Please, introduce yourself and your business.
Hi, my name is Mark Bush, and I'm the founder and CEO of RAD Computers in Mesa, AZ. We provide computer repair and IT managed services to Mesa, AZ and surrounding areas, including Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, Chandler, and Gilbert, Arizona.
How did you start your business?
I took to computers pretty early on, and as I honed my skills, I wound up floating from job to job filling various IT roles.
I took a help desk position for a large hospice organization, worked for one of the largest telecom companies doing phone-based tech support, worked for two nationally recognized computer repair companies, and three local computer shops.
I wanted to provide better solutions to people and businesses.
It seemed like each IT-oriented business had flaws with either service delivery or overall purpose. People deserve better service than paying to have their computer wiped out and data put into odd places, which is a pretty common business model in this industry.
RAD Computers spawned out of a desire to do better by the customers than the procedures of other companies would allow for.
It started as a side hustle to supplement my income, but I was provided an opportunity to do electronics sales at a local business that had tremendous amounts of walk-in traffic.
I only allowed them to hire me under the stipulation that I be allowed to advertise I did computer repair. That single agreement really catalyzed the growth of the company, and I'd recommend "business incubation" partnerships to anyone looking to start a business.
How much revenue was your best year? (include margin if possible)
We're twelve years into our journey, and we're still in growth mode adding 10% YOY gains, so last year (2023) was our best year, with ~$250K in gross revenue, with a profit margin around $150K.
When did you notice traction when building your business? The “Oh S**t!” moment, what did that feel like?
I was still working at "Best Deal In Town", the electronics store I went to work for as a salesman. I had been there for a little over a year, and the second "Black Friday" sale was rounding the corner.
Up until this point, I had them cutting my hours down so I could dedicate more time to the business. I was down to about 10 hours every other week. One day, I woke up and thought "Ugh. I don't want to go in at 4AM to sell TVs to people all day".
I told the owner, Ryan, I didn't want to come in and to give my hours to someone else. He asked if I was alright, knowing commissions from sales that day would be pretty big. I told him "I think I'm ready to fly solo." That was my "Oh S**t!" moment. It was scary, but it was worth it.
What was your childhood like? Were you slinging candy on the playground?
I was definitely an entrepreneur when I was younger. I started out babysitting my mom's friends' younger kids. I got $3 an hour as a responsible 10-year old watching 5-year olds (with my mom, Josie, around).
When I turned 13, I started mowing lawns for $20 a lawn ($40 for both front and back yard). Lawn mowing was while I was in Texas, and the yards were pretty big. It was also a manual mower.
I was thankful when my mom invested in a self-propelled lawn mower. I looked to increase my revenue per hour, so I did research and convinced my mom that mulching the clippings instead of bagging them was a better option for her yard.
This saved me about an hour a day. I also convinced my grandmother living across the street to let me mow her yard, so I was making about $80 every other Saturday in about three hours, or ~$26.66/hr.
This is also when I learned about adding value to services, and pitching value of services. My mom kept a really beautiful yard. We had seven pecan trees, an Asian pear tree, apricot tree, peach tree, three mesquite trees, a pomegranate tree, and she loved to plant flowers.
We had an assortment of bougainvillea, roses, bushes, herbs, and in the backyard we had a vegetable garden. We lived on a corner lot, so across the other street, we had a neighbor, Mrs. Ecker. Mrs. Ecker was always out in her yard watering the grass and working on her yard, and my mom appreciated how well maintained Mrs. Ecker's yard was.
I convinced my mom to let me mow the yard weekly so the grass would always be trimmed and "photo-ready". My mom liked the thought of a yard that was always well-kept, so she agreed to my proposition because the added value appealed to her.
I also noticed that my mom always followed up my mowing with edging of the curb-area. I knew why she did this - sharp lines made the yard look pristine. But I didn't know how to use the weed-whacker.
So, I took it upon myself to learn. We had an alley way, so I grabbed the weed whacker and practiced edging the grass areas around the alley. It only took a few minutes to get the hang of, so I started edging the front yard when I got done mowing.
It only took about fifteen minutes to edge the front yard, and my mom really appreciated not having to do it herself. So I traded a little bit of time for a lot of additional value in her eyes. I also added this to my grandmother's yard service, as well.
In junior high, there were vending machines in the school courtyard, but kids always had $5 and needed to make change but there were no change machines. Recognizing this, I always carried $20 in ones and loose change. Kids would ask me for change, and I'd charge them a fee, sort of like an ATM.
They'd give me a $5 bill, and I'd give them $4 in ones and $0.50 in quarters. At the end of the day, I'd have a few dollars more than I started with, and I'd repeat this daily. In a week, I'd make about $10.
In high school, I got a real job for a mind-numbing $5.15/hr. Big mistake, it's a trap, don't do it. As a side-hustle, I created jewelry out of paperclips and fancy marbles as a pendant, and strung them using necklace rope.
I made more per hour selling necklaces at $20/each with additional marbles than I did working my "real job". This is also when I started fixing computers, as an enthusiast hobby.
What has been your best marketing marketing channel?
I'm going to catch so much flack for this but our free Yelp profile has been our #1 source of new clients after we left "Best Deal In Town" and got our own building. While doing business out of "BDIT", I always let people know I was a small startup and word-of-mouth was our only method of advertising.
When I told them this, I gave them three business cards each. Our business cards had our review outlets on them (Yelp, Google, Facebook), and occasionally people would leave a review - and they were ALWAYS 5-star.
Building up a solid reputation on our free Yelp profile in a metropolitan area with many Yelp users helped perpetuate future business. It helps that they're #1 for a lot of search terms - having a good reputation on their platform helps direct users to your business.
I would recommend anyone with a service business focus on getting their reputation in order.
How many attempts at building something did you make before you found what you’re working on now? Did you always have an entrepreneurial drive?
I have the best mom and stepdad anyone could ask for. They never told me "no, you can't do that".
My mom always encouraged me to play. She didn't get mad when I took stuff apart, so long as I put it back together. My stepdad, John, encouraged me to try new things - to do things I was afraid of.
Sometimes, they were terrifying, like laying on top of monkey bars and holding onto the bars and flipping over them. He was there to catch me, and I did it, but it was terrifying. To this day, I never did it without him there to catch me.
He talked a lot about businesses and money, despite never starting one himself. I guess I may have learned a lot through osmosis in listening to him. But, the biggest thing is that I was never discouraged from trying things.
And even if I tried something and failed, I didn't know how to settle for failure. Video games taught me that. Mark Rober, a famous YouTuber, did a TED Talk on "The Super Mario Effect".
I highly recommend everyone watch it. My mom and stepdad bought me video games as gifts, so "The Super Mario Effect" is very relevant to my life. Failure is just a tool to learn how to do better next time.
What is your biggest overhead expense?
My biggest overhead expense is employee wages, followed by rent. I think this would be the same for most service businesses like mine.
We also use a lot of SaaS ("Software-as-a-Service") tools, and they scale with the number of users that we support, so they can get relatively expensive as well.
What’s the most important skill you’ve learned?
The most important skill I've learned is the art of negotiation. Learning how to read people, talk to people, and convince people that what you're offering to them provides the solution they want and value they didn't know about is a fantastic skill.
This is true of convincing someone to fix what they have versus replacing it (we try to save existing computers to reduce eWaste), upselling someone on something that would benefit them, and doing contract negotiations with business owners to manage their IT infrastructure.
Chris Voss's "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It" is a fantastic read.
What do you spend the majority of your time doing, in a given week? (I think a lot of people hear entrepreneurs “work,” but may not understand what that means on a day-to-day basis.
During the first several years, I was doing all the "technician" work. Technicians are the ones that do the work in the business - you learn this from Michael E Gerber's "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It".
In this book, you learn about Entrepreneurs, Managers, and Technicians. Entrepreneurs grow the business, managers manage, and technicians do the work. You learn about being your authentic self, and delegating tasks to others so you can focus on what matters most - the business growth.
Recently, I've begun delegating more of the "computer repair" and "managed IT services" to my amazing staff members, especially Paul, who is taking on more of the stuff that was slowing me down.
Paul is the best thing to ever happen to RAD Computers. He's kind, knowledgeable, he loves what he does and loves learning, and most importantly, he's great with people.
Customers and clients love Paul, and he's gotten several 5-star reviews under his belt on our social review profiles. Every business owner needs to find their "Paul".
So these days, with task delegation working well, I focus on growing the business. I write blog articles, create YouTube videos, do client acquisition through business networking events, keep up with technological trends and supply-chain shifts, and do market research to see what obstacles are headed to our industry.
I always continue to innovate our existing products and services so our clients get more value for their dollar.
What do you know now that you wish you knew when first starting your business?
I wish I knew more about delegation, and pricing services accordingly to plan for growth. If you offer services at a really low price to attract customers, you leave yourself no overhead to hire.
If you can't hire, you can't delegate. If you can't delegate, you're stuck doing all the work yourself, which REALLY slows down your ability to grow.
It's a vicious cycle. You need to price your products and services accordingly from the get-go. Do market research and price yourself in the median vicinity of your established competitors from the start. There's a reason they're charging what they're charging.
Also, don't overwork yourself. Getting to this point in my business, where I am delegating tasks, was a journey... 1880 days of 18 hours a day - that's a little over 5-years of working every single day, including holidays, with no days off. Don't do what I did.
Read books, price accordingly, and delegate early on. Take weekends off, take holidays off, take vacations. Do NOT overwork yourself. You WILL wind up regretting it.
Now, we're only available to the walk-in public between 12 and 6, Monday through Friday. For businesses, we're available from 8 to 6, Monday through Friday. We saw no loss in projected revenue with 30-hour work weeks, and my employees are happier.
Lastly, don't be afraid to fire a client. Don't let people be toxic to you or your staff. Tell clients "no" when they're stepping out of line, or let them go when they're persistently lowering the morale of you or your staff.
Money will come, believe that. Trust in your abilities and your reputation, you don't NEED toxic people in your life.
This is true of business, and I dare say this is true of "family and friends". Do not keep toxic people in your life. Period.
The world of entrepreneurship can be misleading. Many people think it’s always easy and always glamorous. What’s a big problem you’ve faced as a business owner and what were the emotions behind it?
One of the biggest issues we face in our business, which at the heart of it, is a computer repair and maintenance business, is when we do our job perfectly, we're ensuring we don't see that customer again for a while unless they have another computer that needs to be fixed.
Our business is self-defeating - we need broken computers to come in to survive, but if we fix a broken computer to the best of our ability, we may not see that customer for several years. So, we have to trust that the customer will be so happy they'll tell their friends to check us out.
This is doubly-true for managed IT services, which is almost maddening. With managed IT services, our job shifts from fixing broken computers to maintaining the integrity of several computers in a workplace environment.
This includes ensuring all computers function at 100% efficiency at all times, all hardware is maintained, all updates are done, all security is in place. The problem arises from the value that clients perceive.
If we do our job perfectly, clients often lose site of WHY their fleet of computers and printers and networking equipment is working perfectly.
They question what they pay us for, not realizing we're the reason everything is working perfectly. On the flipside, if a disaster happens, like a computer's power supply croaks or a drive dies with no warning due to a power surge, the client ALSO wonders what they pay us for.
It's... very difficult to convey just how insane this line of work is, where you can be equally stigmatized for doing your job perfectly, or "imperfectly." Luckily, we have a lot of good rapport with our clients. We
Many people don’t know where to start in the business world, they feel stuck. They may want to start a business to become their own boss and create their hours. What is your best advice for someone who feels completely stuck?
Read books, follow your passion, make it happen NOW. Don't sit around idly by thinking about doing it, just do it! Life is too short to NOT follow your passions. Get out there and bring your business to life. You can figure out logistics as you go, but you don't know what you need until you've experience "customer demand".
Provide what you think people will need, and figure out what they WANT in addition. Once you know what the customer's are wanting, fulfill those wants with your business. Listen to the wants and needs of the people, and CARE about the people. That's it.
Good books EVERY Entrepreneur should read:
Michael E Gerber: "The eMyth Revisited"
Gary Vaynerchuk: "Crush It!"
Chris Voss: "Never Split the Difference"
Dale Carnegie: "How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age"
Paul A Akers: "2-Second Lean: How to Grow People and Build a Fun Lean Culture at Work"
Michael Michalowicz: "The Toilet Paper Entrepeneur", "The Pumpkin Plan", and "Profit First"
James Clear: "Atomic Habits"
Darren Hardy: "The Compound Effect"
Do yourself a huge favor and subscribe to "The Futur" on YouTube. Even if you're not a designer, Chris Do's business acumen is top-notch, and you can apply his logic to any industry. He's arguably one of the most influential YouTubers for entrepreneurs. His videos really showcase the challenges people face when talking to prospective customers, and how to overcome them. Chris, man, if you ever read this, thanks for all the free coaching on YouTube.
And to my staff, I love you all. Keep up the great work and let me know if YOU need anything.
Make sure to check Mark's socials out!
