Let's be honest. Making money on technology in the 90's and early 2000's was insanely easy. I'll explain how I made enough money to open my own business while in college, how I made money even in high school, and the skills you needed to be able to do it.
Years before LGR was building his dream rigs from Ebay hand picked parts, my friends and I were Macintosh gamers and soft hackers, thinking we owned the world and everything was for us. We had limited tech knowledge, but school gave us multiple opportunities to expand our skills, and we always knew someone that was throwing away an old computer. DOS gaming always seemed more primitive to what we had on the Macintosh, with having to navigate command lines and different kinds of ram management, and typically there was a Mac version of the game we wanted, and it ran better on our systems anyway. Needless to say, all of the experience I had working on PC's was 90% Macintosh related.. and they rarely broke. Macintosh was the premium, more expensive option, and they were very upgradeable. Schools used them, everything was easy to install. Plug this in, press this button, ram goes here, hard drive goes there. They were all the same. It was a niche, but I didn't know anyone in my circle of friends that preferred their IMB compatible over their Macintosh.
I realized right away that people were absolutely terrified to open their computer. In most old Macs, there was a red button on the motherboard you press to reset the computer, and it would fix most issues right away... but that would require you to take 2 screws off and slide the motherboard out of the tray and press it. I never had a Mac just not start after I put it back together after an upgrade or a reset. People starting calling on me when they heard I could take them apart, and would pay me $50-$100 just to press a button on the motherboard, or put a paperclip in the little hole to eject a floppy. I remember once, someone gave me a $100 bill to plug in a modem to the back of the computer and turn it on, and install AOL.
When Gateway started offering dirt cheap computers locally with everything included, I knew my Mac days were numbered. My parents were early adopters and bought a top of the line Windows 95 system for the house and of course ignored it and let me do whatever I wanted with it. Like anything, I felt it was just as easy to take this apart as it was to play one of those kids games where you stick the colored shape blocks in to their corresponding holes. Literally two screws to take the case off, and the there is a the cards, board, processor, hard drive and power supply. Some small changes like plugging in sound cards, and the CDROM had to be plugged in to that, but that's not much of a learning curve. Learning DOS seemed easy after navigating an operating system if you could visualize you were accessing folders and could memorize half a dozen commands. Within a week, I felt very confident I could fix or build a DOS or Windows PC from scratch, and work on older systems.
I never had to buy anything. People upgraded and just tossed out their old computers, sometimes if there was nothing wrong with them. They would ask me their old PC and toss it after I just set up their new one and got them online for the first time. A few times, I brought computers home that were better than my own, and had some unique upgrades that I could use. I started collecting parts, boxes and boxes of parts. Bags of old and new ram, monitors piled up 10 deep. Cardboard boxes of mice and keyboards. I didn't even have a business card but would get 3-5 calls a week to come and replace a mouse or keyboard. 99% of the time it was just dirty, so I would take it home, clean it and bag it up for sale. I was still living at home and my closet and the hall closet became a repository for my de facto PC warehousing. I found some beige PC cases during one particularly fruitful dumpster dive, with laundry baskets full of old IBM XT and PS2 parts and software. I knew nothing about these other operating systems and computers, or how they worked. I had never seen a server in person before, but people have asked me to work on them. All of these things combined, I decided to start networking computers together on the floor of my bedroom for fun.
Understanding Networking on bedroom floor with 3 junk PC's all tied together was an eye opening experience. I had networked Macs together to play games over the IPX protocol, and the GEO port to play Doom against buddies, but never for Business, and definitely not on PC. It was actually not that hard, and I had so many spare parts, it was easy to learn and make my own network and get files transferring. I started taking Networking jobs as well as I started to take my first college classes, and around that time, I made my first business cards and got started making a name for myself.
Working out of my bedroom, I was taking 20-30 jobs and house calls per week, while working part time at a gas station. Those were very busy days. 50% of the jobs were old people that could not connect to AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve, and needed a modem or just a quick reset or change a phone line out because it got pinched. I would charge $50 to show up, and $50 per hour if it did not require any parts. I was getting so much work I started turning the hourly jobs down in favor of the bigger ones. New PC setup was a big business then. I would recommend a computer or they would just buy it on their own from a magazine or the TV, and would call me and I would just hook it up for them and show them how to use it. I charged $150 for this service and took me an hour. Anything after an house, I told them I would have to come back and they would have to schedule another service. $150 to plug some wires in and show them how to print a picture of their grandkid and send an email.
The other 50% of house calls were always a burned up modem. I would carry an external US robotics modem in the car, bring that inside and if that worked and their internal one didn't, I would replace the modem. Where did I get the modems? I would buy them 25 at a time from PC Mall magazine for $8 each. The cheapest ones they had, 28.8 baud, no frills, Hayes compatible. I would charge $25 for the modem, which if you bought one at the store for $99, you knew you were getting a good deal. Some people would tell me they would get one at the store, then call me back and say just come put it in, because my fee and the cost was still lower. Remember, the only place you could buy a modem back then was at a specialty computer store that would 100% of the time charge 3 times too much and rip you off for any of the services. My local repair shop I dealt with for some diagnostic things would charge $90 an hour, minimum of 2 hours, and they would get it.
My job at the time was paying me $7.75 an hour, but reimbursed me for my college costs, and gave me free health insurance. Yes, free. I only worked 20 hours a week and if I called in to take a PC job they would never say anything because I was in a relationship with the store manager. I was able to save $20,000 in one year, and that's with buying a motorcycle, a car that I put tons of money in to make it fast, and anything I could want to have at the time. I did have distractions where I would take a few weeks off, like my ex-girlfriend sleeping with my best friend(s)? and moving in to my own place. I rented both sides of a duplex, did my PC stuff out of one side and lived in the other. $525 a month per side.
Things started to slow down, where the only business I was getting was building new PC's and networking large jobs. It was weekly work and allowed me to save further. I got a new girlfriend and treated her to vacations and a good way of life while she was going through Hair School locally. I brought on a friend to take the jobs and he ended up buying the business from me and making it in to something great. I called an ex-girlfriend who I knew had a younger brother interested in tech and gave him all my inventory that wasn't being used for free. Wrap up below:
- Made 20k a year from 1998-2000
- Made 40k in 2001
- Made 66k in 2002 and in 2003 sold the business for 15k after taxes
No comments:
Post a Comment