Computer repair newark

Growing businesses share their experiences in creating and marketing new products and services.

If you're a customer of Tempe Camera Repair, Inc., you don't want to have a little "F" by your name in the company's computer. It means "this customer has failed," says Joseph Wojcich, founder of the company in Tempe, Ariz. Then Wojcich, laughs in a way that lets you know laughter comes easily to him.

An "F" by a customer's name signals to an employee that this is a problem customer--someone, for example, who might rent expensive equipment, break it, then return it with the claim that it was already broken when it was picked up.

Employees take extra care with such customers, making sure all the paperwork is done correctly and signed and that the customer inspects the equipment and agrees it's in working condition before taking it out of the store.

But Tempe Camera Repair has an "A" list of customers, too. "They're a joy," says Wojcich, (pronounced Wo-chick). "We bend over backward for them."

Most camera-repair shops are one- or two-person operations. What makes Tempe Camera Repair unusual is that it has 40 employees and more than $5 million in annual sales and just keeps growing. Wojcich's success has been such that in 1994 he was named Arizona Small Business Person of the Year by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

His achievements have not been the result of an easy start in life. Ms family ended up in a displaced-persons camp in southern Germany after World War II. They came to the United States when Wojcich was 5, and he grew up in Newark, N.J. After a stint in the Air Force, he went to Phoenix to live because he had friends there.

In 1970, Wojcich, a college student in need of money to supplement his GI Bill payments, got a job in the shipping-and-receiving department of a local camera store. Six months later he was repairing cameras--not because he had any training in camera repair but because the repairman had quit and there was no one to replace him.

"I'm pretty much self-taught," says Wojcich, 51, who describes himself as having a "good mechanical aptitude." And, he recalls, cameras weren't nearly as sophisticated then as they are now He would take apart a broken camera and a model like it that worked, comparing them until he figured out how to fix the broken one.

He became so confident of his abilities that he opened his own shop in 1972, renting 500 square feet of space in Tempe.

Today, Tempe Camera Repair, whose customers include professional and amateur photographers, is headquartered in a 10,000-square-foot building that Wojcich, owns. The business encompasses not only camera repair but also a rental department, a photo-finishing division, a retail store, and an industrial-sales division that serves large clients, such as the local offices of Motorola, Inc., AlliedSignal, Inc., and General Motors Corp. Wojcich, says the rental division, which specializes in expensive equipment that most customers cant afford to buy, is the most profitable.

The repair side of the business is marketed almost entirely by word-of-mouth. "It's like a good auto mechanic," says Wojcich. "You find a good auto mechanic, you go back."

Cameras and photographic equipment have changed a lot since Wojcich got into the business more than 25 years ago. Today, or example, you can capture an image on a digital camera, download it into a laptop computer, and fax it instantly to someone across the country.

How does he keep up with the new cameras? "Read the book. Take 'em apart. Look and see what they've got," he says. "If I don't understand them, I call up the manufacturer." In addition, he and his employees attend seminars offered by the major camera makers.

One of the company's employees is assigned to quality control and checks every repaired camera before it goes back to the customer. "Even a camera I repair has to go to his desk for final approval because I still make mistakes. We all do," says Wojcich,

It might seem a little odd that the president of a $5 million company has his own workbench and still repairs some cameras himself, but Wojcich, gays: "I love it. It's my therapy."