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Service calls in a New Yawk minute

ComputerRepair.com is headquartered in Boca Raton, Fia., but company founder Jeff Leventhal speaks classic New Yawkas he rat-a-tat-tats his way through a half-hour pitch that sounds more like one of those sports-gambling touts onTV than your typical chief executive.

Not that there's anything wrong with it:The man is simply convinced that he has built a better mousetrap and that the IT services world is already beating a path to his virtual door. I'll vouch only for his enthusiasm - and let him tell his story.

Leventhal's 18-employee company provides an online marketplace through which some 8,000 registered IT professionals situated throughout every ZIP code in the country provide on-site services to 2,000 businesses big and small, and the occasional home user.The company facilitated its first work order last April 14 and already processes about 1,000 per day, with a goal of pushing that to 10,000, he says. About 150 new techs sign on every week.

According to Leventhal, three claims to fame set ComputerRepair.com apart from other companies that attempt to connect sellers and buyers of IT services: absurdly fast response times, low market-driven prices and a full-satisfaction guarantee.

"Here's a stat that will blow you away," he promises. "On average our calls [to techs about an available job] are accepted within 6 minutes and a tech is in route to the problem within 20 minutes. Now we didn't build the system to do that, it just does it because it works like a real market."

What he means by "like a real market" is that ComputerRepair.com doesn't set any prices, as the prices are determined by a combination of what the customer is willing to pay and who among the nearby/qualified techs is willing to accept those terms. ComputerRepair.com charges $11 to open a work order and rakes in 10% of the eventual fee once the client signs off on the completed job.

"Typically, you go to a service company and say, 'Here's my problem, what are you going to charge me to fix it?' With us you're saying, 1I have money on account, I need XYZ work done today, and here's what I want to pay to have it done. Who wants it?'" he says. "Then they send [the order] out to those people who they want to get the order and the first one to take it gets it.That's the fundamental difference on how we work."

Customer savings are realized by eliminating the layers of middlemen who tend to drive up costs of outsourced IT projects as work gets farmed from primary contractor to subcontractor and beyond, Leventhal says.

"With my model - because I've cut out the five handoffs in between - the client pays half [of what he might otherwise] and the tech makes more.They love it," he says. "I can give you an MCSE anywhere in the country for $52 an hour; nobody can come close to that, OK. But for the MCSE, $52 an hour is equivalent to $110,000 a year.The average salary for an MCSE is $62,OOO.They make more on my system, and clients pay less."

Of course, this only adds up to a win-win for all concerned if the work gets done well, right?

"By the way, we close out 99.7% of our calls with a six-out-of-six-star rating, that's a fact," Leventhal boasts. "It's an impossible metric. No service company in the world can touch it - nobody."

Don't ask me to vouch for the impossible, but that's what the man says. In fact, he says the number is actually higher than 99.7% but he's "embarrassed" to say so.

Because we were on the phone, I couldn't see if his face turned red, but it wouldn't be in character.

Had any experience with ComputerRepair.com? Let me know. The address is buzz@nww. com.