Sunday, our cash register iMac decided its hard drive had served long enough. Beachballing so hard it could no longer load Safari or Mail, the terminal became useless, and I knew I had to replace or repair it.
Unfortunately, repairing iMacs isn't as easy as dusting crops, boy.
The 2012 and newer models are particularly difficult to service because the shell is held together by adhesive. That's aside from the RAM drawer, which is the easiest ever to get into and requires no tools and even has instructions printed on the casing nearby.
Fortunately, this was a 2011 iMac, so I could get into it without cutting through destructible matter. All it required was a heavy suction cup to unfasten the front glass, which is attached via a combination of fittings and magnets. Then a Torx screwdriver keyed me the rest of the way in. Had I only a RAM replacement to perform on this model, that can be done with nothing more than a Phillips and a few spare minutes.
The 3.5" SATA hard drive was easy enough to remove, though it has a custom thermal sensor rather than a SMART system so the iMac's fan will run too much unless or until I find a more effective solution than resetting the System Management Controller, which only temporarily convinced it to stand down. Heat may not be as much of an issue because I replaced the bad hard disk with a solid-state drive I rescued from our old shipping desk PC that suffered motherboard failure a few months ago. In fact, lacking a reinstall disc for macOS, I simply powered the system back up and it booted Windows 10 without incident. It doesn't like to cooperate with the printers, likely due to driver mismatches, but I'm going to put High Sierra back on it anyway so that will be solved soon enough. Bottom line, we have our cash register terminal back and it should run fine for a few years before being put out to pasture.
Most of you probably don't know or care what any of the foregoing means so I will tell you that the TL;DR of it is that I was able to perform a non-trivial repair on a computer that's not designed to be user-serviceable, saving the company $700 to $1200 depending on what a replacement would have ended up setting us back, or some several hundred dollars in repair labor and/or parts from a professional outfit somewhere in town. And if someone had walked in the door with a similar need, provided that I had researched a bulletproof solution to the thermal sensor issue and practiced the repair in general, I could have had them out the door in under an hour with money in the bank on an economically sustainable deliverable.
And though it blew my Sunday itinerary out of the water because I was learning as I went, repairing that iMac was still high-value work. If there's one thing owners in the greater comic and hobby game industry too often fail to do, it's to systematize basic or core work and spend more time doing higher-value work.
Core work is still important, because it runs the business. But the people we hire are there to do the core work. Moreover, it's what they expect to be doing. Giving them good training and clear processes and turning them loose to impress you with their initiative is often the best way to have that core work be performed well. Core work is going to succeed when you've cultivated competency and judgment through training.
Then the expert-mode play is to start training our standout staff members on how to do higher-value work.
What's the difference? It's more than just how much money the work produces or saves for the company, though that's surely an important element. With higher-value work, competency is upgraded to knowledge and skill, while judgment increases in responsibility.
Every time I teach a staff member how to do higher-value work, and they internalize and perform that work successfully, they get better and the business gets better. And everyone's job actually gets easier, including their own. I have given them greater agency. And with effective conveyance of agency, an owner can start to achieve true duplication. That achieves the dual purpose of making it possible for the jobs you hire to become careers, and freeing the owner from being chained to the dashboard.
So, does this mean I should start soliciting Mac repairs, as yet another step toward building this amazing business with high-value work and robust investiture of agency in my people and a bold future promising power strips on every countertop? Well, maybe. Probably not yet. But looking forward, combined with some other things I'm keeping under wraps for now that I was intending to develop, this is looking like a sensible direction.
DSG already does a limited assortment of video game hardware repairs, a menu limited primarily by my ability to systematize it and train others to do it when neither me nor our silent partner who is an electrical engineer are available. But it's an area that has already done well for us and where we are learning the problems now so we can set it up better as we go. I already discovered we charged too little for a common NES repair. Our success rate has been 100% on units serviced, and the process is close to mastered. We can build in some gross margin and it's still a competitive price for the consumer. That's solving a process.
Sadly, this suggests to me that my internal reservation that the store should have gone small, not big, and cut its focus down to Magic and video games, may have been the smarter course. I still like the other things DSG does, and in fact as a gamer I am a board game player first and most often. But mastery of a value proposition has more power, pound for pound, than diversity of value propositions.
The converse, however, is that diversity of value propositions makes the business far more resistant to failure, with revenue coming in from a nondependent array of sources. That, coupled with our industry's headlong rush toward Third Place mechanisms, suggests that the gigantic space with a favorable lease was the correct long play after all. We had better hope so, because we have 53 months left on that favorable lease.
I don't want to overthink the business implications of having swapped out the storage device in a broken computer. But big things are made up of little things, and sometimes little things pack an outsized punch. I wonder if this is one of those times.
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