---
title: "A professional workshop"
author: "Stan Voo"
url: https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/a-professional-workshop
published: 2011-10-30
summary: "Clean, tidy repair workshops were only starting to appear in Ukraine. A good example, and seven ideas for the website and the business."
---

# 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](http://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:

![](https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/a-professional-workshop-1.webp)

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*](http://www.markforster.net/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*](http://kniga.biz.ua/book/MIF/128/1043/) (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).