WiGoMan Blog - Tech Care (Repair, Reuse, Recycle) Industry Leader

No man is an island , or woman for that matter!  ( full credit to English poet John Donne ). Please allow me to take that thought a step further and say that no business is an island either. In other words, you and your business can't succeed on your own. Everybody needs somebody sometime ( queue, Dean Martin ). Friends, in the last 15 years I have seen a lot of tech repair companies rise and fall. I have seen honest hardworking people start high quality repair shops all over the country and I have seen cheats, scoundrels and opportunists try to do the same. I've seen good ideas and bad ideas tried over and over again. I have seen business after business enter the tech repair industry with so much excitement and passion only to see some of them fail, burnout or move on all too soon. Sound familiar? Not yet? It will be. Why? Because up until this year the tech care industry has lacked a true professional trade association that was designed to help the industry thrive...

It has been awhile since I have had a chance to share my musings with the world about the tech repair industry. While 2020 has been a decade of a year, your friend, the WiGoMan has been busy diving deeper into the tech repair industry. In fact -- or just to sound dramatic - deeper than any human before him.  Now I stand at a crossroads. A year after joining repair.org fulltime, I am leaving the association --  but more on that at a later date -- because now I want to jump into things a little bit and talk to you about the tech repair industry. What it is exactly and why I think NOW MORE THAN EVER the industry is poised  to grow into a powerful, profitable industry. Let me share a few things that I have learned over the last year at repair.org and 14 years in the tech repair industry. First up, WHY THE HECK DO YOU KEEP CALLING IT THE "TECH REPAIR INDUSTRY" WiGoMan? What was originally called the "Cellphone repair industry" has evolved greatly and continues to evolve ...

Wow! In the last three years the TECH repair industry has seen some pretty big dominoes fall and I predict that 2020 will be a breakout year for this rapidly growing multi-billion dollar industry. Dominoes started falling back in mid-August 2016 when a company most people had never heard of managed to pull down $15 million in series A funding, led by Carmel Ventures, with Sequoia Capital (a pretty serious name in investing) also participating - after seeding CellSavers with $3 million in December 2015. An $18 million invest in a less than one year old company kind of said something about the tech repair industry don't ya think?? Down went a domino. August 22, 2016 | Israeli startup  CellSavers , which provides an on-demand repair platform for smartphones and other mobile devices, has completed a $15 million financing round, led by Carmel Ventures, with participation of Sequoia Capital Israel. The current funding follows the company’s $3 million rou...

TOP HIRING PRACTICES TO HELP BUILD YOUR BEST TEAM - GAME 2 Game two is tough in any best of seven series. If you've won game one then you can build on that lead but if you lost game one you'll really need this one. The same is true for hiring, if you have found some good technicians you're off to a good start but your next move can either make it easier to become major league or you'll end up spending more time in the minors. How do you pick a winner?  One time while I was visiting my Arlington shop I sat down with a tech who was struggling. He was a nice kid who got along great with everyone in the shop. Super friendly and easy to talk to. So w hen I sat down in front of him I had no intention on firing him. It was a simple coaching session on how to check-in repairs to the shop. You see I had been going over the numbers and this friendly young man had, by far, the fewest successful check-ins out of any of the technicians working for me - we tracked hourly ...

Ouch, you just dropped your iPhone for what seems like the millionth time. You pick it up hoping, yea praying, that once again the screen is not cracked. You turn it over and terror fills your soul because it looks like a tiny spider has crawled inside and spun a web. But it's not a spider web your iPhone screen is CRACKED - WHAT NOW? Your first inclination will be to go back to the place you purchased it from - The Apple store, AT&T, Verizon, Best Buy, T-Mobile, Target, Costco, etc. Don't! These are RETAIL stores that sell billions of dollars of goods - in the case of Apple $265 billion in annual sales just last year. There job as a company, in duty to their shareholders, is to increase sales. So what do you think is the first thing they will try to do? (hint: you're going to walk by lots of them as you walk into the store). You got it, they are going to try to get you to buy a new phone.  All these shiny new iPhone's are like kitties at the pet st...

TOP HIRING PRACTICES TO HELP BUILD YOUR BEST TEAM In the spirit of baseball here is game one of my seven game series about how to build a championship repair company. Playing baseball is easy, all you need is a bat and a ball. Find a field, add some gloves, bases, nine players and it becomes a team. Anyone can create a team but only a few can win a championship. Just like baseball repairing tech is easy, all you need is a screwdriver and a part. Buy a tool kit, anti-static mat, a few parts, post an ad online, put up a sign and you become a business. Anyone can repair cell phones but only a few can build a business that will last. Much like baseball teams tech repair companies come and go on a regular basis. One day you're hot the next day you're cold. One day your fans are cheering you on and the next day it's nothing but 1-star reviews on Yelp There is nothing I love more than a game seven of the World Series and a couple of years ago the good Lord blessed us wi...

In the old days - dang I sound like an old man - you would get stuff fixed when it broke. I fondly remember helping my dad carry our TV console down to the car to take to the repair shop. Heck I even remember going with dad to get a blender fixed one time at a local repair shop. Things changed in 1989 when Gordon Jump became the "Maytag Repairman" and his character became an iconic metaphor for a professional whose services are rarely needed. You see innovation in the home appliance market had pretty much peaked by this time. So to sell more product companies like Maytag built a better product that they could charge more for and convince folks that they could do without "ol' Lonely" as he was called. Many other industries followed suit and tried to build better stuff that didn't need to be repaired as often. Really only the high-tech stuff, that was still innovating needed repair centers. The Cell Phone industry was one of those products as both Noki...