By Noah Graff
In the next issue of Today’s Machining World I interview Demetrios Leontaris, otherwise known as the iPod Doctor. He has a business driving all over New York City in his Aztec, fixing broken iPods, PDAs, laptops and smart phones belonging to everyone from Wall Street guys to construction workers to teenagers. On average, to fix an iPod he charges between $59 and $100 and change—a heck of a lot less then the price of a new one.
What I found so refreshing about the way Demetrios’ runs his business is that he hates to say “no” to people who need something fixed, which he admits isn’t always the best business practice. After the interview, I told him about my external hard drive that stopped working. It had about 700 gigs of memory, mostly comprised of video footage from some of my most important projects. Lacie, my hard drive’s brand, doesn’t even attempt to fix defective drives. They offered me a free replacement, but I didn’t want a new drive, I wanted my data. They suggested I send it to a company that extracts data from busted hard drives, but those services cost thousands of dollars.
Demetrios said he would take a crack at it, so I sent it to him, even though I knew that by letting him open it up my warrantee from Lacie would go bad. A few weeks later he proclaimed that after many tedious hours of attention he had both restored my data and got my drive working again. He charged me $375, which I happily excepted.
Question: Have you ever taken on a customer’s machining issue when rationally you probably shouldn’t have? Do you have trouble saying “no” to a challenge?
