Friendly Computer Help's Company Profile

Friendly Computer Help is based in Oceanside, California. It was started by Michelle Russell in June of 2000 after constantly being asked for help by friends, family members, and classmates. She figured that since she had so many people asking for help, she might as well start a business out of it. At the time she started the business, Michelle was going to college full time and working part-time. Because of this, Friendly Computer Help started out as a moonlighting business to earn some extra income.

Michelle was very realistic going in and knew that it would probably take a while for the business to take off. This was especially true since she was working other jobs at the time to make sure she had some income as well as relying solely on word of mouth advertising. While she did receive some customers every year, business was fairly slow and inconsistent until about 2007 when she started volunteering for a local computer center. Her co-workers would often send people her way when they needed help with computers.

In February of 2010, it was officially made a partnership, but it is still a small business with limited availability at the moment. All partners have different skills in the variety of services that the company offers.

While there are many areas of the business, the main areas are tutoring and editorial assignments. The tutoring area is showing people how to use different components of computers and other electronics. The editorial assignments area refers to typing, transcribing, and proofreading documents. Along with the two main areas, we also offer a variety of different products such as greeting cards, business cards, flyers, catalogs, t-shirts brochures, and creating and maintaining basic websites.

Since many of our services can be done over the internet, a person does not have to leave near us to use our business. All that is required is a phone, internet access, or a mailing address to send your request to. At the moment, we cannot do remote access (for those of you not familiar with remote access, that is when one person accesses another person's computer from their computer to help them solve a problem). We are working on learning that skill though so we can be able to help more people in more ways.

The way we help is we walk the person through the steps of what they want to know. We figure this helps them more as well as saves them money rather than having to call for help over and over again for the exact same thing. We will adjust to the preference of the customer, but the price will remain the same. Basically, the only time the prices will change is when we have to adjust for inflation or other reasons of necessity, but we will keep the prices reasonable.

While none of our services are charged per hour that we work, there are some that are charged per block periods of time (with a maximum payment amount). Also, transcriptions are charged per audio minute. For those of you are not familiar with transcription information, charging per audio minute is charging for the amount of time the audio file is; not how long it takes us to work on it.