Just started a repair business

[hoorhay]

So I've recently started a small repair business for computers. One of my customers brought me his girlfriend's laptop claiming they couldn't log on anymore etc. I spoke with the girlfriend and she even showed me a receipt for when she bought the laptop a year ago. I can't be sure of course, but whatever. Once I backdoor reset the password and got on, the pictures on the computer were all of them and their kid, so confirmed.

Anyway. I Spent about three hours, first removing the laptop hdd and putting it in a dock. Couldn't view any files(second part of their issue is they couldn't find the files when they logged in via safe mode) which I thought was odd. Disconnected, put the hdd back in. Booted it up and proceeded to reset the password. Got in, checked folders and there was almost nothing to be had. Checked the trash bin..... whalla! 364 items including music, documents, pdf's, spreadsheets, pictures etc etc etc. Restored.

Again, I spent about three hours doing this. What do you think would be a fair price. We didn't discuss price beforehand as it didn't really fall under my options listed eg

virus removal
tune up
hardware replacement
etc

I guess this would be akin to data recovery

any thoughts?

 

[abaday789]

I personally would only charge them your hourly rate plus for any parts/consumables you might have had to use unless you have quite a high rate and it wasn't a very difficult procedure for you to carry out. Most people will be willing to pay your your honest hourly rate if that is what it takes to get precious photos etc back as well.

 

[mudpuppet]

Look into setting a price for data recovery, but things that are "misc" are usually a labor per hour rate. How long did it take you to backdoor and restore? Office Depot offers "data recovery" services for about $39.99. You can gauge that for yourself but I would say for roughly an hour of your time, around 20-30$ is fair.

 

[hoorhay]

Yeah, I was thinking(although not planning to advertise this) that I'll charge $15/hr and claim 3 1/2 hours work on it, as it more or less was due to windows attempting repairs for like 40min. This would equate to $52.50

I did work for both BestBuy GeekSquad and Staples EasyTech. I can say with certainty that they would have been much much more expensive after bench fee's, in-take scans and of course trying to shove the house anti virus down their throats. I know data back-up and recovery was between 69.99 and 99.99. So I don't really feel bad, even though it was relatively simple once I got to the desktop. I still spent a lot of time removing hardware, slaving the drive, changing commands to reset password.

Thanks for your opinions guys! I feel a little more confident in my choice now

 

[Solandri]

Yeah, I was thinking(although not planning to advertise this) that I'll charge $15/hr and claim 3 1/2 hours work on it, as it more or less was due to windows attempting repairs for like 40min. This would equate to $52.50

Do note that $15/hr at 8 hr/day, 5 days/week, and 50 weeks/yr works out to an annual income of $30,000 before taxes. And that's assuming you have business constantly lined up so you can actually do 8 hours of work each day, and don't have other business expenses like rent (if you open a shop), test equipment, driving for on-site jobs, and bad jobs where either the client doesn't pay or where you waste hours and fail to fix the problem. If you plan to do this as a business, I'd say that's severely underpriced.

I don't bill for hours where I'm waiting for the computer to thrash the disk. Usually that's time I can spend working on another job, and I don't want to be like the auto repair shop which bills for 20 hours of labor in an 8 hour workday.

 

[hoorhay]

Definitely understood. This is my second week at this and my 5th customer, but my first that's a "friend" of a relative. Since we didn't discuss it before the work was done, I was trying not to irritate. Closer to a favor job than an actual client. I'll heavily weigh out financial responsibilities and other things of the like, then carefully decide on what I'd like to see an hour while attempting to retain past customers. I don't have nor do I plan to have a shop front, so I fortunately won't have to consider that overhead.

Again, thank you for the input. It's valuable in a thousand ways to me.