Growing demand, limited competition, no inventory or payroll to worry about – the life of an independent computer repair specialist does have its good points. Plus, you get out and about instead of sitting at the same desk every day. One more thing: You can charge $60 or $70 an hour and still undercut corporate repair shops by a wide margin.

“Business is very good,” said Dan Bailey, owner and sole employee of Iowa PC Services in Des Moines. Now in his third year in business, he said, “in 2003, every month my sales went up, and 2004 was phenomenal.”

In Altoona, Charles Clayton has operated Repair.com for eight years, which is a long time in the computer business, and recently added a storefront next to the Sugar Shack restaurant to go along with his average of more than 20 house calls per week. “Yesterday I had six or seven computers come in,” Clayton said. “I’m expecting that to be the daily average, once the new phone books come out.”

That’s another point in their favor. These businessmen have found their customers with little more than a yellow pages advertisement and word of mouth.

Bailey and Clayton are two examples from a fairly short list of Greater Des Moines computer repairmen. Both have a few traditional business customers, instead relying on home-based businesses and ordinary home computer users for their livelihood.

That approach has turned up about 700 customers for Bailey, who was introduced to computers through a high school programming class in Glens Falls, N.Y. He went on to get a computer science degree at Harding University in Arkansas and moved to Iowa to be a programmer at Grinnell Mutual Reinsurance Co. He worked for three companies in Des Moines before a layoff at AmerUs Group Co., his last employer, convinced him it was time to go out on his own.

“I incorporated in July (2002), and at first I was excited when I had one call in a week,” said Bailey, 43. “But my yellow pages listing came out in November, and within a few weeks, I was very busy.”

He charges $70 per hour, or a flat fee of $300 for hard-drive data recovery, which accounts for a big share of his calls. “I hope to grow my data recovery business,” he said. “I had to buy a fairly expensive program to do that, and if I can get enough business, I’ll buy another license. Then I could do two recoveries at once.”

Bailey said he might add employees eventually, “but for right now I like being independent. For the foreseeable future, I’ll run the business like this.”

Clayton spent two years as a pre-medicine student at Iowa State University, but changed his plans and concentrated on computers, which he says he began tinkering with as a fifth-grader in Altoona. After short stints with the Des Moines Independent Community School District and CompUSA Inc., Clayton founded Repair.com.

He drives to service calls in a Scion TC with a 6-foot Repair.com logo on the side, and charges $64 per hour.

“I’m doing as many on-site calls as last year,” said Clayton, 32, “and now we’re getting the computers that are brought into the store every day.” A couple of part-time employees help him run the shop. Clayton’s long-term goal is to add service centers in West Des Moines and Ankeny.

Though computer repair would appear to be a growth industry, Clayton said the level of competition remains steady. It doesn’t seem to work out for everybody. “There’s been an average of six or seven new guys in the yellow pages every year for the past eight years,” he said. “But six or seven go out of business every year.”