Setting up a Storefront & Mobile Repair Business with Dean Ingraham

Bryce Whitty: How did you know to hire them? At what point did you determine that you needed external help?

Dean Ingraham: There was a long time there where I was working probably over 100 plus hours a week and I know I calculated it out and I was making less than $4 an hour. Once you start doing that you really need some additional help. The problem was at the time, I didn’t think I could afford the additional help. It’s just like moving out from the smaller location to a bigger location, I may not have been able to afford it but it’s one of those things that you have to do if you want to grow. Once I was putting in that many hours I just didn’t have a choice, to be honest with you.

Bryce Whitty: With hiring the employees, how did you know who was the right people?

Dean Ingraham: When I first started, my main concern was personality and character more than technical skills. I’m able to simplify repair processes pretty easily to where almost anybody can do them, so training was not a main concern for me. I wanted people that could basically talk to customers, who could speak on their level, and more importantly be able to sell and up-sell. During the interview process obviously, they had to have an interest in learning how to do the repairs but more importantly, they had to be able to speak, to be able to articulate themselves well and demonstrate ability to sell themselves. Otherwise I know they couldn’t sell the products.

Bryce Whitty: Yeah, it seems to be with personality obviously, you can’t train but just about everything else you can. The skills, you tell them to follow your systems, that sort of thing.

Dean Ingraham: Right, absolutely. In fact, for quite a long time, up until about a year, even our receptionists were required to become technicians. When you can take a receptionist who’s main job is to check in, check out customers, and answer phones, and make them into a technician then you know you’ve simplified a process enough to where almost anybody could do it. That’s always been my goal. We have what we call checklist repairs. Like I said, in the very beginning it wasn’t too important that they were technicians so much as they were salesmen. Now, as we have grown, it’s become more important to not have to spend all my time training and to actually get more experienced technicians in the shop while also trying to maintain employees that also have good personalities. As you can imagine, that became much harder to find.

Bryce Whitty: You mentioned some repair processes. How did you go about defining them and simplifying them?

Dean Ingraham: We have what we call checklist repairs. A checklist repair for us would be things like virus removals, tune-ups, re-installs. Those are things that I can consider anybody can do. We have checklists upon checklists, but for each of those repairs we have a checklist on how to start the repair and how to finish the repair. Part of finishing the repair of course, is to check everything and make sure all the functions work properly, make sure we didn’t forget anything, check the browsers, just basically make sure that the end product is what is intended. The great thing about having these checklists, is that the quality is always consistent no matter who does it.

We end up having anywhere between 2 to 3 different technicians working on one section, like the software section, and any one of them could pick up where the other person left off because it’s on the checklist and it gets checked off as it’s done. The checklists consist of things, a series of scans, check this, browser cleanups, account creation process, and then just checking all the functions and features and make sure that they work properly.

Bryce Whitty: Systems and processes are pretty big at your store?

Dean Ingraham: Yeah, there’s no way that we could run with the volume that we have and have the quality that we produce without systems and processes in place.

Bryce Whitty: Are those systems fairly simple? Is it like, “Okay, run virus removal software” or does it go a lot more deep into that? Check for this, check for that?

Dean Ingraham: Yeah, I can actually go down the list of a virus removal or tune-up to give you an idea if that helps.

Bryce Whitty: I mentioned before, you also have the other location. At what point did you decide to go into the second location?

Dean Ingraham: We decided to go into the second location, it wasn’t really as much planning as it was an opportunity that kind of fell into our lap. We have a really good reputation where we’re at currently, and there is a military base that’s actually about 15 minutes away from our location here in Jacksonville. A lot of the people who actually run many of the functions on that base were our customers. They had another shop on the base but they were not happy with the shop that was on the base. They had been there for 15 years, they’d done shoddy work, they were very unprofessional, their business didn’t grow, it wasn’t making them money and it wasn’t making their customers happy. About 6 months before the contract was actually up they approached me and they asked if I’d be interested. At the time, honestly, I was not sure if I wanted to open up another shop simply because I wasn’t sure where the industry was going. I figured, “Well, you know, even if it doubles my income, why not?”

The great thing about the contract was that it was all percentage based. They covered the rent, they covered the utilities, and it was based on the percentage of what my sales were. Even if I didn’t have a great month, I didn’t have to pay a whole lot in overhead. We went ahead and put in the bid. They had some ridiculous things like you had to work in a 700 square foot area and they wanted you to be 10% below the local average for this area, blah blah blah. Basically, it was just things that, if you wanted to have a successful business it was just not going to work. They sent us their contract, we sent them back our counter-contract and basically said, “Take it or leave it. If you want to have a good shop with a good reputation, this is what it’s going to require.” We pretty much got everything we wanted. We didn’t get the bigger location right away, but we actually just moved into our bigger location on Camp Lejeune about a month ago. Everything’s been going well, we’re doing probably almost half of what we do here in the Jacksonville store and that’s only after a year and a half of being open.

Bryce Whitty: How do you balance not being at that location? I understand you’re at the Jacksonville location now. How do you oversee everything at the other location?

Dean Ingraham: This is where the policies and procedures and processes all come in play. To be honest with you, I got really lucky in many respects. We had a hard time trying to find good technicians, and one night we did our last two interviews and we stumbled upon two great technicians and literally, me and the manager just looked at each other and we were like, “Did we seriously just interview those two on the same day?” We hired them on and one of those technicians ended up going over to the Camp Lejeune store. The technician, to be completely honest with you, didn’t have a whole lot of experience, but he had management experience and his past work had shown that he was capable of running a store. I put him over at Camp Lejeune and I taught him all the technical things that he would have to learn or that he would have to do over basically a two week period, went over the policies and procedures with him, and gave him the manual and said, “Here you go. Call me if you got any questions.”

It’s not exactly the way I would suggest that people do it, but unfortunately, because of how much time that was required to put into Jacksonville, that’s all I could do at the moment. At the time, the store was relatively slow so I could pop in from time to time and help out, and answer any questions that he had. I knew he wouldn’t be overloaded, but if it wasn’t for having those policies and procedures in place, there was no way that I could have opened up a second store and then have it run successfully. It did run successfully with that one technician for that first year and he did a great job. Now he’s actually my current manager now.

Bryce Whitty: What sort of software are you guys using there? Do you have any sort of favorite tools, both as software and hardware?

Dean Ingraham: For the checklist repairs I was talking about earlier, we use things like TDSS Killer, MBAR, MBAM, Combo Fix, Hitman Pro. These are right down the list of things that we do during our virus removal process. Then we clean the registry, then we use Adware cleaner and JRT and Kaspersky. Those are the main scanners that we use and then from there we go through the actual repair process of running checklists and SFC Scan Now, as well as creating the new account for the repair process. Those are most of the tools that we use for virus removals and that also is a lot of the tools that we use for tune-ups. As far as diagnostic goes, we use things like Memtest 86 and Memtest 86 Plus.

We do use PC Check from time to time whenever we come across a gaming computer, a custom build, or if we come across anything with overheating or possible display or motherboard issues, assuming that it turns on, it displays, we’ll use PC Check for those purposes. Then for our hard drive tests we’ll use Gsmart Control for the bulk material of our hard drives, and then HDD scan for installing safe drives and old IDE hard drives. For the most part, that is all the software that we use here in the shop. As far as our hardware goes, we actually have custom built diagnostic boxes that allows us to test up to 8 hard drives at once. It allows us to do things like data backup, cloning, data transfers, and stuff like that.

Bryce Whitty: What’s the RMA you’re using? If you’re using one at all?

Dean Ingraham: Right now we’re using RepairShopr. We were using Mhelpdesk probably for the first few years of the business. Mhelpdesk is great in many respects, but I believe something got corrupted in our account and we kept on having crashes going on, and so we moved to repair shopper. RepairShopr ‘s been good. I would say it’s biggest downfall is its reports. I feel like I’m constantly having to manually sift through data in order to get the information about the business that I need. In fact, just to give you an example, we were actually looking at a much bigger space for the Jacksonville store just recently and the rent was about 3 times more than what we’re paying now. As I said before, I don’t work a whole lot on the computers or tablets or cell phones. I try to run the business more than anything else, so I’m not in the midst of all the repairs. I was seeing a lot of repairs in the computer sections get done very quickly and I know our processes obviously. I’ve helped out, we also use D7, that’s another thing I forgot to mention, and D7 has streamlined our process a lot.

I kind of figured that we’re just knocking out the repairs a lot faster and D7 is helping us, and all this, but we’re still going to need the additional space to expand our store as well as the work area. We started to look for a bigger location, we found one that we thought was going to work, and it was a lot more than what we wanted to spend but we figured that the walk-by traffic was going to help generate enough business to make up the difference as well as applying the same strategy as the first time we made the move. Setting bench marks for up-sells that we wanted to make throughout the month and make up the difference. When I was doing all the calculations and the math and looking at our projections for that year, and determining whether or not it was something that we could do, I was only looking at half the picture. That was because the reports that is available to me was not very clear. I couldn’t easily see for instance, how many of what type of repairs are we doing versus another type of repair.

What I was ending up doing is, I was mainly sifting through a lot of the data and it took me probably a couple hours to finally realize, “Wow, we’re actually doing a lot more cell phone and table repairs than we are computer repairs.” For instance, as of last year June we were doing 25% cell phone and tablet repairs and now as of last month we’re doing now 69% cell phone and tablet repairs. Our needs have actually changed dramatically. A year ago we needed a bigger location. Now we could probably get away with a slightly smaller location than we currently have now. If I had the reports to be able to give me a quick snapshot of that, I would have known that long before we started negotiating the lease. Like I said, repair shopper, I think it’s biggest downfall is not having robust report systems. Other than that, everything else in repair shopper seems to be working out great. In fact, it seems to be working out a lot better than Mhelpdesk was for us in the past.

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