Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

From time to time I do some consulting for computer repair companies outside Schrock’s local trade areas.

Typically these take the form of phone calls about trends or marketing ideas, but York Computer Repair is a whole different story.

Yesterday I received an unexpected thank you letter (yes the postal mail kind) from York Computer Repair’s Owner, Walter Oakhem. Here is what he wrote:

Thank you for all of the help you have given me with starting York Computer Repair.

I especially appreciate the information and advice you have provided, and the contacts you have shared with me. Your assistance has been invaluable to me during this process. I just wanted to say an extra thank you for your mentoring and kindness.

Again, thank you so much. I greatly appreciate your generosity.

What Did I Do to Deserve Such Kind Words?

I have never really talked about Walt, his company, or what I have done to help him get things rolling in York, PA. Even my employees don’t know the details of what we discussed. In one of our calls Walt suggested I document our conversations because he felt other computer repair company owners might benefit from them.

I am going to preface this by stating that no consultant, no home study course, and no business model can bring you success unless you are willing to implement it.

From day one, Walt has had a flame of passion that I have seen in few others over the past few years. While this post will name off some of the suggestions I gave to Walt, by no means am I trying to take any portion of the credit for his work. Anyone can talk, but only an entrepreneur can transform talk into results like Walt has in Pennsylvania.

The Meat & Potatoes of Three Phone Calls

Over the course of our three phone calls we covered topics raging from starting up to scaling to a retail location and everything in between. Walt and I discussed:

* The absolute NEED for a sales model (and how easy it is to make one)
* How to target a small niche in your marketplace and expand outward from there
* Yellow Pages advertising techniques that are proven to bring in hundreds of new customers each month
* How to build an inventory of repair components for next to nothing
* How to hire employees as inexpensively as possible in the first few months
* How to value your time and get your customers to pay a reasonable price for it
* Every reason you should NEVER try to be a low-cost leader
* The need for a work flow management system and where you can get one specifically designed for computer repair shops
* How you can create brands for your physical products and service products and why it is a VITAL step than is often skipped causing others to fail
* Who the key low-cost hardware providers are and how to do business with them (if you think NewEgg is your best value, think again)
* The need to continually remind your customers how wise they are to choose to do business with you

I never imagined that I would be writing this, but I actually agree with the ACLU on something.

I am used to the ACLU defending the indefensible and taking ridiculous positions on issues that inflame public opinion.

But this video is as scary as it gets and if Obama digitizes health care records as part of his overall socialization of the US health care system, this could be a reality more quickly than you might think. Way to go ACLU for getting one right this time.

Local Insight Yellow Pages is informing its advertisers that their contracts are being forcibly extended – at their existing monthly rates – for three additional months. 140 of the company’s 900 directories are being delayed.

While the company says the move is to allow time to install new printing equipment, it is also obvious that the delay will prevent advertisers who wished to cut back their ads from doing so. In Lincoln, the billing of yellow page directory advertising is linked to your telephone service. If you refuse to pay the bill, Windstream will cut off your phones.

In effect, the delay will allow Local Insight to delay what would most certainly be cuts in small businesses yellow pages advertising budgets.

A few weeks ago I received a letter form Local Insight Yellow Pages informing me that they were delaying the release of their 2010 book by three months. Instead of its normal release in November 2009, the 2010 book was being pushed back to February of 2010.

On Friday I had a small oral surgery to correct a birth defect that has been a problem for the past 2 years.

Oral Surgeon Dr. Andrew Glenn implanted a small titanium screw into my upper jaw yesterday to act as an artificial root for a tooth that Dr. Chris Haag will be crafting and mounting to the screw in about 5 months.

Only 2 days remain to get Schrock Innovations’ Preventative Maintenance Checkup on sale for only $19.99! This is the FINAL maintenance checkup sale of 2009, so it you miss this one its a long wait until 2010!

We are “officially” launched the sale on last weekend’s Compute This radio show, and our staff has done an amazing job keeping up with the workload. Unlike the previous sale, our turn around times are very reasonable (3 days or less).

A PC Maintenance Checkup is a complete head-to-toe examination of a computer that takes between 8 and 12 hours of bench time to complete. Our Maintenance Checkup is normally a great deal at its usual price of $60, but for next week only we will be discounting that price to an amazing $19.99.

A recession is a massive opportunity for a small business that is willing to take a few calculated risks for a big reward. While your competitors are petrified by fear – real or manufactured – about what the future holds, your business needs to seize the present. By moving aggressively with calculated marketing moves you can snatch customers and marketshare for your company while your competitors’ fears become their reality.

Over the past few months I have written about:

* Yellow Page Advertising Strategies for a Start-up Business
* Radio Advertising Strategies that Work Fast
* Why a Recession is the Best Time to Lead Your Industry
* How to Use Dunn & Bradstreet to Identify & Target Weak Competitors

I know these strategies work because I employ them in my computer repair company, Schrock Innovations. Schrock was started in 1999 and controls a commanding share of the Lincoln and Omaha computer repair marketplace. We have zero debt, great cash flow, and we are taking in an average of 162 new customers each and every month in 2009. We are GROWING in a recession.

Remember the gold old days when you could get a free computer as long as you agreed to pay a monthly dial-up provider like AOL $30 a month for slow, overpriced Internet access?

Well grab your credit cards and put on your bifocals! The deal has returned courtesy of Best Buy and Sprint, but this time the screen is a bit smaller.

ZDNet is reporting that the two companies are partnering to offer a Compaq-branded HP Mini 110c netbook for only 99 cents when you sign a two-year 3G Internet contract.

These free computer offers are REALLY tempting because consumers in a recession-battered economy get what they want right now – a new computer – by signing a promise to give more money later.

Breaking Down the Numbers

Under this deal, you get the $389 retail value netbook for only $.99. The contract costs about $60 a month, so if you multiply that by 24 months, you would find that the contract will cost you $1,441 over its two year term.

Obviously the Sprint 3G connection is portable, so you are paying a price premium on your Internet connection to be able to take it with you anywhere you go. Additionally, there are limits to how much Internet connectivity you can use before additional charges get lumped in.

For the sake of comparison, the cost for you to buy this netbook and use it on a budget cable modem or DSL connection would be much, much less expensive.

Try $20 a month for the DSL Internet connection and $389 for the netbook. The total cost over 2 years is only $869 – a savings of $572 over two years (nearly $24 a month).

Schrock Innovations’ web development division started off in 2001 with just one website – its own. We hooked up with a company in Lincoln called Binary.net that handled hosting for all of the websites we would come to manage flawlessly.

Schrock is a high-service providing company and our web customers expect us to be there when they need us in the capacity that they need us.

Schrock Moves Hosting to Rackspace

To help meet that service expectation, we decided the time to move our hosting infrastructure to another company had arrived. We moved all of our serveres to Rackspace Hosting about 4 months ago, and we haven’t looked back since.

Rackspace was voted one of the best Fortune 500 companies to work for in 2008, and I can honestly say I have never had a bad experience dealing with them over the phone or email.

Schrock Innovations might be closed today, but we are celebrating Independence Day by supporting a fund raiser for children our US service men and women.

The “Golf for the Troops” charity golf tournament is in its third year and has raised more than $25,000 locally in Lincoln to fund scholarships for our troops’ children. Schrock will be contributing a gift card to the list of prizes available to those who participate in the tournament.

My wife was an Air Force Brat, so I have an understanding for some of the stresses that military families go through between multiple moves, long deployments, and time lost.

Our armed forces take on these stresses in a selfless desire to serve, and this event shows our local military members that Lincoln cares about their sacrifice and appreciates it.

The tournament consists of two 18-hole rounds of golf, a silent auction, couple of meals and many prizes. The tournament is scheduled for July 9th at the Wildreness Ridge Golf Course. Contact the golf course for information on how you can enter and be a part of a great cause.

Have a safe and fun July 4th weekend, and thank you to all of the men and women who have served over the years to keep the US a free and safe place for everyone.

I have been playing around with a solid state hard drive for the past few weeks to get a better understanding of how they improve my notebook’s performance under different operating systems.

While I certainly don’t look like Goldilocks, my solid state drive experience was a lot like the classic children’s fairytale.

Windows XP on a solid state drive was fast, but at times too fast. With XP, my notebook booted so fast that I could log in, and open Firefox just to have it fail because the system had not negotiated an IP address yet.

Windows Vista was not much faster than a traditional hard drive. I got a serious case of heartburn thinking I had just spent $450 on a 120 GB solid state drive when a $60 drive would have done the same job.

Then there was Windows 7. It booted in seconds. Response times were amazing. Windows 7 was JUUUUST RIIIIIGHT!

Why is Windows 7 So Fast on a Solid State Drive?

Flash drives became fashionable when Windows XP as around, but only as a backup medium or for temporary storage.

Nine years later, a bundle of super speedy flash drives can be teamed up to create an entire hard drive with no moving parts. Lower failure rates, faster access times and no defragging.

It sounds like a match made in heaven, except that XP and Vista were hard-coded to treat all drives like they spin.

That means that unnecessary operations happen all the time on a solid state drive that tie up valuable resources and sap the power of this expensive performance booster.

That is, all operating systems except Windows 7. Windows 7 is the first Microsoft operating system that was specifically designed to detect if it is operating on a solid state drive or a rotating disk drive.

Windows 7’s secret is a technology Microsoft calls TRIM. TRIM allows Windows 7 to detect

* Enhancing device wear leveling by eliminating merge operation for all deleted data blocks
* Making early garbage collection possible for fast write
* Keeping device’s unused storage area as much as possible; more room for device wear leveling.