Start a Computer Repair
Business From Home

First, you have to be good at the service you offer. Like any other successful home based business offering a local service, you need happy customers who will recommend you to their friends and colleagues.

Also, it's much cheaper to keep your current customers happy than to advertise for new ones. Keeping customers happy also means that you need to be reliable, to turn up on time, and to be pleasant - so customers want you to come back.

Second, like all small business ideas, if you want to start a computer repair business from home, it's vital to identify a good way to find new customers. I suggest that the best strategy is to build up a list of residential and small business customers who you visit every month or quarter to give their computers a health check. This gives you a steady income from repeat business, rather then relying for people to phone you when their PC has fallen foul of a virus or a lightning strike.

A friend of mine runs a home based PC repair business. He used to ask friends to recommend him to home owners or small businesses who needed emergency laptop or PC repairs. The problem with this idea is that no-one knows when their machine is going to break down.

However, by shifting his strategy he was able to ask whether friends knew anyone whose machines were driving them mad by running slower and slower, or who were worried in case they lost all their photographs or other data. Also, many people have problems with their email systems or internet browsers and would be happy to pay for some simple advice to sort these out. You could easily make a list of similar items to include on a routine 'PC health check'.

This idea of building up regular repeat business from loyal customers is crucial to building any successful home based business.

Third, you need to make sure that you price your time at a sufficiently high rate to make the money you need to make. It's best to aim for customers who want good service rather than those who want the cheapest deal.

While you may need to charge extra for travelling further than usual, it's good to have a clear fixed tariff that you can explain to customers before you repair their PC. Customers like to know how much they will be paying.

Normally, one of the main challenges in building a successful home based business is having to find customers. While this is still the case if you are starting a PC repair business, at least there should be no shortage of potential customers for your services. Most homes and small businesses have at least one computer.