BUSINESS !

3.13.09
Business !

So I guess I’m starting a business. I have been fixing friends and families pcs for years. If you are a geek you know what I’m talking about. You get a call or talk with someone about some issues they are having because you “know everything about computers”.
You end up either talking them through it on the phone which is a total cluster because you know exactly where everything is and have done it a thousand times. You end up getting frustrated and so don’t they because they don’t quite get it as good as you do and you as the tech just want to resolve the issue and move on. So what do you do? You go to their house with your memory stick with a bunch of troubleshooting/quick fix applications, maybe a few cd’s and a pc toolkit, (well that’s what I bring anyway and any tech worth his weight in gold always carries said items in his backpack anyway). You show up and fix their shit. It makes you feel good because you’ve helped someone out when they are just so frustrated and they make you feel like a god because you always get the “how do you know this stuff ?” “I just don’t have the patience for learning all that “. That’s ok with me because that’s why people like me exist.

Now before I talk about the business, indulge me with a little soapbox preaching. I promise to be nice…more or less.

PEOPLE WANT THEIR PCS TO RUN PERFECTLY BUT WILL NOT LEARN WHAT IT TAKES TO KEEP THEM THAT WAY ! It really is a relatively easy thing to do. Basic maintenance on a pc or laptop is essential to making personal computing fun.
I’m not going to tell you how to do all this stuff because there are about 45378 different articles on the web. If you do a quick search on Google you can learn it very easily. This is with the expectation that you can actually tear yourself away from Ebay, Facebook, MySpace or whatever sites you’re for addicted to for 5 fucking minutes. ;)
Or if you’d rather have me do it, get in touch and I will give you a very attractive rate if you mention my blog…

I recently worked on a new clients laptop. It needed a full format and total config afterwards. Not crazy hard stuff or anything but time consuming and you have to pay attention. I did all I could on my own and then set up a time to meet at her house and hook everything back up and do some user specific configuration. I spent about an hour and a half there. When I got done, she was just flabbergasted (do people even use this word anymore?) about the proficiency of the way I worked and my seemingly unending patience with her and her 12 year old daughter who I did some custom config for as well. She got her first email account ! Cute…
She told me “you should really do this as a business. You were so good with me and explained everything so that even I could understand. My laptop runs 100 times better and now I can do like 3 or 4 things I’ve never done before with a computer”. That’s the problem a lot of times is that people get frustrated with the performance or what they are getting out of their pcs so they either never use em or just trudge through life with a piece of metal and circuits that ends up being more of a hassle than it’s worth. doesn’t have to be like that people…promise…

So I decided what the hell, I’m going to do this professionally. It really isn’t about the money. Well yeah it is, but the enjoyment I will be getting out of helping people enjoy their pcs will be just as rewarding. I am putting together a group of very talented techs that I have worked with in the past. We will be servicing Maine from Portland to Kittery. NH from Manchester to Nashua. Massachusetts from the NH border to the South Shore.
We will do pc/laptop repair and upgrades. Wireless/wired home network setup. Small business network setup and Web site design. The thing we are offering that I am most excited about is education and training. Making people use their pcs intelligently so it makes it fun for them. I don’t want to put myself out of business by teaching them every little thing about pcs but frankly people don’t WANT to learn every little thing. They want to learn enough to be self sufficient and make this thing do what they need it to do. So many times I have heard after showing somebody something “I didn’t know you could do that.” Fortunately I did and now you do too…

Scope the site and feel free to contact me if you think I can help. I’d be glad to talk to ya…

www.lakeview-solutions.com