Setting up a Storefront & Mobile Repair Business with Dean Ingraham

Most of the people here, they’re doing everything on their phones. They’re doing everything on their tablets. Obviously, the computer repair industry is changing as well. We’re starting to see a lot more tablet-laptop hybrids come in, and even though Microsoft Surface Tablets were kind of a flop, I think it is more or less a glimpse into the future as to what we’re going to be seeing in the future. We’re not going to keep seeing the traditional laptop as much as we’ve been seeing in the past. We’re going to start seeing more and more of these laptop-tablet hybrids. I can only see that portion of our business continuing to grow. The one thing that I’ve also learned is that PC repair for whatever reason, people don’t want to pay that much for PC repair. You end up spending a lot more time on a PC repair compared to that of Mac repair or cell phone repair.

In the end, for as much time as you put into it, oftentimes you’ll actually make less on a PC repair than you would on a series of cell phone repairs. The biggest different of course, is that I think PC repair probably has more up-sell opportunity and thus bigger ticket items. Cell phone repair with enough volume, is actually more profitable per square foot and per hour than PC repair. We’re really trying to gear up our business to start really getting it in peoples’ minds that, “Hey, we’re a cell phone and tablet repair shop. We also do Macs, we also do PCs, but our main focus is mobile devices.” That’s going to require us to change our name, to do a few other changes in order to get that into peoples’ minds, but I really believe that that’s where the industry is going.

Bryce Whitty: You mentioned Android phones. I guess the problem with repairing Android phones is, can be like a $30 phone with a screen the size of a matchbox or a $1,000 flagship that’s actually quite large. How do you stock the parts with that sort of thing? It’s just so many different models of Android, whereas with the iPhones, basically you can have it from the 4 upwards and you’re pretty much covered.

Dean Ingraham: Right. There are thousands of Android phones obviously, and it’s very difficult. In fact, it’s pretty much nearly impossible to keep everything that you would need in stock to service every phone. Realistically, there’s only going to be maybe half a dozen phones you’re going to service on a regular basis anyways. Sometimes you’re not going to even really know what those phones are until you’re started repairing a few of them. Currently right now, we repair the S4’s, the S5’s, we’ll start seeing more of the S6’s come in. We do a lot of G2’s and I love the G3’s, the XT1080’s, the HTC One’s, M8’s and M7’s. Those are the more common phones and we’ll try to make it a point to keep things like screens and charging ports in stock for those phones. Anything outside of those phones, generally speaking, if you want to get it fixed, if it’s even worth fixing, it’s one of those things where we’ll special order the parts and the customer would either have to wait a few days to get the parts in, unless they’re willing to pay for overnight shipping.

Really, in the last couple years that we’ve been doing this, unless there’s a resource that I don’t know about, the best way that I’ve found to figure out which phones are going to be the ones that you want to keep things in stock for is just to do the repairs and see what comes in consistently. The thing about that too, is that generally speaking, when the phones first come out you’re not going to want to keep the parts in stock anyways because they’re usually so expensive and the prices drop so quickly that there’s no sense in keeping a phone screen in stock for a month when it first comes out and then just to have it drop 50 to $100. By the time it’s actually worth keeping those parts in stock, you will generally have an idea as to whether or not you’re going to start seeing that phone come in regularly or not.

Bryce Whitty: Are you finding the Mac repairs worth it? With the screens, are they very fiddly?

Dean Ingraham: Yeah, Mac repairs are definitely worth it. In fact, when we made this major change, Mac repairs are going to be one of the main things that we’re going to focus our business on as well as the mobile devices. In fact, we’ll continue to do PC repairs but we want to do them more or less at a premium price. Mac repairs in general, super easy, obviously the re-installs are super easy, the hardware replacements are easy. The screen replacements, they’re a little more difficult anyways than all the rest of the repairs, but honestly, we have a pretty good process in repairing those devices and those screen assemblies. It doesn’t take us very long at all to do them. In fact, I would probably say they’re actually easier to repair than the iPad. Yeah, definitely worth doing.

Bryce Whitty: Do you have trouble getting good parts for say, the iPads for example? I know a lot of people in the forums are having a bit of trouble. Actually, it might have been you that was posting it, I think it was the touch pads. I can’t remember if it was the screens or the buttons but there’s a lot of crap parts coming out of China and it’s a little bit hard to actually get good stuff.

Dean Ingraham: Right. Sometimes it seems like you find a good parts vendor and then they do great for 6 months to a year, then all of a sudden they start supplying crap parts. Then you’re switching to another one, and then they do good for a while and then you start getting crap parts again. It seems like that’s happening all the time and we have probably 4 or 5 different distributors that we go through. E-Tech seems to be the best one right now for iPhones. Wholesale probably is the best one for small parts, Gadget Fix we’ve just recently started using them more, and they probably have some of the better prices on the Android screens. Group Vertical is another one that we started using recently, their parts are more expensive than our other vendors but time will tell whether or not the quality justifies the price that they’re charging. Yeah, sometimes it can be difficult and we’ve also found that because all these different vendors are getting these parts from China, that sometimes they all suffer the same problem.

For instance, in the last 6 weeks or so, we’ve had issues with some of the iPhone screens, the glass lifting up from the plastic bezzle. It seemed like no matter where we got it from, which vendor, they all had the same exact problem. My understanding of course, is that they finally tracked down where that problem was coming from and there shouldn’t be an issue anymore. The fact remains, all these vendors are all getting them from China and it seems the only thing that differentiates the vendors is one, you have where they’re getting it from and two, how many times it’s being tested before it ships out to them and three, how many times they test it before they ship it out to you. I think that’s one of the reasons why E-Tech’s small parts are so expensive because they test their parts so many times before they ship it out. I think that’s the biggest thing that makes the biggest difference is, how many times are they testing it before they ship it out to you to ensure that you’re actually getting a good part?

Bryce Whitty: Would you rather pay the premiums to make sure you definitely got the good stuff or would you rather eat the cost of the bad stuff or go through the process of returning it? What would you prefer?

Dean Ingraham: I try to find a balance. For instance, E-Tech, they had their big parts which are super premium parts, they have their standard, what’s considered a OEM, original LCD parts, then they have their A++ screens. To be honest with you, up until just recently where we started seeing the glue issues0 on the bezzles, the A++ parts have been working great. In fact, we rarely ever see any defects come from that. Honestly, if we’re doing 100 screen replacements in a month and I see 1 or 2 or them come back because it had an LCD issue, the amount of money that I saved from all those A++ screens versus their next step up, far exceeds the couple warranty claims that we have to do. Especially considering the repair only takes about 15 minutes. Usually, as long as you honor the warranty, the customer is more than happy to wait there for 15, 20 minutes for you to switch out the screen for them and hand their phone right back.

Bryce Whitty: Does it delay the repair, having the bad stuff or do you just have another one ready and just chuck that in in a moment’s notice?

Dean Ingraham: For instance the iPhones, we always keep those screens in stock. Honestly, we have so few defective screens coming from E-Tech for instance, that we don’t even test the screens anymore. We used to with Wholesale gadget parts for instance, we used to test every single screen before we even put it on a phone because we were getting so many defective screens that it was ridiculous. We were sending a box to them every few weeks of just defective screens. E-Tech has consistently provided good quality screens. So much so that we literally don’t even test the screen before we put it on the phone. Every once in a while we might come across a screen that we just repaired and something’s wonky with it, and we’ll just have to switch it out. It costs us 15 minutes to do that versus maybe a half hour to an hour to have to do all the screens when they come in. Like I said, we don’t get very many people coming back for warranty claims so the couple times that we have to do a warranty claim is nominal compared to the time and money that we’d have to spend otherwise.

Bryce Whitty: If someone had to come back for a warranty claim, do you make them wait or do you generally just swap the part over on the spot or within a few hours or maybe the next day? Do you wait for the par to come back from the supplier?

Dean Ingraham: It really depends on the situation. If it’s an iPhone, as often as we can we will try to prioritize that repair and get them done right away. However, if we have a ton of phones that came in and we’ve already quoted certain time frames, obviously we’ve got to try to get those done as quickly as possible or at least on time. We try to find a balance when it comes to that. When it comes to Android phones, if we do have a warranty claim most of the time it’s on the phones that we keep the parts in stock anyways, so at that point it’s just a matter of switching out the screen or the part or whatever it is. Android phones generally take a little bit longer than iPhones so we would have to quote them a little bit of a longer turnaround time.

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