Making Business Mistakes

When I was 17, I started on the path as a self-employed computer techie. On the way, I made many mistakes where I remember the lesson that I had learned almost daily in my modern day repairs. I would love to share these with our Technibble members, especially our younger techies who are just starting.

Cover your ass

As the start of my second year I was purchasing clone PC’s (ex. goverment) with legitimate copies of Windows XP installed including the sticker on the side. I would get them patched up with all the Windows updates, install a free antivirus like AVG, install OpenOffice for them and deliver it to the clients house. They would pay me and I would give them an invoice with the price and mentioning that it included a 1 month warranty only as the computer is second hand.

For 6 months the client was very pleased with the computer until one day I receive a phone call from the client saying he is having problems with the computer. Treating this as a potential service call I asked what the problem was, he said “some of the icons from his desktop were missing, about 5 of them”, because this was such a small issue I tried to help him over the phone.

I first asked him to look in any folders on his desktop as he may have accidentally moved them into one, no luck there. I told him to look in the recycle bin as he may have deleted them, not there either. I then talked him though how to get to the system restore to see if someone else had uninstalled those programs which would have removed the icons from the desktop. Nothing had been uninstalled.

Something strange is obviously going on here and I couldn’t do anything more over the phone so he asked me to come out on a service call to try and fix it. Somehow by the tone in his voice I got the impression that he wanted me go onsite for free so I said “no problems, It should take less than an hour so its just my usual fee of $XX per hour” and he replied “oh, you want me to pay for it?”. I knew there was going to be trouble.

I proceeded to explain to him that it was most likely something he (or someone else using the computer) had done and not a failure of the computer itself. I also reminded him that a warranty was only 1 month and it has been expired for a long time.

He then mentioned that his friend told him that if he put the WindowsXP CD in, booted the computer and went through the prompts that it would fix the problem, all he needed was his XP CD (for our not so techie readers, he’s talking about a XP repair install). I told him that there was no XP CD, only a recovery partition that would delete all his data if he ran it and it wouldn’t fix the problem anyway. He insisted on his XP CD and I responded that I couldn’t provide one and he replied “well, you will be hearing from my solicitor”.

Woah! my mind instantly went into defense mode wondering “what dirt does he have on me?” and I quickly realized that everything is totally legal. The warranty was only 1 month, the invoice didnt say there was an XP CD, the software already installed on there is completely legitimate and it wouldn’t be worth it for this guy to persue it in court anyway. I was in the clear so I told him that “I will wait for the letter from your solicitor” and hung up. Never heard from him again.

Although I didn’t get burned, this guy could have caused me pain for a while. The lesson learned here is be sure to have a disclaimer down the bottom of your invoices specifying what you cover in your warranties (eg. hardware only) and that anything outside of the warranty date will not be covered. There will be a sample of this disclaimer in our upcoming Computer Technician Forms package we will be releasing soon.

Make sure you get paid

This one is probably the most recent of my big mistakes; I had a client who ran a business that makes millions of dollars a year that I had been doing alot of work for, mainly just small things like setting up printers and PDAs. In the past they had paid promptly, on time and were generally good to work for.

One week they did a massive purchase of laptops and PDAs and it was my job to set them up with the correct settings and make sure everything was running smoothly. There was alot to do and some tasks required certain people to return our calls (with settings and such) so I was in and out all week.

At the end of the week everything was finished and running smoothly so I sent them an invoice and had myself a good weekend. I would typically send them an invoice every time I went onsite but because there was so much to do, I left it till the end of the week. This was my mistake.

Two weeks passed and I still haven’t received payment so I gave them a call, I got hold of the secretary who said she will get them to give me a call back.

Another week passed and I called them again. Once again, I got the secretary who said they would give me a call back. Not wanting to wait, I asked when the person I was after was in and she gave me an approximate time. When I called back later that day I got the secretary once more.

This repeated for months so I sold the debt to the debt collectors which means I get 80% of what I am owed and the debt collectors keep 20% as their fee for chasing the client. I never found out why they decided not to pay me.

The lesson learned here: Invoice often, get paid as soon as possible, don’t do any more work until you are paid for previous invoices and don’t give too much slack to previously good payers because they may do a backflip on you.

Watch your Cashflow

Towards the end of the first year of my business I was getting plenty of work (especially from businesses) and business appeared to be good. I was firing off invoices left and right and had alot of money coming to me. A few weeks later I needed to pay for some high ticket items but quickly realized I had little money in my business accounts. I had earned the money, I just didnt actually have the money.

The lesson learned here: You haven’t earnt a cent until their money is safely in your bank account.

With that, I have some advice for our young techie readers; Dont be afraid to make mistakes. They say, if you don’t make any mistakes, you aren’t trying hard enough.