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A guy at a garage sale in Akron handed me a dead Marantz and said one sentence that changed how I quote repairs
I picked up a beat up 2230 receiver off his folding table for $20 and when I asked if it powered on he said no, then said something I still think about. He goes, "I already know what's wrong with it, I just don't want to spend 3 hours finding out." That line hit me because I do the same thing with my own bench time, I'll sit on a unit for a full day chasing a dead channel instead of quoting the diagnostic fee upfront and letting the customer decide if it's worth it. Now I tell people straight up it's $45 to look at it and that comes off the repair if they go ahead, and nobody has argued with me once. Anybody here still eating the diagnostic time to win the job, or did you switch to charging for it?
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johnson.eva14d ago
That line about not wanting to spend 3 hours finding out is the part most people skim past, because the real cost isn't the bench time, it's the jobs you don't take while you're buried in a maybe. When I stopped eating diagnostics I also started tracking how many free lookups turned into paid repairs, and it was under half, so I was basically running a free repair shop for tire kickers. The thing nobody brings up is that charging the fee actually filters out the units that were never worth fixing anyway, which saves you from taking on somebody else's junk pile.
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