I want to talk about something that’s been a natural progression for us over the past few years, and explain where DannStarr Electronics is heading — without burying the lede: we’re still a repair shop first and foremost. That hasn’t changed, and it’s not going to.

Repairs Are Our Core

Fixing phones, tablets, laptops, and computers is what pays the bills. It’s what we’re known for, and it’s what most of our customers come to us for. We’re not stepping away from that. If anything, we’re better at it now than we’ve ever been.

But running a repair business day in, day out teaches you things that go beyond soldering and screen replacements.

The Natural Progression

When you run a small business, you end up wearing a lot of hats. Over the years, I’ve had to learn about websites, marketing, booking systems, stock management, customer communication — all the behind-the-scenes stuff that keeps things running.

At some point, I started building our own website. Then customers started asking if I could build theirs. It turns out that the same problem-solving mindset that goes into diagnosing a dead laptop translates pretty well into figuring out what a business needs from its website.

That grew into a proper web design service — we’ve built sites for local businesses, and we maintain them too. It’s a natural fit.

Then Came the Software

Here’s where it gets interesting. When you run a repair shop, you quickly realise that most of the available management software doesn’t quite work the way you need it to. So you end up with spreadsheets, notebooks, and a system held together with good intentions.

I got fed up with that, so I built something better. RepairKeeper is a repair management platform that handles job tracking, customer communication, invoicing, and everything else a repair business needs. I built it because I needed it — and it turns out other repair businesses need it too.

Building RepairKeeper taught me that a lot of small businesses have the same problem: they’ve got processes that sort of work but are held together with manual effort. Copying data between systems, tracking things in spreadsheets that should be automated, relying on memory for stuff that should be in a system.

What This Means for You

If you’re a local business and you need a website, we can build you one. We’ve been doing that for a while now, and we’re good at it.

But if you’ve also got a process that feels like it should be easier — something manual or clunky that you’ve been putting up with — we might be able to help with that too. Not every business needs custom software, and we’ll be honest about that. But if yours does, we’d rather you talked to someone who actually runs a business and understands the problem, rather than a big agency that’s going to charge you ten times more and deliver something that doesn’t quite fit.

Same Shop, Broader Skills

Nothing about our repair service is changing. You can still walk in with a cracked screen and walk out with it fixed. We’re just doing more with the skills we’ve built up along the way.

If you’ve got a website that needs updating, a business that needs a web presence, or a process that’s been driving you mad — get in touch. We’ll have an honest conversation about whether we can help.

Dann DannStarr Electronics