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Entrepreneurial Dominion | ||||||||||||||
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Richard Cole |
Chief
Geek
There's big business in providing computer repair service to homes and small businesses. Richard Cole wants to professionalize the independent techies who serve that fragmented market. | |||||||||||||
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Fatal
competition
can emerge from the least likely of places. For roughly
350,000 computer repair shops across the For
Richard Cole, founder and chairman of Geeks on Call, the
threat erupts from Minneapolis, One way or another, a big sector of the economy is heading for an upheaval. The outcome is far from certain. Maybe the little guys will get their act together, merging and consolidating to fend off their better funded rivals. Maybe Best Buy will leverage its brand name and national footprint into the giant of home computer services. But one way or another, the fragmented and inefficient PC-repair industry will rationalize along the lines envisioned by Richard Cole. And it's a good bet that Geeks on Call will lead the way. The
market for PC repair services is enormous, and ripe for
change. Cole cites a Ziff-Davis study estimating the
after-market for PC sales – maintenance, repairs,
upgrades and training – to be about $300 billion a
year. Large enterprises can afford to maintain their own
IT departments or pay big retainers to IT services
firms, but the options are terrible for everyone else,
Cole contends. Most
Cole
doesn’t want to put these guys out of business so much
as he wants to liberate them -- by turning them into
Geeks on Call franchise owners. His company builds the
brand, sets standards, handles the advertising, operates
a central call center, delivers training and provides
technical support. That takes
a huge business load off the shoulders of the repair
guys. Says Cole: “We run the business side of the
business for the geek, so the geek can do what he does
best, which is fix computers.” Cole
may aspire to
the status of chief geek but he is new
to the field. He spent 20 years in the outdoor
advertising business, cashing out of his last business
in 1996 -- an enterprise that had had the distinction of owning about 80
percent of the billboards along the Landmark
was a “super fine” organization, Cole says, and he
was “high on the food chain,” but after three years
he came to the conclusion that he didn’t like working
for anyone else. After an amicable departure, he spent a
year thinking what to do next. The inspiration
came one evening when he and a friend, personal injury
attorney Michael Joynes, expressed frustration with
their computer systems. After a bit of brainstorming,
they came up with the idea for Geeks on Call. Says Cole:
“We thought it made sense to hire a couple of repair
guys, put an ad in the Yellow Pages and see what would
come of it.” Cole brought in some local investors (including Joynes), spent two years perfecting the business model, and then developed a franchise package. The business model is built around the idea of helping geeks do what geeks do best -- tinker with stuff. “When we were five years old,” says Cole, “most of us got one of those little paddle balls for our birthday. The geeks got the super erector set with the motor. While we were outside playing, they were working on their erector sets. Those are the guys who are fixing computers today.”
Computer
techies may be
wizards with a PC but most have no sense of how to run
a business. Call
a computer repair guy, Cole observers, and he’ll try
to solve your problem on the phone despite that obvious
fact that no on can make
money giving away his service for free. Geeks on Call
doesn’t let its techies work over the phone – it
dispatches them into the field like a plumber or
electrician. And, like the plumber or electrician, Geeks
on Call charges for every visit. To
save the geeks from themselves, Cole’s company
operates a call center at its Cole’s
geeks must meet high technical standards: They must be
certified as an A+ Comptia technician or a Microsoft
certified systems engineer before even entering the
Geeks on Call program. Then they must attend “ The
company has grown from its home base in Hampton Roads to
the Dictating
the pace of expansion is the company’s ability to sell
enough territories in a market to support the Geeks on
Call ad campaign. “This is not a stand-alone
business,” Cole explains. “You have to have multiple
franchisees to sustain a market.” The
challenge now is to keep the first mover advantage now
that Best Buy, which has blatantly copied many
aspects of the Geeks on Call business model, has entered
the market. But Cole relishes the challenge. “They
do big-box retailing well, but that doesn’t mean they
can execute a plan to roll out on-site service across
the country. They don’t have dexterity.” Geeks
on Call has an advantage that Best Buy can't replicate, Cole insists. “In our
model, you’re always dealing with the owner of the
franchise or one of his employees. You’re not dealing
with a store manager or someone who can’t make a
decision.” Customers will stick with Geeks on Call as
long as they have a good experience. “It’s all about customer service.”
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Find Out More...
News
August 23, 2004 Geeks on Call Among the "10 Hottest Deals in Franchising"
July 21, 2004 Reno is the Newest Hot Spot for Computer Geeks
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With
the proliferation of viruses, worms, spam, spyware,
software conflicts and other forms of cyber-debris
clogging up PCs, small businesses desperately need
help. As Cole looked around Hampton Roads, he observed
that the only enterprises serving the home and
small-business markets were tiny computer-repair shops.
They were all but invisible, usually tucked away in a
seedy neighborhood
shopping center. And most are marginally profitable. The retail margin in computer hardware is only six
percent, Cole notes. “The [mom and pops] have to sell
a lot. Most of them do about $250,000 a year, half in
parts, half in service. Do the math: It’s horrible.”
