Should an entrepreneur spend his weekend on sourcing computer repair and computer rental?

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My customer looking for computer rental over the weekend <br>Not too long ago I came across a customer calling me over the weekend to rent a laptop from my company, TH IT RESOURCE CENTRE. His problem is his laptop is faulty and it has taken too long for the supplier to repair it. I happen to have a similar model as his and he would like to rent one unit to recover his data from his hard disk so that he can immediately get back to work with his data.<br>This sounds like a typical scenario where a lot of people will have. He spend his time over the weekend to go to internet to look for a place where he can rent a computer. I managed to help him with this situation.<br>We have a good chat and one of his question is to ask me "Why people rent computer?" This is a typical question where a lot of people cannot see where the rational is. Another response usually I get is,"Since computer is so cheap nowadays, why people still want to rent?"<br>To a lot of people, not only that they have not heard of computer rental but also upon hearing it, have a very strange feeling as to why people want to rent computer? Same questions then was asked by this customer.<br>Well, I pointed out to him for his situation like this, he wouldn't need to struggle at his work without having his computer for 2 weeks. Should he has arranged on rental basis from rental company like us, he would have gotten a replacement unit immediately when the other one broke down.<br>As he is the business partner of his company, his work and time are even more crucial than other people. Especially when he even has to go to the extend to make use of his weekend to source for temporary and long term solution.<br>The customer commented that he does not work on Saturday and Sunday and therefore it is OK for him to make use of his weekend in that way. His time over the weekend is FREE and zero cost!<br>Question is: Are our weekend really FREE of cost?<br>To answer this question, I think it is best to do it base on my own personal experience.<br>How I spend my weekend? I am a person who like to do DIY works at home. So over the weekend, I usually will spend my time for maintenance, creating and improving fish ponds, gardening and other works. While these type of activities brought some benefits in terms of saving money, having a good and healthy hobby, promoting children's interest to work on DIY concept, improving our quality of life and so on, it does not stretch over to the line of business.<br>As family continue to grow, more children and bigger house, this concept of mine to do as much house work and family matters as possible started to pile up. Though not every single problem happen every week, but the cumulative effective of all of them basically make me fully occupied every weekend!<br>With this type of life profile, I do not see any significant change in my revenue profile. My business does not have any tremendous increase in terms of revenue too.<br>In 2005, I attended an internet marketing course and then after spent my next four Saturday consecutively on redesigning my website and revamping the content, after four weeks, I saw result like, my website is starting to find ways to get good exposure in search engine. Of course then after, I started to get customers through the internet exposure. From then on, I continue to spend my weekends on improving my website and the result now is we need not to do offline advertising anymore and yet we could achieved double digit growth for the last 2 years!<br>Just to illustrate how important is this for my business, I started the company in 1999 with just 2 pc for rental, then after the business grows slowly and last year it has crossed the 1 million mark on rental only! This year I am confident that we will continue to do well given the strong first 6 months business.<br>Despite spending my weekend time to my internet marketing work, I have decided also to devote some time performing research and development on rearing household consumable fish. This opens up new opportunity and at least it gives me more hope and confident in the future.<br>Other times, I like to be alone contemplating my work, my business and my planning. This will give me a clear future action plan that I should follow. After each of those session I found myself fresh and energetic again!<br>There is cost element<br>It is very clear that there is some kind of cost element hidden behind our weekend job. Depending on what we choose to do, the cost element could be different. If we choose to do simple household work, we save some cost; if we choose to invest our time in more productive area, we save our opportunity cost!<br>I believe the magnitude of the cost element will continue to grow as the person's business or responsibility continue to expand.<br>Analogy to business<br>For business, this can be taken as an analogy to small business which started from small operation to large corporation. If the top management adopt a "handle all by themselves" attitude, they will come to a time where they find themselves too tie up with all sorts of work and losing their clear mind and time for the more productive works.<br>Conclusion<br>To conclude, it is very obvious a manager's weekend time can not be FREE of COST at all. It involves somehow rather certain cost element. Whether the cost is trivial or very high it all depends on the magnitude of the work the manager is responsible for. So it is therefore wise to start to think of outsourcing as an option to relieve the workload of management to save opportunity cost. That is also why some company choose to rent their computers.<br>TH IT Resource Centre is a company run professionally to help company reduce their opportunity cost in this manner. We offer excellent rental services for computer, pc, notebook, laptop, projector, server, printer and training room with nationwide coverage.

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