I went out to a clients house who was having trouble getting her wireless network to work. She told me Geeks on Call had already been there and couldn't fix it. Took me about an hour to get five pc's up and encrypted.  If only I had their marketing budget.

makeitwork: That is why we are doing the FindAComputerGuy.Com you wouldn't believe how much we have been spending on the backend of getting marketing up and running. You will be seeing quite a bit of advertising from us in the next five to six months. Starting about 45 days from now. We are just trying to get the code base finsihed up for all of our logic.

On the Geeks On Call subject, well...... One of the franchise owners lives about four houses down from mine and you would not believe the franchise fees that they have to pay, it is over 1/2 of their income. Also you to own a franchise you have to pay between 20,000 -50,000 for a few zip code area and purchase a new car before you can ever start. Their advertising is what makes them work, but their hourly fees are somewhat high as well. We are spending a large amount of money on the front end and should be competing with them in the near future.

-Linn

Buying a franchise for a service business seems very silly to me.  Especially when the brand hasn't really been established yet except through advertising hype. The Geeks On Call advertising is cheap cable tv low-production-value crap anyways.

The GeekSquad advertising is almost humorous in how over the top it is but at least it is high quality.  

In the end the customer is left with two choices hire an indepependent provider, hopefully one who knows what they are doing, or call one of the more expensive franchise services and get some guy who makes  $7-10 an hour out of the $120-$200 the company charges.