to my current location 11 years ago, I quickly discovered a two-man computer business owned by Patrick Li and Jeffrey Shi.

At that time their busines was mostly built around assembling and selling computers, including bulk lots to schools and businesses etc.

Jeffrey Shi, who looked after the networking side of things, moved on. Since then Patrick's primary business has evolved to be almost entirely upgrades and repairs.

He is always flooded with work because he is scrupulously honest and his charges are very moderate. So his business thrives on word-of-mouth.

Work is done onsite in his shop -- no outcalls, or very rarely -- and he charges $AU 35 (say $US 27) for any simple job and $AU 65 ($US 42) for a more complex job -- like a hardware upgrade (plus parts of course). [Well he might charge other customers more, but that's what he charges me.]

He is also quite happy to provide unlimited free telephone support.

Well, what can I say?

I am SO DAMNED GLAD I don't live in the USA.

Be careful about this. Home users, special the ones that bought their PC with you, are known to be unsatisfiable as it comes to service their PC if not working. Even to the point of putting in 2 cd/dvd?s in the one drive they have (not on purpose) and blaming you for a screw-up or worse. For sure as rules in the EU say that whatever you buy of a company has to work as it should be given the specs as what it should do.

Over here (NL) there are company's who do support home-users as they have their warranty and charge for whatever is not covered by this warranty, within the rules there are (see above).

Good luck with your business.

Rob

I service home users here in rural France. very rarely do the quibble about the bill, and all are grateful for someone who will do the job properly at their place. The level of competence at the big stores is frighteningly poor - I have one client who was told the ventilator on her portable was u/s and the processor was about to fail. A quick look revealed the cause of the problem - hard disk completely full. A quick transfer of big file to another partition and voila! Result happy client and no quibble about the 75€ bill.

I spend about 40% of my time on home visits and it can be profitable. Word of mouth does all the marketing I need.

Geek Squad couldn't possibly pay their guys enough to get good people. Anyone with experience will demand more cash and therefore be more interested in the corporate market. When you call Geek Squad, be prepared to have a green computer geek show up.

Run a campaign to generate word-of-mouth advertising for your company. As a smaller business, you have an opportunity to have more intimate relationships with your clients as you can send the same guy out every time.

Keep in mind that home user support can't be profitable for the reasons you mentioned. That market isn't as high-pressure and demanding as corporate computing. Home users can wait, often times, if their computer is on the fritz. And because there isn't much money to be made by techie or business owner, it can only be a combination of a few things:

1) You as the business owner taking 100% of the profit and working on your own making decent cash. I think this is the best route. You can specialize in a few areas and jack your hourly rate up very high for specialty work.

2) A training ground for green computer guys who will eventually start their own business or move into corporate computing. You as business owner will need to keep control over them by training them as they come on board to replace the guys who leave for better cash.

or

3) A dead-end stop for a mediocre computer geek that just doesn't have the drive to demand more and who is content to take only a percentage of what is billed. Which may seem like a good thing, but these guys often times don't have drive enough to go the extra mile for the client and make them feel like $1 million bucks.

2 & 3 make it tough to have guys you send out to clients in the home and small biz market.

And because home users don't normally want to spend cash on their computers, I rarely do homes now. Businesses are the place. And when somebody at the business wants me to care for their home computer, they need to pay the same rate as the business does. My time is my time no matter who is paying for it. And when the computer geek kid in the family screws it up further instead of fixing it, they will pay for my time. :)

If you work from a large city then you can ask and get a decent wage from home support, however as we are based out of town the locals grumble at ?15 for support.

And because of the distances involved while giving support in the countryside we can spend ?5-?10 in fuel alone.

We concentrate on supporting the local businessess that need the backup, and generally only go to a home user if we happen to be passing by.

To rely soley on home users would kill the business.

Maybe leave home support to the people that advertise in the evening paper as they are the ones that have a regular day job and giving support is a tax free way to boost their income.

Like briwlls 70% of my business is in supporting small businesses. Some recently started complaining about costs, so I did some analysis. My average customer uses between 1 and 2 hours per user per month; about half of this goes on the servers; some is showing them how to do things and improve efficiency. The bigger the company, the lower the amount per user, much as you would expect.

I achieve these levels by using things such as Symantec Corporate antivirus, Microsoft's WSUS for patching, so that the effort is the same regardless of the numbers of machines.

I also spend time documenting the systems, creating policies and preventing applications other than legitimate ones being installed.

Your home user will have (in most cases) 10x the amount of programs installed, many from dubious sources (what is your liability if you maintain a machine on which a user is running illegal software?). The home user will not even know what a backup is, let alone have one.

So, home users are considerably more effort to support. In setting up my own desktop, something I do once every couple of years, I find it takes me about 15-20 hours to track down all the latest drivers and configure all the apps - OK, I have it sync my Outlook to my phone and PDA, and run a lot of development tools, but it gives me some idea of how complex a system a home user might have.

Now back to the economics. My customer was complaining about the average 1 hour per user per month. If I take 40 hours per week, then I have 160 hours per month. My wife is a teacher, so I asked her to estimate how many PCs the school has. It is around 160. For this, they have 4 full time IT technicians (and holidays when they can fix things) and an IT teacher who does much of the systems administration.

I see people (such as PC World in the UK) offering silly monthly prices of a few dollars per PC. Of course, the real price is that it excludes most of what people really need support for.

(As an aside, one PC manufacturer told me that they would not take my brand new laptop back, where I could prove that the wireless was faulty because installing extra software invalidated the hardware warranty).

I also find that I spend an increasing amount of time as the "pig in the middle" between suppliers and customers.

If you want to offer a service to home users, then good luck. Your biggest problem will be managing their expectations. Yes, you can limit things in a contract, but what do you do when fixing a problem outside of that is going to result in a bill larger than the cost of the PC?

Now that PCs are down in the same cost range as domestic appliances, people expect support at an appropriate rate. You may not think a service bill of $1000 unreasonable on a $25000 vehicle (my wife's Cherokee), but this scales down to $20 on a $500 PC.

So, to conclude, think about your small business users - what their expectations are, and what you charge them. Will home users expect more for less?

I too once found myself in the same predicament. End users problems and pc configurations are too numerous and varied. With an end user there is no end to the list of things they can ask you to do outside your core comptencies and they just nag about the smallest of issues and always whinge about payments. It will not be worth your while to pursue the end user path. In the long run your cooperate customer will suffer at the expense of the end user.

My advice try and work around the problems with your cooperate and try and grow that side of the business. It will give you more free time on your hands and also grow your skills base.

The problem with most home users is that they do not call often enough. After running my business for the last 10 years, I can tell you from experience that I need approximately 30 home users to equal one small/medium size business to support. Home users are famous for calling me and saying "Do you remember me?"

That's because it's been an average of twelve months since their last service call.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have a home user who will not follow your advice, and continually is riddled with malware and expects you to fix it every other week, under warranty. Try to explain it's their own fault and not covered under warranty, and you're in for an argument that keeps you from making money on other work for the next hour.

Home users don't want to call support unless its free and they will call you and try to get information for free. For example, a customer calls me the other day, who I haven't heard from in over five months and asks "Do you have any idea why someone couldn't record a DVD? Could it be software?"

I assume they are talking about a system I worked on, so I ask a bit and I soon learn her sons girlfriend got a DVD burner for her birthday. Apparantly they installed it themselves but either it does not work or they do not know how to use it.

Because I fixed her last problem via remote access, she wants to know if I can remote access into her sons girlfriends PC and try to resolve this issue.

I explain I cannot do that and that I offer remote access only for specific customers with certain types of problems.

The next, inevitable question is, "Do you know anyone who can?"

I say "No, but if you bring the PC to my shop, I'd be happy to look at it for the standard rate."

That usually results in "Ok, thanks. Good bye." And it did.

I also have folks call me and ask "Do you do telephone support?"

I ask, "Are you a customer of mine?"

They say, "No."

I ask, "How can I support something when I have no idea what it is or if it's put together properly?"

The response one guy gave me was not asking how much I charge, where I was located or what my hours were, but rather "sorry, I guess I have the wrong number."

Consumers get so frustrated dealing with the retailers and manufacturers, they'll start calling every place in the phonebook looking for help, and after spending their money on the item they are frustrated with, they are NOT usually looking to pay for help. This always blows my mind, that folks that have never been a customer, are calling me randomly from my ad in the Yellow pages, which costs me money every month, on a cellphone, which costs me money every minute, to interrupt my business to answer their questions when they have no intention of buying anything from me.

Business users need things fixed and they need it fixed yesterday. Just like a consumer, but you can charge a business more and they will need you more often. You also rarely get a bad check from a business. Imagine going through the expense of driving to a customers location, spending an hour and a half to fix the problem, and being a nice guy, only charge for one hour, and when you drive home and do the paperwork for the service call, then drive to the bank to deposit the check, a week later you discover the bank has charged you $15 for a bad check and sent it back to you.

Home users are, generally speaking, a waste of time. They are thankless, want onsite support so they can look over your shoulder and ask you what you are doing each step of the way and, since most people bill hourly, want you to do it in an hour. And if you fix it in 10 minutes and the minimum billing rate is one hour, guess what? They want you to stick around the extra 50 minutes to make sure they get the hour they are paying for! But if you go 10 minutes over an hour, they'll be upset if you charge them for 2 hours! So, if you are good and efficient, you are punished.

There are exceptions, of course, but generally speaking, the majority of consumers have no money and don't care how, or if, you stay in business.

I estimate if you ONLY support consumers, you would need about 450 of them for ONE technician to have enough consistent work for one year. And that includes all the headaches and frustrations I just mentioned x450. Just to make ends meet.

I do a lot of home support.
Problems:1/ Cheap PCs without Installation disks, just system recovery disks. I often have to resort to semi-illegal hacks to restore system.
Or install the free, better Sun Microsystems Open office 2 rather then MS office or Works.
2/ You have to turn a blind eye to software piracy. very few have origional instalation disks, most are copies from friends or relatives.
3/ You find that there is no up to date anti-virus protection, no firewall. Theey also forget passwords, and they need to be "recovered."
4/ Often infected with mutiple malware.
5/ On the bright side there used to be a local recycling place where I could get 2-8 Gig Hds for a few pounds, great for upgrades when the M/b will only tale small Hds.
And its very easy to stick in a CD rewriter, dvd player, freeware CD burners, extra RAM, extra USB ports, you can even add USB to DOS, so long as you are not hung up on "Ms Approved stuff only".

I have a whole CD full of non Ms approved free programs to make 95 and 98se work better and more secure. I just couldn't sort out some of the problems with "approved" software.

Nor could I work without my Knoppix Linux CD.
Great for removing lost passwords!

"Ms Office 97" or "Ms Works" with extra free PDF creator, 12 place clipboard and 2048 digit pgp encryption, and of course a free O0-2 suite.

In some ways its easier than supporting a work system.
Many of the programs that I use are not free for commercial use, and are DEFINATELY NOT MS approved.

However I have been into IT since 1960 and I always adopt the "If it works, it IT'S legal!" idea.
There is no way most home users would pay for maintainence contract, unless it was thrown in when the bought the pC and they didn't notice it.

And yes the PC will be in a loft,or a dark courner,or even under the stairs, with a tangle of wires etc.
I have never found a dead mouse inside though, YET! perhaps its the cat that shares the room has eat it!

You do need a good hand tourch and one of those headband magnifyers (+3 dioptres for me). I sometimes resort to my old head torch from my Mountain Rescue days.

I also have a collection of old mice and kbs at home from the recycling place, its cheaper to replace than to try to repair or clean.

Geek Squad
Cox Cable (around here)
Dell

all offering home support. Do you see what they charge? Can you sustain the same charges AND be hard nosed and charge for the follow up calls?

In our experience the biggest problem for the SOHO and Home user market segment is that once they pay the (to them) huge bill - they expect a lot of follow up phone call time that is WAY beyond the courtesy 5 minutes.

And you didn't fix their spyware problem properly! Only you did - but the kids screwed it up again immediately. Or you lock down the computer to prevent it - and "we can't load software".

The cost of educating each home user is WAY too high compared to educating in an enterprise where you get a lot more return for your one hour presentation to a large group and where you can lock computers down and keep them moving along with less maintenance.

I'm generalising but the reason we get a lot of calls from home users is that "Geek Squad spent hours and didn't fix it". Now I am sure most Geek Squad contractors tried hard or were low skilled and tried long (while learning on the job). The customer hates their bill and is hoping yours will be better.

I'm not saying there is not a market here. But in your position - go after higher value work and if you do take on a contractor - they had better be a balance of good (so you can avoid follow up calls) and low cost to you so you can have some margin on billing.

Not only do we not deal with home users anymore but if it is a home office AND kids are allowed on the office computer - we will not deal their either. In fact we have recently moved to - 5 workstations or more.

Some might call us arrogant - but it is way more profitable.............

I used to do the same kind of thing -- collecting old machines, upgrading them from spare parts from other machines, and selling them at a modest price.

For tuition and tech support, my fee was very negotiable for people who were genuinely poor (pensioners mostly).

There is no one to provide home services to out-of-warranty
computer users. But a deal from DELL is considered as an
average cost and matching their figures could prove very
expensive to you. Besides it also involves a lot of helpdesk,
support, staff and telephone costs.

Also remember that $39.99 is paid up front for 12 months
which people would not fork out easily.

Considering that you just have 30% home users, you should
alternatively consider a maintenance contract option, wherein
your staff should compulsorily make a trip to the home user
every 2 months for a general check-up (for 30 minutes).

Support, virus problems and hardware issues should be dealt
otherwise on a per call basis.

This way it would be cheaper for the client and it will also allow
you a repeat business on product sales. Secondly, you're actually
not losing anything since, you will still be charging for out-of-
schedule support calls.

I can't come up with a good business plan for me.
I do thing that there is a very large need there.
Just seems like the only business model that might work is like the geeks on call guys. A pretty good investment to get the business going and contract for low pay. Seems like it will always be a challenge to get the work done well with low paid help.

I don't do a terrible great amount of marketing to home users, but I'll take the work if it comes.

I charge home users $90.00 an hour, one-hour minimum (plus parts and software) during business hours, more during off-hours. The great bulk of the work is malware removal, and I give detailed explanations of how they got it and what they have to do to avoid it while I'm removing it. They usually listen, believe it or not; and when they call back six months later to say it's back, they usually accept full responsibility and don't try to get the second job for free.

The main problem with home users is more that they tend to think of me as tehir friend, and the telephone support part becomes a bit excessive. Businesses tend to understand better that time costs money, even if it's telephone time. Home users have a harder time with that concept.

On the other hand, I've also gotten some excellent commercial accounts via referrals from home users, so it's a mixed bag.

I have found it very difficult to give home user support for anything other than hardware problems, upgrades etc. Due tothe fact that most of the people dont seem to take care of there systems, virus updates, windows updates, defragmenting etc. Many times I have had to do a service call for someone and just needed a little houskeeping on their computer and they flip out when you have to charge them an hourly rate for things they should be doing themselves even if you schedule things to run automatically like windows updates, virus updates and defrag they dont leave there computers on at the correct time, or are using them and stop the program from running. I have been thinking of trying to install a remote software on some problem customers, and offer remote/phone support for a reduced rate, and maybe a service plan to do the maintenance for them periodically. The problem I have run into with that is there always seems to be someone who will do it cheaper, a freind of a freind who is a computer "expert" and tries to fix something and doesnt do it correctly and they end up calling me to redo something. The home user market is a tough business to support regardless.

opportunities are out there...
There is alot of possibility if you are motivated. check out
http://www.onforce.com/

Yes, I do it, but only for my clients whose business I service. The average home user:

1. Owns a computer disaster
2. Hates to throw away obsolete hardware
3. Has kids that have already done way too much "system engineering"
4. Does not keep spyware and virus signature files up to date
5. Is unwilling to pay decent money for service
6. Thinks you should be thrilled to help them on the phone for free.

They don't expect their auto mechanic to fix the car over the phone for free, so why should the computer guy?

I turn down business. Most of my contacts are via word of mouth, and I do not rely on this as a primary source of income. I do know I pay off all Christmas Bills in January from the income of setups and enhancements.

I also give people the option of subscribing to logmein.com so I can remote support when possible.

I charge 25.00 to 50.00 a hr depending on the nature of the problem. If they remote support, then I charge 50% of the going rate. usually 12.50.

Is it viable, your call do not know your demographics, maybe you can contract the position, 50/50 split.

without reading all the posts already made, I'll post in this discussion the comment I make in this one:
https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5208-11195-0.html?forumID=87&threadID=190926&messageID=1969170

when red hat said we will no longer offer any support to home users, they lost a lot of support in the open source world.

open source is a community, and most open source work is done at home, so by telling home users you aren't worth our time red hat was saying we don't want your business.

these are the same people that were buying red hat linux for their company servers. they changed distros.

Mandriva went from close to declaring bankruptcy to being profitable, by not alienating home users, they do support home users, just as well as they support corporate clients. They have the same base business model as Red Hat.

Debian 100% community driven, can't buy anything but coffee cups, t-shirts etc, from them, but they have a very large community that regularly donates time and money to keep the distro going. This is the true open source model, free.

Slakware, 100% community driven, just like Debian, and almost as commonly used as debian, with only knick nack sales and cash donations to keep them going.

The open Source Business model is exactly where the large "Name Brand" proprietary companies are moving to..services, not products. check distrowatch out, with several hundred linux distros listed, see which ones have retail or enterprise versions available, or even both.
then check those companies public records, most are making money.

Red Hat Linux started making far less money by NOT supporting home users a few years back. They went from being the most succesful Linux Distro to one of the top 3, financially. The only reason they didn't drop more was name brand recognition, they kept some business simply because they were so strong before they killed support for home users.

...which is why they continuously allow kids to download music & never update their antivirus, Win updates, etc...

A business MUST keep their system running & humming- not so the home user.

My advice would be to set up a remote tune on a weekly or monthly basis. Offer to do a mini-tune, spy/viri sweep, updates- for a flat fee. That means they're always clean (pretty much) & will cut down on totally trashed systems hitting your shop.

IMHO,

Tracy

I commend you for trying to support home uses. But, it is prices like yours is the reason you will not be succesfull. $40? It cost half of that just to drive your vehicle there. Base rates, $90 an hour for first hour, $60 after that in 15 min increments. Air-conditioner people charge more than you. Home users pay them! I have been doing this for 17 years. Unless your real job is cutting grass, and because you can connect two cables together, you are considered a tech guru as a side job, yes you should only charge $20 for the five hours you are at their house. But if you are a pro like me, you pay alot of money every year to keep your MCSE, CNE, RHCE, CCNA, A+, Network + current. Plus the massive amounts of time to study for those customers problems so you know how to fix them when you finaly get the call. All the while you are not getting paid to study. I am not going to charge $5 dollars to fix your problems. I am not rich, even though I showed you my prices for residential. Business get charged $140 hour. If they don't pay it, then let them go hire the lawn-mower boy to go fix their problems. Because I eventualy end up fixing their stuff anyway, because the grass-cutter messes things up way worse that it was in the frist place. Have faith in yourself, and do our industry a right, and charge what all the pro's charge.

Best response Ive heard to these types is:

"why hire a geek when you can get a professional for the same price"

I have been running a computer and network support and maintenance company in london for three years.
During that time I have built up a client base of around 200 home users and twenty or so business users.
I charge ?40 an hour for home users and ?65 an hour for business users.
If I fill a whole working day with work then it is feasible to make a living. But the work is sporadic. Some weeks are full others are empty.
I do some advertising but the majority of work comes from word of mouth.
Lately I have been installing wireless networks for the majority of my home user work.
Business users want new printers installed, new client machines set up, regular visits to update virus software etc (as they can't trust their employees to do it).
Wherever possible and practical I recommend the business users to move to SBS2003. This provides regular visits to ensure everything is running smoothly.
I send out regular emails to all my clients providing tips, help and general computer related news. I run a blog which my clients have access to which gives my views on current IT related news and products.
The feedback is that they like this personal approach and look forward to receiving my mail or reading the latest posts on my blog.
I also design web sites for small business and a lot of that work has come from home visits.
What I have noticed is that it is getting easier to set up new equipment or diagnose problems. Therefore I am spending less time with a client and they are paying less.
I suppose the big question is 'Is It Profitable'?
Well, like I said there are good and bad times, but I earn a living. Nothing spectacular but enough.
Also, a big plus is that I am my own boss.
This is just my two pennaths worth for the discussion.
Must go, have another wireless network to set up.

Most of your customers are and will be older people who don't have the cash to take it into a shop. So right there you will have to base your rates on something they can afford. Most people who can afford the extremely high rates I see quoted here, will just take it to a shop. The other really major problem with home users (and in particular seniors) is that 6 months from now when they crash their computer installing something or letting some neighbors kid play with it, they will call you demanding you fix it. Or they want to call and ask you questions about it.

Yes, I have my sales margin, but remmenber that these home-users also working in some small business company's and again....wait I will tell you a story :-)
Some day someone call me with a broken VGA card. I fix this pentium 2 PC and some 2 months later this person contact me again and ask me to come and visit his boss...This is a small accounting company with 1 server and 7 workstations working with a network with coax (yes) cabling. All was 7 years old, so I have sell here a two new servers (the want two servers), 8 new PC's and 2 laptops a compleet new network cabling router e.o....This is just illustrating that a home-user can give you profit...

Supporting home PCs can be risky business. We do support home office computers for some of our clients but ONLY if it is used for work by the adults. If children use the machine for any reason we will not touch it. Early on we had issues where we would spend a couple of hours cleaning a PC of all the junk the kids had gotten on the box from their relentless browsing and downloading only to be called back the next week for the same problem. At our business-based hourly rate people start to question why our fix doesn?t last. It?s a little like crashing your car, taking it to the body shop and then immediately running into a tree again. Hence, no support if kids are involved. We would suggest purchasing the children their own PC, which we would not support, but that the business machine be password protected and kid free.

In short, it has the potential of mudding up the relationship with a business client. Consequently we will not support a home PC if the client is likely not to understand the base issues involved. Then there?s the pesky problem of cleaning all the porn-related guck and explaining, sometimes with spouse present, what the problem was with all these solicitations popping up.

As for purely home-based computers for the general public, you will have the same issues. In addition you will likely not be able to charge the same rate you would for business so your margin will not be as good. Then there?s the problem of bad computing behavior on someone?s part recreating the same situation soon after your visit. You?ll get the ?your guy didn?t fix the problem? call and be faced with a free revisit or an impossible tech discussion with an angry client about how the fix was good but someone in the family is engaging in surfing behavior that is the functional equivalent of unsafe sex.

For us, not with anybodies 10 foot pole.

[Post deleted by Admin]

[Edited by: admin on Mar 8, 2006 6:15 AM]

I was thinking of the same thing!

Even if your mom offers you money to fix her pc, you should just kindly turn it down.

In my case, now that I'm making the money I never dreamed of making, I'm the one that gives my own mom gifts, instead of her giving me things during b-days, xmas, etc.

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert20012211860201.gif

Lol,

Tracy

I clearly said she gives me. Of course I don't charge her you whatever-you-tried-to-call-me. And I'm 44, not 18, and there is no way around it. Once I completely refused to accept it and she deposited it in my account.

And just to save you the trip to the dictionary, here is from Webster.com:

asinine
Etymology: Latin asininus, from asinus ass
1 : marked by inexcusable failure to exercise intelligence or sound judgment
2 : of, relating to, or resembling an ass

Having grown from a one-man support shop to 11 full-time hires with three storefronts I believe that adding home users can build upon your base and it can be profitable (I currently enjoy a 32% net margin) as long as they are not your primary customer base. (Try to keep the mix around 80% business and 20% home users).

1) Have a sense of humor. You will see a vast amount of user ignorance and be asked to do the impossible on a daily basis.

2) Be flexible on your charges to home users. Businesses can absorb larger fees then home users. Instead use the discounts to generate further businesses.

3) Establish a ?no pirated software? policy and stand by it. Refuse to install pirated software. You?ll be surprised how much additional business that one policy will generate.

4) Establish a standard for yourself and your customers. Establishing a standard for hardware and software will save you time and headaches. Plus you won?t have to justify every minor HW/SW decision.

5) Establish an emergency charge and stick to it. You?ll be surprised how many clients call you claiming an emergency. When they find out the charge to ?drop everything else? to respond to them instantly you?ll be amazed how quickly they schedule an appointment.

Just a few words of advice from a geek in So. Calif.

I once tried to establish my own independent business by offering PC support and mainly training over here in Switzerland. When I asked for the then modest fee of CHF 120 per hour (about US$ 90/h) I lost most of my clients. Then I went down to CHF 60/h (US$ 47/h) which works fine - but only because I am doing this as a part-time job (20%) now. Otherwise I should raise the fee up to at least CHF 100/h. Even my hairdresser gets CHF 113/h! What makes the home user business really difficult is that many of these clients think that they are paying a flat rate and could ask you tons of questions over the phone. I stopped this by charging for that time, too. One must be absolutely serious and not be timid about asking for what you need. And one more thing: Ask more when working for a company between your home user hours! The best combination would be: part-time job in a comfortable position and as an addendum your own business.

It will only take one of them to image a home office HDD and sell that data on and it will hurt us all no end.

All of us here know just what access we have and act accordingly and professionally but the moment that someone does something really unprofessional to make a bit of extra cash and the media get hold of it we are all going to suffer and be covered by the same blanket.

Remember [b]Mud Sticks.[/b]

Col

My company policy is to support every customer who purchases a computer build from me. There are disclaimers however. We don't support or guarantee due to abuse or downloaded issues. The company is whole based on the fact that the home user is either a) in too much of a hurry to learn how to properly operate their equipment, b) are intimidated by computers and only learn some of the fundamentals. We train and tutor those same home end-users and are becoming successful, because there are only a handful of companies willing to devote the resources to do so, ie: Geek Squad.
With that said, we do charge for what we do. We are profesionals, therefore we charge. You go to the DR, you pay, you have the plumber, the electrician, the cable technician, come to your house, you pay.....Charge for what you know, and for what you do. If not, keep the day job.

I am not a computer tech, just a home office user, but I have long wondered if any of you support guys have thought of supplying your phone support via a 'pay by the minute' phone number, billed through the clients' phone company.

There is a difference between a complaint about unfair competition; it is valid and is a problem that occurs and recurrs in unequal trade agreements. However, the desparate desire to restrict the lawful business of another in free commerce, based on supposed superiority is a uniquely short-sighted condition that unfortunatley appears to be Chronic. No matter what happens, In good times, "those people" are fair game, because they don't do anything to help themselves out of poverty. When they do something to stop the cycle of poverty: then they are compromising some unwritten reservation of prosparity that rightfully belongs only to a chosen few.

The issue is simple, cream rises to the top, if you are consistanly being out-thought, out-classed and out-manuvered...you need to step-up your game. Get better or get out of IT. Its just that simple.

Hunger is a great motivator, Countries that have over dependance on Class, Caste and entitlements are doomed to fail sooner or later. Communal entitlements, whether based on heredity, shared poverty or tradition are against the natural order. Being able to use tools, is the hallmark of the success of humanity. If you can't use tools ... expect to be siddled off to a dormant branch of evolution.

I have run a computer consulting business for 6 years and moonlighted many years before that. I always thought the home market was an uptapped market. However after years of trying this I have concluded its too much trouble for not enough money. Yes, there are millions of home users that need help and I tried a multitude of ways to support them. The problem is you never know what your walking into. 90% of the work is removing spyware, worms, and viruses. It takes hours and how can you charge someone $60-$75/hr and they can buy a brand new Dell for $299.00! Computer repair is much like the TV and VCR repairmen of yesterday. Who wants to pay $150 to repair if you can buy a new one for $300. Yes, I know you can just reinstall the OS and start over however most of the time customers don't have their restore disks, they upgraded with the neighbors CD and want you to reinstall illegal software. Then they don't have their Office CD and SN, or any of the applications they had before. You spend most of your time educating the customer or getting call after call about what to buy and where to get it. They call you because you are able to give them the answers they can't get from CompUSA or Best Buy (unbillable hours). You can't build machines for people as Dell or Walmart has got you beat. Even buying parts from Fryes with rebates won't help you make enough profit. You spend 1 hour min. driving to and from the store buying parts - 2 hours minimum assembling, installing OS and peripherals and what to make $100-$150! Then you get 6 calls over the next 3 months everytime the machine needs a reboot or the keyboard is not responding. I enjoy what I do and enjoy helping others however that does not put food on the table for my family. As you can see no longer is there a computer store in every strip center. There's a reason, the profit margin is way to small, big business is taking most sales and service away from the little guy, and why pay someone $25-$75/hr when you call 1-800-India for nothing. I don't blame the people from India, Malaysia or elsewhere - I blame Corparate America and our government! We may be saving money now but it will come back to haunt us in many ways. I could start a whole new message about current ecomonic situation.

it's not just American companies that will spend a dollar to save a dime!

In the case of my mother who is on a fixed income she can not afford to pay me for what I'm only too willing to do anyway.

Besides it just doesn't feel right taking money from my mother when I'm in a much better financial position than she currently is.

At 76 years of age she still is independent and while she's slowing down a bit she still watches my sisters kids one is still below preschool age.

While I do take the money I try to find ways to give it back to her all the time. Many years ago she had [b]Red Hair[/b] and I guess that that temper has remained. :D

What makes it even worse is that she asked me to go over there when a tech came out to fix the Photocopier that the Association that she does Volunteer work for required fixing just after it was delivered something else that I also arranged at a vastly reduced price and I landed a major contract from that one meeting as they had just got a new Oracle Network installed and it naturally wasn't working correctly as the installers had not set it up correctly so to help get things moving along I offered to have a look see to see if I could help them out. It was an easy fix and more importantly they could invoice out the required spare parts to fix the photocopier which was far more important to me.

The next thing that I know is a massive Check arrives from the company and then a phone call for a meeting. I didn't want or expect any money from that simple job but just the way that I attacked their problem must have impressed someone so I now have a contract with them at rates that I would never dream of putting on any business for the little work that I do there.

But it gets worse as every time I sell one of their Photocopiers to one of my clients I get a commission as if I'm a salesman for them and all I ever do is tell the client which model they require and offer them the opportunity of buying it themselves or having me arrange the invoicing and Service Contract that goes along with these new Digital units.

Unfortunately I tend to be on call 24/7 so I don't get much opportunity to take my mother out unless like recently I nearly managed to kill myself then my staff remove every car here and make sure I'm left alone, of course My wife has a hand in that lot but actually she is quite often the one who goes to my mothers place and drives her around and the like.

I've just got to find a new way of giving the money back to my mother so she has enough to live on and doesn't go short for something that she really needs.

Col

I've been doing the small business/home user support routine after losing my IT mgr job due to a corporate bankruptcy. The major problem that I have had is that nobody wants to pay anything! The small business owners are not interested in a monthly maint fee, but when there is a problem, you better be there fast AND with the right part(s)! Home owners are worse: $5 to put in memory, $10 to install/format/reload a hard drive,
$50 including the part to replace a power supply? Where in the world do users get these prices from? I charge $20-25/hr. with N/C if I can't get the problem resolved, and I'm having people tell me my fee structure is outlandish! When I point out what Geek Squad charges, they respond with....I'll just buy a new system!