Commonly asked questions and answers about this franchise opportunity.

Q: What type of training, and experience would you say is necessary to be successful in this business. Also, what area of the country is most in need of these types of services?

A: The type of training depends on your role. If you want to OWN a Computer Troubleshooters franchise, then an IT background is helpful but really to be the most successful you’ll want business experience, including management and/or marketing training.

If you are talking about the training needed to be a technician in this field, then that’s a little more complicated. We’ve never found a training course that exactly matches the skills you need in supporting small business IT, but the three closest are:

• CompTIA’s A+ Certification (and associated training classes). This is really a general background type of course which provides a good foundation.
• CompTIA’s Network+ Certification (and associated training). This course gives you better skills in understanding networking, which is really the key to everything we do today (i.e. internet, email, wifi, iphones, etc).
• Microsoft’s Small Business Specialist: Although understandably Microsoft-centric, and a little more mid-sized business focused than Computer Troubleshooters typical clientele, this training comes closer to anything else to incorporating the hardware, software, and networking skills we use on a day to day basis. It’s far from perfect, but still very good.

As to region, we’ve never found a region where our services were not needed (which is also why we’re in 25 countries, including very diverse economies like Ghana, Australia, or Saudi Arabia). There are some geographical differences, like our rural franchisees generally are more successful than our urban franchisees, and the types of services we offer in different markets may vary (some are more conducive to PC sales, others to VoIP telephony, etc). We’ll help you navigate that to find the right product mix for your area.

Q: Do you accept partnerships as owners of the Franchise?

A: Partnerships are okay.

Q: Do I or my partner have to have IT knowledge, or do we just run the business and have other people work for us?

A: IT skills are not required; most of our top franchisees manage teams of technicians rather than doing the work themselves.

Q: What do you offer with this franchise? Training? What else?

A: What we provide is essentially:

• Training and resources to support our business model, which revolves around managed IT service plans, VoIP telephony, cloud computing, and data backup and recovery.
• The tools you need to manage your technicians and your clients, including the industry-leading Autotask operations software.
• A professional marketing program including direct mail, email, and networking campaigns. This also includes online portals for ordering and executing marketing campaigns, a SEO-optimized website, your own marketing CRM, an email marketing tool, and a preloaded database of the best small business targets in your territory.
• National promotion, in the form of national account partners that use our locations nationally and globally, as well as limited national promotion through both onine and traditional campaigns.
• Partnerships and discounts from best-of-breed industry vendors. This also includes partnerships to support our recurring revenue lines of business.
• Support and advice from all 471 franchisee locations around the world via our online forums, intranet, and other resources.
• Approximately $2000 worth of technical utilities licensed for use by you and your technicians, as well as a startup kit with stationery, comprehensive manuals, and promotional items.
• Use of our UniverCT.com online training tool for you and your staff.
• Advanced traingin in marketing, sales, and technical topics.
• Exclusive use of the Computer Troubleshooters brand and resources within your territory.