Hey Everybody,

I know we haven’t been posting much, but that doesn’t mean things aren’t happening! Here is an update on where the company is going! We have signed a lease for our first official office space. It has great visibility, right on MLK. I’ll release the address and pictures once the lease is finalized (don’t want to jinx it).

Notes about the new property –

1) The space holds about 1,100 square feet in this new, very environmentally efficient building.

2) We get a 3 x 5 foot hanging sign which, at least pending another tenant putting up a sign, will give us visibility on MLK both northbound and southbound. Even if another tenant puts up a sign, our sign hangs further north on the building, so all southbound drivers will see it for a long exposure as they drive past.

3) The space comes with parking behind the unit; we get 1 dedicated space. The other spaces belong to the apartment dwellers who live about the building. They will generally work during the day and take their cars with them, so even with only 1 dedicated space our clients will often have other choices for parking spots.

4) The office space comes to us unfinished. The building’s owner has supplied us with a contractor to complete the space. The contractor has committed to finishing work within 30 days. We can get into the space for move in around June 25th, with a completion date of all work around July 10th. We will do our best to have the intrusive work done before the move in date and they can finish up around us.

A new, closer-to-retail location brings with it some big changes -

My role in the company will be changing a bit. The company has reached a size where it no longer makes sense for me to go on individual service calls. I will be running the office, dealing with technicians and customers, answering phones and dealing with emergencies. This will make me substantially more available to you all when you need to get in touch with me.

Some other big changes are coming to the company -

1) We will start having regular phone hours so that I can stop working 24/7

From here out, calls will be answered on the main company line:

Monday – Friday from 8 AM until 7 PM

Saturday from 9 AM until 5 PM

Sunday from 10 AM until 4 PM

This means that when the phone rings halfway through dinner I will no longer feel compelled to answer it.

2) Those regular hours are not office hours. A tech will work in the office most of those hours, but the company will not stock parts or have any other sort of retail presence.

3) I still refuse to accept credit cards but we will get an ATM in the shop. The surcharge is about $1.50, which we will discount to the customer, since that still costs way less than accepting credit cards (about $6 on a $210 transaction).

4) We will have a second person on phone-answering duty a few hours a day during our peak times as we now frequently have multiple calls coming in at once during peak times.

5) We will be dividing jobs into two groups. There are now going to be on-site and off-site jobs and each will be dealt with differently.

On-site jobs will continue to be handled by contractors. These are jobs that should be done in a customer’s home, like networking, general computer speed up, user training, and many virus removal issues.

Off-site jobs are those that can not be dealt with in a customer’s home. Currently, on those jobs, there is an enormous inefficiency in our system. For example, for fixing a DC jack, a technician has to drive to a customer’s location, pick up the computer, drive home, fix it, drive back to the location, and drive home again. That is a huge waste of tech time, because the tech in that situation is doing two jobs, being a tech, and being a delivery driver.

So, we will be changing up the model a bit for dealing with off-site jobs. (DC jacks replacement, motherboard replacement, OS reinstall, etc). I am going to hire a delivery driver (temporarily played by Nikita) to do all the driving around the city, picking machines up, bringing them into the shop to be fixed, and then dropping them off afterwards.

Of course, this means we need to have somebody in the shop who can fix them. To that end we will be switching one contractor to a part time employee (Obie) and making two contractors into hybrids (Nikita and Peter) who will have regular hours here in the office fixing those machines as well as field work.

Obviously there will be some growing pains here in the next 2-3 months as all of the dust settles and we transition from the scrappy upstart to being a respected member of the small business community. Feel free to e-mail or call me if you have any questions about the upcoming changes and what they mean for you or the company, and I will do my best to clarify.
Thanks!
-Zac