What's The Similarity Between a Repairman and a Doctor?
When the SL & SR buttons of my Nintendo Switch joycon broke, I looked up how much it would cost me to get them repaired. It was way too expensive. The spare part is cheap and the repair is straightforward.
I decided to order the part and do the repair myself. After a successful personal repair, I decided to turn it into a side business.
Here are the lessons I learned.
- Starting is difficult. I’m only doing repairs, but imagine starting up a more complex business. I had stripped screws, broken tools, broken parts, missing parts, delayed work, uncomfortable conversations with customers. But they’re all normal part of starting up. Fuck ups are normal. Fuck ups are signs of growth
- Fake it till you make it. I had impostor syndrome when I started. But, how do you become good at something without ever feeling like a fucking noob? You have to just do it. Make mistakes, learn from them, avoid them, plan better, do better.
- Cheapest repair service wins. Cheap repair makes people truly consider repairing. Why would people bother with repairing if the repair cost comes at around 50-60% of buying a new one? They'd have to bear the hidden cost of conversing with the repairman, meeting with him, waiting for the repair, etc.
- People don't mind going down to my home. Some were driving.
- Do the right thing. I realized that I can't afford to botch my job and focus purely on the money. Sometimes, people bring their joycons for repair so that their children can play. I don't want to disappoint those kids.
- All parts are not equal. For instance, the quality of analog joysticks vary between suppliers.
- Mind the hidden costs. I can profit about $11 per 10 minutes of easy repair jobs. That's a whopping $66/hr. But, that calculation is valid if I do repair work only and that the problem has been obviously identified. There were hidden costs: chatting with customers, meeting them, troubleshooting their joycons, testing them. Troubleshooting is especially time-consuming when dealing with a more complex case.
There's a parallel between a good repairman and a doctor. A good repairman doesn't need to open up the joycon and use measuring tools like a multimeter to determine where the faults are. He can narrow down or sometimes accurately diagnose the faults by asking questions and testing for functions (symptomatic troubleshooting).
For example, a customer said that their joycon's battery is spoilt. I asked them what they mean by that. They told me that they plugged their joycon into the Switch console and it wasn't detected by the console. I wouldn't be too quick to conclude that this is an issue with the battery. It could be an issue with the charging rail connector instead of a dead battery.
Likewise, a good doctor rule out diseases by testing for functions (movement, reflex, etc) instead of jumping into asking patients to go for diagnostic procedures like CT scans, MRI, etc.
If I clear my inventory, I'm supposed to make about 5x the capital I invested into spare parts. But, I couldn't clear my inventory. I had to stop my repair service due to life circumstances. I did break even though. I managed to cover the tools I bought: a microscope, an iFixIt Pro Tech Toolkit, etc.