Starting, Operating, and Running a Small Business
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If there’s one question I get asked frequently, it's, “How did you get into this? How did you just start a technician business?”
There really is no right answer on how to start a technician business. How I fell into this is, I worked as an industrial repair technician up in Oswego, Illinois. We made diamond abrasive wheels and giant oil rig drill bit sharpeners. Imagine a grinding wheel on a bench grinder, but instead, it’s 80 inches in diameter. We had massive lathes, heated hydraulic presses built in the beginning of the 19th century, as well as a lot of modern equipment such as CNC and water jets. I was brought on board to be in production but ended up retrofitting the heaters of these presses with PLC devices, re-chroming the hydraulic rams, and retrofitting the seals on them. These rams were typically 24-50 inches in diameter, and to give you an idea of how old they were, the seals we pulled out were leather.
After 2 years of low wages in a high-risk, harsh environment, I had enough of that job. The risk obviously was moving giant pieces of equipment that could tear off, burn, or smash a limb. I even witnessed a co-worker lose 2 fingers. The low wages were… low wages. The harsh environment required us to wear long sleeves and pants in a shop that was on average 100+°F while typically being covered head-to-toe in hydraulic fluid.
How does this relate to operating on an espresso machine?
That job was excruciating, but I did walk away with a much better education than I had ever received before, even just from the 2.5 years of it. Having the knowledge of AC/DC voltage, seals, pneumatics, hydraulics, electrical, heaters, PLC’s, and PID’s was all applicable to espresso machines, I just didn’t know it at the time. My wife, Abbey, who now runs Technico service with me, got a job offer in Nashville, Tennessee. I was ready to quit my job, so I did. She took the job offer and moved while I moved a month later with no job and lived in my sister's basement. I’ve always loved working with my hands, repairing motorcycles, cars, industrial equipment, etc., and asked how I could work on things and, (A) make a decent living, and (B) not be in a dangerous/harsh environment.
In 2015, there was definitely a lack of coverage in Nashville for technicians. My sister owned a coffee shop in town and was complaining about how it took 2 weeks and cost an arm and a leg to get her machine fixed (a LaMarzocco GB5). One time, it was down for so long that she said, “Can you just come and see if you can fix this thing?” I opened it up and saw solenoid valves, a basic heating system with an integrated PID basic hydraulics, and I remember I was really weirded out by BSP fittings. I ended up successfully repairing it several times. At this time, her GB5 was about 10 years old. She then bought a LaMarzocco Linea PB, which I helped install, and she asked if I could refurbish her GB5.
That's when things for me got serious. I never felt good about charging people an “expert rate” when I wasn’t an expert yet. As they say, “There’s nothing more dangerous than a confident idiot.” So, I would buy used machines and refurbish them. That way if I screwed something up, it was my own property, not someone else’s that they just spent 6 months of their income on. I would then sell them with a 6-month parts and labor warranty (usually way too cheap). After refurbishing several machines and a few trips to Seattle to meet with manufacturers, I felt like I had enough experience to where I could comfortably charge people a full-espresso-technician rate. All of those machines are still in service today. My contact quickly spread around for the first 2-3 years. I never had a website or email address listed.
The first year, I dumped all my money into stocking parts. That, to me, was the most important thing, if you can repair a machine on the same visit as the diagnosis, you’re saving the customer tons of downtime and they’re back up and making money. An old co-worker used to always say, “What's a technician without his tools? Worthless.” I’ve adapted this to essentially emergency calls, if you don’t have the parts, especially over the weekend, you’re dead in the water.
Running a small business is a ton of work, from filing monthly/quarterly taxes to staying on top of parts inventory, having vendors pay you on time, as well as paying vendors on time, among a million other little things. At the end of the day, what's rewarding for us is that everything we put in is a direct outcome. There are also cons to it – every problem you encounter falls on your shoulders you have to figure it out. Every mishap or unsuccessful repair is your responsibility. When running any technician business, these problems are going to happen. What defines your integrity and reputation is made or broken by how you handle these situations. At the end of the day, your reputation, good or bad, will outlast any quick buck you made or lost.
Photo by @highbrowcoffee via @technicoservice