Non data recovery job become data recovery from hell

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Reminds me of an old story I heard once.

Two Indians (Native Americans for those PC folks) were selling bead necklaces on opposite sides of a road leading into their reservation. Customer goes to the first stand and sees that all the necklaces are priced at $10. Next he heads across the road and sees very similar necklaces all priced at $20.

So the man asks the Indian "Why are your necklaces twice the price of the guy across the street? Doesn't he end up stealing all the customers?"
The Indian replies "Who him? That's my brother and we both do very good business"
The man asks "So why are your necklaces twice the price? Are they better somehow?"
Indian replies "Nah, they're all the same. Some people come here looking for a $10 necklace other people want a $20 one. We just give them what they want" :D
 

peon

New member
Jared":344lk5a7 said:
"We just give them what they want" :D

It's true in a way.


I'm in IT support/repair/consulting for a bit more than 10 years now.
I started cheap because I thought with my little experience on the job this is the way to attract customers. (And I had no business plan since I kind of slided into this business while I was actually pursuing another career which turned out to be a castle in the air.)

Over the years I repeatedly raised my price quotes a bit because I experienced that I'm doing better and more honest work than a lot of my competition that was operating with twice or thrice (Does this word even exist? It should...) the rates.

(Unfortunately I had to learn: A lot of the competition is either incompetent or fraudsters. Sometimes both.)

Now with the higher rates do I attract more complex cases that need more skill? Not really. I'm just attracting another segment of customers.

I'd even say the customers I attract now are the "better" customers. The value my service more. They are less often trying to get free work done or to cut prices. They are less often calling me at 10 pm or sundays. They are more reliable when it comes to pay the bills I send them.
But they don't have the more difficult tasks. Maybe even the contrary.

Thinking about it. I'm still in the medium (maybe even lower midfield) price range. Probably I should raise my rates further and see what happens then :D
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
peon":214zbkeu said:
[post]11066[/post] I'd even say the customers I attract now are the "better" customers.
Absolutely. I've found that going too cheap will get you the worst customers who only want to argue about the price after the job is done. By pricing a little higher you get better clientele.
 
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