Custom PC Building Business

[gauravjaybrown]

Hi Guys,

I'm new to pc gaming but I've always had a certain interest in pc building and I want to start a business in custom pc building and maintenance to provide services to schools, offices and alike.

 

Before I begin such a venture I need to know what are the things I need to learn to start such a business. I know how to assemble a pc but what are things other than this I need to know

 

 

Please help.

[Overkilled]

lets not beat around the bush here.

Your not only going to need add some flare to your builds to grab peoples attention you'll likely have to sell it at a loss because your not established.

Your going to need to be able to source the parts, probably in bulk. You'll need a website and probably a business address, you cant have your home address on your website. You'll likely have to hire HTML coders to build your website to a certain standard, then you'll need to be able to ship the thing, what are you gonna do if something breaks. You'll need to provide a warranty.

[ForsakenLive]

Just like Linus said, there is no study or preparation you can do to run your own business, you will find yourself doing a huge variety of things, like making sure everything you do complies with any possible legal standard for your type of business, having good business practices, managing finances properly, finding new clients, make yourself known to others, keeping a good image, be organized with your work, and many more. And it gets more difficult when you have to build from scratch on your own.

Besides all business-related topics, you will also need to know how to fix pretty much everything system related. Building a PC is easy because it's meant for consumers to do it, but on non-consumer applications the hardware and the rules change. People will have systems with problems and will want you to fix them, not buy new stuff, just get the current stuff to work, as it used to work when they bought it.

You will need to know about the software business and big places use to manage their computers, how to set up networks properly and how to find errors on them, you will need to know a couple of things regarding electricity (you will need to plug stuff in, and it might not end up pretty). Anything printer-related will be required, as well as working with proprietary systems, the way you diagnose or fix a particular model of Dell/Lenovo/HP/whatever system is not the same as a regular tower PC someone bought prebuilt/built.

Most of the things you will see is old, old hardware, old computers, old software and OSs, lots of dust, obsolete technologies, etc. You will see old weird bioses instead of a nice UEFI, SCSI/IDE drives, AGP ports (hopefully not), and similar stuff from the old days which is still working and being used for certain purposes.

 

My advice would be, start small, don't go after business, schools and offices, go after the regular consumers that you can understand. Any individual that wants a new computer for either working, browsing or gaming can come to you, have you build it and install everything; this way they pay less for a good performing system instead of going to Best Buy. Also fix other people's computers, doing new windows installs, back ups, dealing with viruses, PCs that have booting problems, and the likes.

Stick to your local area at first, there are probably dozens of people with PC problems on a 500meter radius to you right now.

Have a good image, no one will think it's safe to handle hundreds of dollars to some guy that says will get me a good computer or fix mine. People needs to trust you at some degree, which is why it's good to start with friends, friends of your family, famliy of your friends, the guy of the local shop that always see you around, etc...