RB Balch & Associates They work out of the owners house Charged $150 to check a box in Outllook Phoenix, Arizona

You had a guy come out for an on site repair and expected to not have to pay a minimum or call out charge??? We call this a road call and charge $100 per hour  1 hour minimum and $1.00 per mile (first 20 miles no extra charge). So if you got off this cheap consider yourself lucky. Especially if it is outdated equipment and software. We won't work on old stuff either, it causes to much warranty exposure and unhappy customers to be worth  the very small margin you make on repairing it. I will lay money the guy who doesn't charge for less than 15 minutes works for a computer sales outfit that are hoping you will buy your new systems from them. And you should, they sound like freindly people that won't be around long or are a big box store, maybe Best Buy? any way You got charged the correct price for something minor and a upset they told you the truth. I think you just don't get what it costs to run a guy out to do on site repairs.

I own a computer services company and I charge a MINIMUM of $130 for a house call.  This includes up to ONE HOUR of labor (which includes travel time TO your location-not from it.)

As to rebuilding older machines.  I decide that on a case by case basis.  As a rule I won't even attempt to rebuild any laptop that is over 3 years old.  UPGRADES are a different matter altogther depending apon whether compatible hard drives, optical drives, memory, etc. is readily available through my suppliers.

 

have you ever heard of "remote".  ?  How about getting someone that know show to troubleshoot on the phone before sending someone out and ripping us off for $150 for an hour of worthless chit chatting.....Hell it would have been better to have the guy ufix it in two minutes and charge me the minimum but he had to waste another houru of my time which is much more than your little $130 per hour charge!

There is a principal here and you that have replied have missed that. 

It's extremely sad that you business owners would give away a customers future business and rapport all for $150 bucks and a wasted hour.

It does not mean anything that you have a minimum!
It does not mean anything that you have costs associated!

You have NO CLUE on how to run a repeat customer business if you are going to rip someone off for $150 to check a box....Are you getting it yet?

Who cares if it cost you $100 to send that guy out....you just lost my business in which I have spent $3200 over the last 13 months with the same company.

So, for your measly $150, you decide to let go of someone that spent $3200.....Yeh, real good business.

Go back to your business as it seems that you are spending too much time out hear and you aure not paying attention to your business.....which you will lose over time by RIPPING people off by charging them $150 DOLLARS FOR A CHECK BOX....

DO YOU GET IT YET?

If it was so easy why didn't you fix it yourself.  It doesn't matter what the final solution was,  she had the knowledge to know the box needed to be checked.  You obviously did not.  You paid for that knowledge.  Just how long or difficult would the problem have to be for you to think it's worthy of charging for and how do you judge how difficult the problem is?  If the service person knows what they are doing, most problems are fairly easy.  That's what you hire them for. It was obviously a very difficult problem for you.

I absolutely do not believe that the other companies would make a house call and if it takes less than 15 minutes they wouldn't charge you?  NOT! That would be recipe for going out of business in a hurry.

A service organization HAS to have minimum charge. They would be fools if they didn't.