A professional workshop

So: a pro­fes­sional workshop. Repairs of elec­tron­ics, shoes and watches, key cutting.

Clean, tidy, in a word, service. Workshops like this are slowly appear­ing in Ukraine. There are still few of them, so maybe some­one will be inspired.

A good exam­ple from the September Forbes (the Ukrainian edi­tion): Gospodin Sapozhnik (“Mister Shoemaker”), 11 drop-off points for shoe repair. The guys can tell it themselves:

Not long ago we noticed that Ukraine sells a lot of good, expen­sive and even luxury shoes, which, when they break, have to go for extremely extreme repairs. The cob­bler’s pro­fes­sion­al­ism and sobri­ety are in ques­tion, the work­shop is dirty, cob­bler and cus­tomer strug­gle to under­stand each other, the mate­ri­als are poor, and so on.

www.sapojnik.com.ua

[The rest explains the name: a shoe repair for cheap every­day shoes and luxury ones alike, staffed by a sober, tidy, polite work­ing cob­bler, and you get an aro­matic coffee while they take your shoes.]

The site does a lot of what I wanted to talk about. So it really is a great example.

The main place on the site goes to the map! Because a work­shop’s web­site has to answer one ques­tion first of all: “Where can I get my shoes fixed?”

Now, some ideas for the web­site and for the busi­ness as a whole:

  1. Order sta­tuses (log­ging in to a per­sonal account on the site).
  2. Text mes­sage updates when the status changes. For exam­ple: “Waiting for the nec­es­sary parts to arrive. Estimated date: October 15, 2011.”
  3. Online repair requests (useful if you want the broken item picked up from home).
  4. And so, pickup and deliv­ery of orders by courier.
  5. Transparent pricing. Not based on how much the cus­tomer can pay.
  6. Clear deadlines. It’s impor­tant to orga­nize the flow of orders prop­erly and not grab what­ever is “on fire”, because done in a rush means done any old how. Mark Forster explains this in detail, with an exam­ple, in his book Do It Tomorrow.
  7. A tidy office, sober craftsmen :)

To those already in this kind of busi­ness, or only plan­ning to start one, I rec­om­mend John Timpson’s book Letters on What Matters (the title of its Russian edi­tion). True, it’s about run­ning a busi­ness in gen­eral, but it’s by the founder of a big shoe-making and shoe-repair com­pany (later they also started cut­ting keys, if I’m not mistaken).