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

When I was a kid my Dad taught me how to fix things. We fixed things around the house, we fixed the car, we fixed the roof ( in the middle of a very hot summer ), we fixed the lawnmower but when the TV broke we both carried it down to the car and took it to a local repair shop. Repair was in our blood but when it was above our pay grade we took it to a repair shop for a professional to work on. Boy howdy did I love to tinker with things when I was a kid! Radios, tape decks, boomboxes and anything that had screws to be unscrewed. One time my parents bought me a brand new ten-speed bike, which I promptly took apart and repainted. Repair was in my blood! Our family was a typical middle class family in America enjoying what life offered us but respecting the fact that we needed to take care of the things we owned. Money was something we didn't just throw around. When my Mom wanted new chairs for the dinning room because they were wobbly and worn out. Dad broke out the woo...

Today a newly formed group within the Trump administrations Space Force Scientist Consortium (SFSC) announced a major breakthrough in repairing liquid damaged electronics. "We have finally done what no other human person has done," said Elmer Gantry. "We have stumbled onto a way to magically repair the water damaged iPhone forever." Gantry, who made his fortune planting churches across America and more recently served as the US Ambassador to North Korea, announced the "Factual Findings" on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial while skipping iPhones into the tidal basin where they would sink to the bottom to be retrieved by migrant children in paddle boats. The SFSC report reveals that while working on a classified project with their Russian counterparts, who were trying to understand the 'Young Peoples' fascination with Avocado Toast, an intern dropped his iPhone in the toilet during a FaceTime session with family back in South Dakota. Up...

The TECH REPAIR INDUSTRY is huge! I mean really, really big. Billions of dollars in revenue flow thru thousands of tech repair shops and independent tech repair people all over the country. But MOST people don't even know that tech repair is a thing! Sad 😞but true! You see, when my company started repairing cell phones as part of our AT&T retail business in 2006 every single customer would say, "I never knew anyone who fixed phones". Then w hen I opened my first standalone repair shop in 2010 almost everyone who came into our shop would say, "I never knew anyone who fixed phones". Well of course, that made sense, because we were one of the first companies to offer on the spot immediate cell phone repair in the country. The thing that really surprised  me was that for  ten years  we still had a lot of people coming in and saying the same thing!? INDEPENDENT RESEARCH Before I sold my repair business in 2016 I decided to do some research. I went ou...

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...

I remember it like it was yesterday -- and at one of the thousands of tech repair shops around the country it was yesterday -- I got a call in my office that one of my good friends from church was down at the repair shop and he was super upset. My tech told me he was frantic and needed to talk to me directly. I was in a meeting with my warehouse staff but I jumped up from my desk and headed down to the shop. On the way I wondered what was wrong. Had someone in our small group been injured? Maybe one of my family members were hurt? Was it another fundraising campaign for the new church building? What could be so important??? I hugged my good friend as I met him in the shop and asked him what was wrong. With tears in his eyes he said, "I really hope you can help Rob." I thought for sure that someone had died.  He slowly lifted a beach bag and emptied four *almost* brand new iPhone's on the counter next to a couple of sea shells along with a little sand mixed-in. The ...

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 ...