Seasonal Update

Hello, friends! Brian from CozyTech here to offer a little touch-base, since I haven't put a lot of effort into marketing lately.

For a start: fatherhood! What a wild ride! On the left, you can see me wiped out around two weeks into this journey. On the right, nearly three months!

Since its inception, CozyTech has never gotten as much of my time and attention as it deserves, but it has been up against incredibly stiff competition: surgeries, a wedding, and a newborn (not to mention, a "day" job). There are some days...most days, I guess you could say...where I just don't have it in me to do what it takes to grow the business. But it has a life of its own, and with an ebb and flow like the tides, clients tend to find me.

I love it when they do, too, because I love this business. Serving customers, demystifying their tech troubles, resolving problems and leaving them as often as I can better understanding the technology they are enmeshed with...it really gives me life.

I admit I'm afraid to even say what comes next, but if you spend a moment on the photos shared above, you'll understand why I have to.

A Modest Price Hike

With apologies, I have to let you know that the listed price of hourly service is going up. It pains me to do when we are all suffering with the cost of groceries and gasoline on the rise...but I'm part of "we all", too, and so are my family (for whom I am currently the sole earner).

Since I entered this market with a small business, I have been afraid to charge what other people are charging. Frankly, even with the new hourly rate—$80 an hour—I am still not charging what other people are charging. I think I'm too fresh a face, and I still have a lot of people to meet before I have the kind of wide-spread word-of-mouth reputation that stops people cocking their eyebrow about pricing. I have the advantage of not doing this full-time. Part of why in-home tech support folks charge $100-200 per hour is because when you do this work independently, you not only have a self-employment tax of roughly 25%, but you also have to pay for the "benefits" that employers usually cover, from health insurance to retirement contribution matching. With all that baked into the price, full-time, independent tech workers have no choice but to charge more.

So, by way of apology, I have to point out that as far as I know, CozyTech is still the most affordable in-home tech support in town. But I am not joking around, or taking lightly that for many people, that price increase is going to sting. That's why I want to discuss discounts and price negotiability, as well.

"Computing For Everyone"

When I set out to found this business, I was excited, especially at what it looked like the market was charging for this kind of service. I thought there might be a real chance that I could make enough doing this to break away from my full-time employer someday and do this work, which I find so enriching, all-day everyday. Then, a few people checked my expectations in a way that my mother put most succinctly. She said:

"[Your grandmother] can't afford that."

It pierced me. I had set out to be The Guy for senior citizens' technology needs especially. Yet, I had failed to consider that while some of our elders have retired well enough to afford in-home tech support pricing of practically any sort...most Americans, including our elders, are not equipped to retire lavishly, and if they are able to retire at all, they live on very modest means.

I racked my brain trying to figure out how I could land on a price that, after taxes, would be fair to me and fair to my customers. All of my customers.

I started with the idea of occupational discounts. Every self-respecting small business offers something like these, typically to active and former military, and often to first-responders, or educators. I decided to offer a discount to all of these groups. The discount was 10%, but has since increased to 15% as an offering to offset the price increase.

But again, did this pass the "Grandma Test"? My grandmother had never been an educator, a first responder, or a veteran.

An income-based discount of some kind was clearly in order, but I didn't want to interrogate anyone about their finances. I also didn't want people to just claim to be of little means just to get cheap service, either. Then, my genius wife, who had worked in social services, pointed out that you had to be at a certain income level to be entitled to SSI, SSDI, and / or Medicaid. If a customer was willing to state honestly that they had used any of these services, I would entitle them to price negotiability. I would ensure that, even if it meant sometimes working at something like a loss, CozyTech service would be available to everyone at a price they could reasonably afford.

And, just to make sure no one got scared away by the pricing on the website before they stumbled on the occupational or income-based discount pages, I added Klarna and Afterpay "pay-in-4" to the checkout page when a person was reserving an appointment or buying a gift card.

I wondered at the time whether I really should, because I had heard reservations about those kinds of services.

Why I Am Removing Klarna and Afterpay

If you aren't familiar, the idea of these services is that you can split a payment into four easy installments that come out of your accounts every two weeks. Perhaps you can't swing $200 for a Windows 10-to-Linux Upgrade...but maybe you can swing $50 every two weeks, and you never have to discuss the matter with me or anyone. You just select the "pay in four" option at checkout.

So what's the problem?

Klarna and Afterpay, and other services that do the same thing, are a band-aid on a bullet wound. To be blunt. They are not only unlikely to fully stop the bleeding, but because they offer the illusion of a cure, you may go on with this wound, getting into deeper trouble (an infection, or lead poisoning, as it were) while feeling like you've already gotten all the treatment you need.

See, these services don't rely on good credit. That makes them available and easy to use for people for whom traditional credit access may be limited or non-existent. But there's a flip-side to that coin. Paying these debts back on-time (and don't be fooled: they are debts, even if very short-term and interest-free) does not improve your credit score...and yet, failure to pay them back on-time does damage your credit score.

People are using Afterpay and Klarna to get things they can't afford during trying times, and just like credit card debt, and the curse of too many subscriptions, this contributes to a kind of Death By A Thousand Cuts, in which you don't realize how far you have over-extended yourself until you realize you are in trouble.

I don't ever want anyone, anywhere, to take a hit to their credit score because they just needed their computer fixed. Klarna and Afterpay are part of a serious issue in this country with people over-extending themselves with deeper and deeper debt made up of these little short-term commitments that feel inconsequential at the point of checkout, but come back to haunt you later. I won't be part of it.

Pricing Incentives and The Return of Negotiability

Remember the Old Days? You might have a tab with the local druggist, or the small-town grocer would spot you on a bag because he knew that your household had fallen on hard times? You can't get that sort of flexibility from a big company like Best Buy. Often, it feels like you can't get it anywhere.

Small businesses like CoyzTech are among the last vestiges of genuinely human-to-human business dealings, unconstrained by company policy and corporate charter, not beholden to the wrath of shareholders and stock prices.

CozyTech isn't a big company. It's barely even a "company". It's me, Brian Hoerner, of Kettering, Ohio. Your neighbor, and I'd like to think, your ally.

I didn't start this business to become a millionaire, and I didn't start it because I was desperate to get out of the traditional workforce.

I started it because everyone in the world is dependent on computers, and nearly nobody knows how to work the things, and I want to help.

I deserve to be fairly compensated for my time and skill set, but I also do not want you suffering from hackers, scammers, machines that won't turn on, accounts that won't log in, important files gone amiss, etc., just because you don't think you can afford my rates.

So this is your invitation to reach out to me directly if you are afraid of paying the asking rate. It's all on the honor system. I think CozyTech services are worth more than I'm currently charging, and I know that while some people can afford my rate, others cannot. Let's have an honest discussion about it, and figure it out together. Whether that is a price reduction, or a "pay in four" that I invoice directly, rather than setting you up to fail with an automated system that could damage your credit. Let's just be humans, neighbors, allies about this, and be good to each other.

I think there's too little of neighborliness and a will to take care of each other these days. Let's try and get back to it, huh?