How to take an appliance repair company from $0 to $4M in 2.5 years

Hi all, I wanted to share with you my path in the Appliance Repair industry. Especially now, we must support and inspire people to start a new path given the fact that more than 30M people are without a job. In the next few months I will share my story.

Nana will play a big part in putting the nation back to work. We need all the help we can get, and you are Nana’s best. Spread the word, let’s support, mentor, & believe in people — let’s be a Nana.

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I hope you enjoy it.

Here it is:

How to take an appliance repair company from $0 to $4M in 2.5 years (June 2013 to Jan 2016)

Background:
In December 2012, my friend told me he has been fixing appliances and was making more than $25k net profit every month. I was skeptical. It was hard for me to believe that, so I got on an airplane from Haifa Israel to Toronto, and shadowed him for 5 days. Fast forward, 7 months after, he mentored me in San Francisco for two months, and I was off on my own. I was happy to pay my mentor $130,000 over the next two and a half years. He changed my life.

Chapter 1: 0–2 months

The beginning was tough. I didn’t know what I was doing and to be honest, I didn’t like what I was doing. I was there for the money. I was there to save my family from financial devastation.

Just to share a bit of background, before I moved to San Francisco to fix appliances, I owned a few other companies in the fashion industry. Yep, radical change, they say. I started my first business in NJ when I was 22 years old. I sold hair straighteners, great business with healthy margins. When I was 24 years old, we moved back to Israel, and off I was to start my fashion businesses in Haifa.

In Israel, I used to parallel import brand names like Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie & Fitch, Tommy Hilfiger, Lacoste, Fred Perry, and others from the US and Italy. I then sold these clothes in my clothing stores in Haifa. I owned two of them, and it was fun. There are many lessons to share from my experience in Israel, but let’s get back to Appliance Repair.

In the first month, I didn’t know where to stay. The San Francisco Bay Area is a large metro area with more than 6M people. I knew that my office location would probably be influential to where I would be living. There were a few more big question marks to consider though, will jobs come in and where will they be located?

In the first two weeks, Koby (my mentor) and I slept in cheap motels. I was sad. I left my glamorous life behind, and now I was sleeping in motels around San Jose. I didn’t have a choice, I had to succeed. My family’s future was dependent on it.

When we arrived at the Bay Area, we rented a car, opened accounts at Marcone and Reliable Parts, and then we turned on Google Adwords advertisements. Now, all we had to do was to wait and see where the first job would be coming from.

My first appliance job was a bearing replacement on a Kenmore dryer in Los Altos Hills, CA. Koby walked me through the repair, how to take the dryer apart, what to replace, and how to put it back together. The job was done, and I was excited. The customer paid for the job with a check. I was happy.

Following my first job, I was excited and thrilled to fix my next appliance. Something was addicting about this feeling of taking a product that is broken, putting it back together, and making the customer happy.

We went back to the motel in San Jose, waited for the phone to ring again, waited for our next call.

In the beginning, Koby answered the calls. He wrote down the information on Apple notes. We drove together. I asked a lot of questions and watched a lot of YouTube videos about how to fix appliances, the fundamentals of electricity, and any other content that the YouTube algorithm decided to expose me to. Learning was fun.

The jobs that started to flow in were inconsistent. We had days with two jobs and sometimes no jobs at all. I was a bit worried. I left everything behind, and I didn’t know if the business would ever pick up, but it sure did. A month and a half in since our first job, the advertisement picked up. I went out to 6 appliance repairs every day.

I can’t say I was good at it. It took me a while to feel comfortable to open this white magic box. The only experience I had before that was a bit relevant to appliance repair was operating my weapons while I was in the Israeli Air Force.

149 jobs and two months later, Koby went back to Toronto and I was on my own.

Having a mentor who believed in me was the key to my new path. I couldn’t be more grateful to my friend who was there for me at my hardest time, believing in me and giving me hope. A few years passed, and now we know that Nana is here to hold people’s hands as they walk down a new path, a new beginning.

To be continued…..