I am 15 and need help starting my business

[beasty]

How much would you personally pay to get your computer fixed? I have asked many relatives this and they are all saying it's up to me but I am not really 100 percent sure what to have it, so that's why I just set it at £10 and hour.

He has a couple of competitive advantages that allow him to be lower on cost than those with a mortgage and kids, in this case going low is a good idea as you can get customers, just kick your prices up later.

Right now, you can get customers based on cost *Not usually the case but for you it is

Good luck with it

 

[beasty]

Nobody repairs a PSU nowadays, they just bin it and bung in a new one. After all, they are just thyristors and capacitors and a bit of regulation circuitry. The olden days of people running around in goat skins and using transformers are over! PCs are pretty much a plug-n-go affair today.

All this 'what if?' nonsense is just that, nonsense!

I began by cleaning cars at the age of 14 for five shillings a car. What if I had scratched a car? What if I slipped and fell and injured myself? What if Zeus descended from Mount Olympus, disguised as a water buffalo and trampled the car owner to death?

I didn't stay with cleaning cars, I did it just long enough to be able to buy first a tape recorder and then a cine-camera and thereby launch a career in the media by learning the basics of making silly little films, featuring my buddies and my dogs.

Doing business at ANY level is all about taking a risk. If you don't like risk, don't become a business person. Stay home, stay in bed, pull the duvet over your head, listen to Radio Four and hide from the World (and listen to reports of thousands of murderous immigrants pouring across the English Channel on lilos, planks of wood, oil slicks, or anything they can get a hold of).

Brandon isn't going to spend the rest of his life fixing computers, not just because in the long run there are better things to do, but also because computers will become so cheap and deeply integrated, that fixing them in ten or twenty years time will just not be worth the hassle.

But right now, it's a great way for a 15-yr-old Brandon to earn some money and learn the ropes of profit and loss, expenditures and gauging risk.

It ain't really a business, but it's a great way to pick up some trouser money and learn some very useful lessons at the same time. Being able to fix a computer is many, many times more useful than most of the guff kids are forced to learn at school.

A motivational story -

Let me tell you about a guy who began playing around in C++ at the age of 12 and at the age of 16 developed a quirky little media programme. Fast forward to 20 years of age and he had involved all his nerdy buddies and developed that and other small programmes and sold these on-line for $10 each. When thousands of dollars a day started pouring in, his father told him to set up a company and draft contracts, etc., etc.

(He tried going to college to study programming, but soon realised that he knew more than his lecturers, so he dropped out after just a few weeks!)

Big business got a whiff of this programme and offered him and his nerdy buddies $240m for the whole thing. He took the money and went to work for The Man. One day, he decided to put a new quirky product on-line and just for free. The Man didn't like it and they fell out, so at the ripe old age of 22, he 'retired' a very wealthy man ($60m trouser money) and started a new project.

Business Week called him "The World's most dangerous nerd!"

He squirreled all that money away for a rainy day and he invested absolutely nothing, other than his time, in this new and very ambitious software package.

He is now 34 and this new package is 12 years old and is just the best in its field. It is on position three in its market World-wide in user-base, though, because he only charges $60 for a license and that is on an honesty-box basis, so people can use it for free if they put up with a five-second nag screen, so turnover is only about $7m, but climbing rapidly.

This SW package is destroying whole corporations. One, whose CEO earns about what this guy has in turnover, has seen its share price fall from over $60 to under $6 and has had to fire 2,000 of its 3,400 staff.

He has just rewritten parts of the core code to widen the scope of uses, so that in years to come, it can enter whole new industries that today are in their infancy.

is it possible you could write a post about turning into a massive story about you
P.S. i skipped it, but jees, its pretty tedious,every post where a few lines work, turns into Jackanory

 

[Raw Rob]

is it possible you could write a post about turning into a massive story about you
P.S. i skipped it, but jees, its pretty tedious,every post where a few lines work, turns into Jackanory

Personally I find The Byre's posts interesting. You don't have to read them, and you can even put him on your ignore list if you feel that strongly.

 

[arnydnxluk]

There's some great advice in here already, unfortunately I'm on my mobile so I'll have to keep this short and sweet.

Firstly, I don't agree with those advising you to wait until you're out of education to start a business. Why start your adult life at step 0 when you can have a head start? You won't have more free time than you do right now nor will you have as little responsibilities as you do right now. Start learning and more importantly gaining experience right now. Don't let negativity bring you down, you're making moves which most young people don't have the mind for. Being ambitious is awesome.

I do think there are some legitimate barriers to the business you want to run. Insurance, age, travel, credit - these are all legitimate problems unless you can team up with a parent or similar. If you want to continue down this route, do favours for friends, family, as many people as you can find through your network (charging a small amount). This will give you experience and contacts, which you can utilize when you hit 18 and can do things properly. It may also earn you a small amount of capital to use at 18 to take out insurance, travel by car, etc.

The more interesting part for me was your mention of web development and graphic design skills. If you can go down this route, you can start your business right away online, age is much less of a restriction. Experience/skill matters less too. It's something you will need to gain but there are jobs at every skill level in web development and design, you will just have to begin at the shallow end until you can build up a good portfolio. Going on at the 'shallow end' repairing computers is not such a good idea because people's data and health is ultimately at risk. Having a role as a developer can also pay a very good salary if you ever wanted to become employed.

The web development idea also brings me onto remote PC repair services. Helping people with software issues rather than hardware ones using remote connection software. I don't know how viable this is as a business but it's an idea.

Above all else though, you should do what YOU think and what YOU enjoy. You'll learn much quicker doing something you enjoy too. All the best.

 

[beasty]

Personally I find The Byre's posts interesting. You don't have to read them, and you can even put him on your ignore list if you feel that strongly.

His posts are fine when he replies to the question, it is the endless stories that are tedious

let me tell you about this time in 1973 or 74 i think it was, i had returned from Asia with a now ex girlfriend and she discovered this new thing called a ETC ETC (Yawn)

 

[The Byre]

Funny you should say that, because in 74, I was returning from the Middle East. I got caught up in the 73 kipper war (a bit like the cod war, but more smoke) and at the time, I was running a chicken farm and being chased by a large American girl, whose name I have forgotten, but we called her 'The Machine'.

When I say chicken, I really mean chicken! 500,000 chicken. Three huge sheds of the beastly things. The place had been built by a little bloke called Joshua and he taught me the importance of saving time.

"Time" said Joshua "is everything! We come on this Earth with just nothing but time. The rest we can get whenever. But, Freddy, never forget, time is more important than money, more important than anything else!"

(I was called Freddy back then, on account of being a good swimmer. Someone called me Fred-the-Fish and it stuck!)

I was going to tell you something and now I've forg- Oh yes, 'The Machine'.

She (The Machine, not the chicken) was a devout Christian and dragged me to Jerusalem to see the Points of the Cross. The only problem was, that we had a large and very spicy meal the night before and somehow, I managed to get diarrhoea.

"And this is where Jesus stumbled." she told me, as cold sweat poured down my body in an effort to not defecate right there in the street.

She droned on and on about this geezer Jesus as I had to follow her up and down the winding, narrow streets of Jerusalem and if we had been at the Wailing Wall, I know what my greatest prayer would have been that I written on a bit of paper and stuffed into a crack in the wall.

That's the trouble with the Middle East, it fails on the 'Wow!' factor. You expect something spectacular and all you get is a wall. It's not huge, like the O2 or Lincoln Cathedral and it certainly falls down badly when it comes to looks. I mean, it's just a wall. Your average Italian church has it knocked into a cocked hat on looks. Speaking personally, having seen blokes praying there for hours, I fail completely to see the entertainment value. I'd rather be at a Nicki Minaj concert.

Anyway, er, now where was I?

Ah yes, diarrhoea! I was beginning to lose hope and pictured the coming disaster, when the sun came out, angels began to sing and birds were suddenly chirruping in the branches of the olive trees dotted around. A heavenly choir struck up a power-chord, rather like the girls in the chorus for Pink Floyd in 'Us and Them'.

I did some work on Pink Floyd's The Division Bell tour and I can tell you, that was the ultimate. They even toured with their own school, so that staff could take their kids with them. How kewl is that! And the stage show was just the best I have even seen. I particularly like the four 'Floyd-Droids' that shot up out of the floor and rose to a height of about five meters, shooting lights across the band and the audience. The biggest shows took over 40 trucks of equipment, but they could build the stage in a couple of hours and tear-down in 40 minutes, which is almost as impressive as that flying pig.

Now I've lost the thread again . . . Oh, for heaven's sake!

Ah, now I remember - heavenly choir!

Yes, a heavenly choir began to sing and if I was a believer and had an epiphany (I have a friend who had an epiphany, I really should tell you about him some time! He became a politician and rose to the dizzy heights of junior minister, of all the silly things to do!) I would have seen the Hand of God pointing off to the right.

As I am not a believer, all I saw was a sign in Hebrew, Arabic and English.

For there, when all hope was lost and pretty soon, so also would have been my trousers, along with my dignity, I saw a sign announcing the presence of a public lavatory.

OK, it was hardly the Gents at The Ritz, just a hole in the ground and two places to put your feet, but it was considerably more welcome than the Angel Gabriel himself.

Which brings me neatly to the whole point of this thread - never give up hope!

 

[Chris Ashdown]

My concern is
To young to make a contract
Not Insured
Has the ability to make a pc a danger by say not earthling something
Potential to cause great hardship by screwing up hard drive with high profile data
No real skill level just board swopping

Suggest keep going helping friends
Start something you can take forward with technology like programing or web design, SEO etc

 

[tony84]

I used to build PCs when I was about 15. I knew more then than I do now.
Would I trust you to be able to do it? Yes.
Would I hire you to do it? No.

The reason being is that I suspect you would be unable to get insurance to do it. You could maybe ask a parent to start the business and take out the insurance but they would need to say there is a 15 year old working on the PCs which could be an issue.

 

[hawts]

Doing business at ANY level is all about taking a risk. If you don't like risk, don't become a business person.

So, so true. You have to start somewhere and you have to take on risk. No risk, no return.

 

[BillWong]

Very appreciate for your work,feel free to let me know if anything I could assist you from China.
Feel free to PM me.

Best wishes

 

[IanG]

technology is improving therefore prices are going down for computers. To me when I was 10 years old, 2gb Ram used to be good and now 2gb ram is only around £5, and 4gb ram is easy to get for a cheap price. You may not have noticed the change but I certainly have

Of course we've noticed the change - when I was 10 my computer's memory was measured in Mb and it cost around £100 per Mb if you wanted to upgrade. So £5 for 2000 times that amount sounds quite cheap.

Some great advice and encouragement in this thread which I would like to echo but I would simply say know your boundaries.

You won't be soldering PSUs - or indeed anything. Perhaps you'll fit RAM or a new drive but that'll be to order and you'll have to let the customer know you don't hold stock. Even if you had the money to do so as the work rate will be slow (I assume you're busy with school 9-3pm) so to stock-hold components as you have already alluded to is not a good financial decision.

I'd probably also favour software jobs over hardware. Simply because your time is cheap but components will not be. And I don't mean a hard drive is £50, I mean that to you it'll be at retail price or slightly less if you can deal with a trade supplier but you can't even dream of the economies of scale that every other larger company will be benefiting from.

Know your limits, recognise that you don't know everything. I know a guy who took on a £30 modem job and it cost £140 when he left the power on to fit it and cooked the motherboard. Definitely a good lesson for him.

I did it years ago and I got bored of working for nothing because the margins are low, people don't value your time or I wasn't audacious enough to put a good price on it. Learned a bit in the process though. Just don't lose any data or burn down any houses.

 

[Smilemina]

You only 15 years old, makes me admire you so much!!! when I am 15 years old, I was in middle school, after I went to hight school and university, it spend me so many years till I am 24 years old I graduate to get job.
From my idea, if possible you have to learn more things from school, at least to university, I think if you learn more, you are so smart, you will be a good engineer in some area, not only just repair computer.
But you can do some part time job in your interesting area during your school days, you can use a low price repair computer, you need do some free advertisment, I mean as forums and somewhere can put tips, or send tips to people somewhere possible work, even door to door sell your service.
And you also can try to learn more about computer parts suppliers in all of the world, for repair job, service is one side, part cost also very important, you have to know where can get good price parts, after you know very well, when you repair computer, and you can wholesale the parts sale to other repair company.
Best Wishes to you, Wish you success in your wish area !

 

[jojo16]

i would recommand to do the s

@Brandon Russell If you want to do it, do it. Only you know what you're capable of and age shouldn't be a barrier. Try fixing friends and family's machines for now and then move on. Get someone older with more experience (a mentor perhaps) to help you with the ins and outs of setting up a business.

In terms of what to charge, check out some local computer repair places and figure out what they're charging. I mean this in the best way, just go for it. Trial and error are the only ways you figure anything out and if you want to really do this then do it. You could spend hours surmising and thinking or you could put your thoughts into action. Don't let it get in the way of school, etc but it *will* look incredible on a CV in years to come when you can say you've started your own company!

a

 

[jojo16]

@Brandon Russell If you want to do it, do it. Only you know what you're capable of and age shouldn't be a barrier. Try fixing friends and family's machines for now and then move on. Get someone older with more experience (a mentor perhaps) to help you with the ins and outs of setting up a business.

In terms of what to charge, check out some local computer repair places and figure out what they're charging. I mean this in the best way, just go for it. Trial and error are the only ways you figure anything out and if you want to really do this then do it. You could spend hours surmising and thinking or you could put your thoughts into action. Don't let it get in the way of school, etc but it *will* look incredible on a CV in years to come when you can say you've started your own company!

i would recommand the same thing

 

[Annoying Donkey]

When I read this story, I thought of this thread...

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11638248

 

[Daniel Brownell]

Hi Brandon,

I can tell by your post that you're an intelligence person and have given this a lot of thought.
It is difficult to set up a business at young age because it goes against the established social norms of potential clients. You'll either find people patronising or doubting you - neither of which is good.

Advantages
Luckily in this day and age we do have child prodigies whose talents lie in business and so it's likely that now that we have a better understanding of these young achievers, you will hopefully find less resistance.
In fact, a benefit of starting up at 15 is that you'll be having a three years head start of those that wait until they're 18; giving you enough time to move through that empirically difficult first year of breaking-even/low profits and through two years of advancement.

Disadvantages
However, there is a valid reason why people wait until they're 18 before setting up a business. Legally, you cannot be a company director before the age of 16 and most legal documentation requires the signature of an adult, which obviously means you're 18 years of age or older.
For this reason, you may run into problems with contracts, insurance documentation, suppliers and sources of financing for stocking; the last of which I know is a problem for your business.

Recommendation
In conclusion, I would recommend that you spend the next three years honing your skills and researching suppliers, customers and other industry professions (for example an accountant) so that you are fully prepared when you do eventually set up the business. The more preparation you have put into it, the more successful it will be and you have three years to prepare.

However, if you can't wait that long and are already prepared to set up the business (judging by your lack of business name or supplier, I'd say you need more time) then it would be technically possible to have an adult set up the company under your informal direction and work for the company until which time when you're 18 and old enough. Then this adult (perhaps the person who drives you around to your jobs) can then transfer their controlling shares to you for you to then run the business; this would require incorporation, which is an added (but minor) expense - the benefit of which is reduced liability.

I hope this helped you made an informed decision.

Kind Regards,
Daniel Brownell.

 

[RambleRuth]

I think some of the practical/technical and constructive criticism people are giving you is invaluable BUT I feel that some people are perhaps being a little negative. First of all lets start at a basic level... make yourself known in your local area which all starts with friends and family. Word of mouth is important as are flyers, business cards, social media etc. Maybe your age will be an advantage because people may like to invest their time in a young entrepreneur. The blog idea is a great one because it is a way of showing people what you know and making your stamp on the web.

After doing this for a while you will start to meet new people which may open doors for you in the future, I think at your age you don't have to worry so much about the whether your business will become a success right now but instead of the invaluable experience it will give you. Even if your business idea doesn't develop into anything, who cares? You will have learnt a lot and will have shown to potential employees how ambitious you are. You are only 15 so have all the time in the world to make this work in the future so I say GO FOR IT! Good luck

 

[danielgregory]

I think your age could be a great selling point, you could brand yourself as "The computer whiz kid" or something like that. I agree with some of the comments that you're going to struggle with certain aspects like keeping stock etc etc.

However, when I was young (this isn't one of the back in my day comments, I'm not old!) me and my brother would get a sponge and a bucket and walk around the local area and ask people if they wanted their car washing, it made loads (or at least loads to a 10year old). Sure, these people could take their car to the local car wash but we had the two main benefits that the car wash didn't a) We was cute b) We was willing to bring the service to the customer.

You could apply this exact same principal to your business, the amount of people out there who haven't got a clue about how to use their computer, tablet or phone is unreal. Go around knocking on doors, introduce yourself as "Whiz Kid" and ask is there anything that's frustrating them about any of their devices that you could explain/clarify/fix.

I imagine you'll get a lot of people saying "this bloomin' ipad won't send email" or "the internet keeps breaking" and these are the types of things that you will be able to fix quickly there and then for a fixed fee. Take the customers contact details and now you can start building a customer base.

Good luck!