Glass only repairs - Queries...

There’s a lot to it.

1. Start up cost - It will cost $2-$4K to get the equipment to properly refurbish. For small time repair shops they have to consider the ROI. Overall I would say you can recover 50-75% of the screens that are good canidates before attempting and the other % is going to break/fallout/defect by the time you’re done or shortly after consumer so the total cost savings will be ~30%. So even in order to break even, you’ll need to run through around 1,000 good screens before you get your initial $ back on the equipment.
2. Owner Time - Typically, it’s going to be an owner or partner in a cell phone repair shop that attempts to learn how to refurbish at first. You must calculate the cost of your time spent (because it will take many hundreds of hours) to get it all down. Is this time the best spent away from your core business? Maybe, maybe not.
3. Employees - After the owner has learned how to do it they will usually hand it off to one of their lead techs to help out. Typical cell phone repair employees do well but not enough that they often get the itch to go do their own refurbishing for others…and why not? They can get 3-4 local repair shops in their area and make 2-3X as much money as being a repair tech working less hours and on their own time. This sort of goes hand in hand with #2 because the longevity of a solid LCD repair program means a top level person is going to need to head it. Do you have this person?
4. Economies of scale - This is a double edged sword. It’s easy to get 1 refurbished or a handful. But to get hundreds done a month means you need a supply chain of repair parts always on hand and the cash to do so. It means you have a lot more numbers to record to ensure you’re profiting …meaning, parts consumption, failure records etc. The more screens you have to refurbish the lower the cost SHOULD go, IF you’re able to keep up with tracking the volume.
5. Market Awareness - Sometimes, it’s just not worth refurbishing due to the cost you can get from recycling the screens through a buyback company . You need to be intune with market prices because sometimes it makes better sense to just recycle for cash and not spend time, money, parts on something that has an alternative choice that yields the same, close or better $.

Bottom line I would say it make sure you have a solid way of tracking the costs of repairs (yields, parts consumption & labor) so you’ll actually know if it’s all worth it.