It’s the back half of my second year in the appliance repair business, and I am running at full capacity on service calls all day, every day.
I have multiple commercial accounts, one of which is a 600 unit planned development complex that keeps me pretty busy all by itself.
My wife now works full time in the office answering the phone, scheduling, and billing, and I have had to hire a subcontractor to take overflow calls.
That doesn’t change the fact that I still have only a year and a half experience in appliance repair, and that means I still have a lot to learn.
Most of the jobs with problems I’ve never encountered I can handle using online resources and remote experts. I continue to tap into Uncle Harry’s online support system to find solutions. I even use my smartphone’s high-resolution camera to shoot detailed pictures of broken appliances and send them out to his network of experienced techs who can recognize what they see.
But on some of the jobs, I found myself wishing I could just knock heads together with someone who could put their hands directly on the unit, do some real time troubleshooting on site while I shoulder surfed, and give me their second opinion.
I seriously considered subcontracting with someone else’s company so I could gain this “fly on the wall” perspective.
A happy accident occurred when I hired my subcontractor.
He had been a full-time appliance repair technician for 8 years for a national company before going freelance. He didn’t focus on full-scale lead generation or dealing directly with large commercial accounts. He got most of his leads by word of mouth around town from one appliance repair company to the next.
When we met it was a perfect match.
As luck would have it, not only does he handle my overflow calls, but he also helps me out with my high complexity calls as my “stealth tech.” All I tell the customer is that I’m going to have Steve take look at their appliance because he has worked on a lot of these particular units.
I now have that boots-on-the-ground resource that can take a physical look at some of my more difficult cases after I’ve had a crack at them. I get a chance to watch how he approaches the problem as an experienced technician. Sometimes it’s the same as I went about it and he just confirms my diagnosis, but sometimes it’s different and he comes up with different results.
Right now I call him in about once a week to take a look at something I’ve been working on. It’s just one more handy component while I’m closing the experience gap.