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Are you the person everyone calls when they have a computer problem? Have you considered getting paid for fixing near-fatal errors and turning your PC prowess into a business? According a recent report, sales of computer services are expected to exceed $47 billion this year in the U.S. alone, with PC repair leading the way.

“Almost all small businesses and home offices use computers and depend on them to be working properly,” says Chip Reaves, CEO of Computer Troubleshooters, a franchise network of computer professionals. “They don’t have the skills, the time or the desire to do their own computer service, repair and upgrades, and that puts us right in the middle of one of the fastest-growing industries in the world.”

But if your only business experience is selling your mom’s friend her first computer, how do you get started? Besides coming up with a business name, getting a business license and obtaining general liability business insurance (which ranges from $300 to $1500 annually and is obtainable through your local city hall), there are a number of things you need to do to get started on the right foot. Here are 10 tips that will help you successfully launch and run your new endeavor.

Entrepreneur Lifestyle

John and Elaine Ryan spotted the kitchen facelift company Dream Doors’ stand while having a cup of coffee at the International Franchise Exhibition at Olympia. They ended up with a new kitchen and a new business.

Mr Ryan had been in the printing industry for 27 years. “I was fed up with the unsocial hours and tremendous pressure, but was nervous about starting on my own, so franchising, with a proven system and support, appealed to me.”

He looked at the British Franchise Association’s website, and researched the options, as well as talking to other people who had franchises. He decided that he didn’t want to take on a franchise where he did the manual work, but would concentrate on managing other people and finding new business.

“But when we went round the franchise exhibition the businesses on offer all seemed very similar – involving cars or signmaking or printing. Then we saw the Dream Doors’ exhibit, and my wife said ‘I’d definitely have those in my kitchen.’ It seemed like a proper business, rather than a tradesman’s job.”

Sometimes an organization’s best growth opportunities lie hidden in something that, at first glance, makes no sense. Idiosyncratic customer preferences or employee behaviour can lead to aberrations in business results. How do you deal with these anomalies?

One common response is to ignore them. Most organizations try to contain or suppress anomalies, for fear they will draw attention to departures from standard operating practice.

When senior managers learn of anomalies, they generally dismiss them as random, one-time events. That’s too bad. Anomalies can reveal what your customers really want - and what your organization is capable of delivering in response. Paying attention to them may point you to major opportunities to grow your business by doing on a broad scale what some part of your company is already doing on a small scale. Wise executives capitalize on anomalies. They dig into them and look for ways to exploit them, asking: What’s really going on? How can we learn from this? Is there an insight buried here that can move the business to a whole new level?

At a maker of high-technology health care diagnostic machines, the key anomaly was in the unusual performance of a local sales-and-service unit. A curious manager noticed that in Manhattan, the company had an extremely high capture rate for lucrative service contracts to maintain and repair the complex technology. What’s more, customers there were buying all their new equipment from the company, even in product lines where the company’s market share was normally quite low.