By Andy Owens
aowens@scbiznews.com
Published Sept. 9, 2010

A smart phone repair service company that has expanded to downtown Charleston had 16 walk-in customers Saturday without even being officially open.

Wednesday night, myPhoneMD held a ribbon cutting to mark the official launch of its storefront at 471 King St. The company will repair all types of phones and will carry parts and accessories.

The company’s owners, who are in this week from Louisiana, said the partnership began when one of its principals broke his smart phone minutes before heading to a golf tournament.

“I dropped it 100 times before that, and it didn’t break. That time, it shattered,” said Phillip Manchester, a real estate developer.

The thought of waiting for a refurbished unit to arrive drove him to take a chance on a local company that promised to rapidly fix smart phones.

He was hoping his phone would be fixed in a few hours; they repaired it in minutes. Impressed by their expertise and attention to detail, Manchester kept an eye on the company. He watched it grow and then decided he wanted to buy in. Less than two years later, the company is branching out.

The company has opened five stores in Louisiana since March 2009 and has an expansion plan for spreading across the Southeast. Jeffrey Lyons, co-founder of the company, said interest from the Charleston market — measured just by walk-in traffic since Saturday’s soft launch — indicates they made a good choice for their first expansion outside of Louisiana.

“It’s worked out well,” Manchester said. “We’re really excited about being in Charleston. There are so many cool things about this place that have nothing to do with doing business.”

Lyons said the company has seven corporate clients in Louisiana and a number who are in the process of being qualified.

For businesses, myPhoneMD typically offers three types of services, though Lyons said the company is open to other proposals that help their customers keep their phones working. What they’ve typically offered:

• Discounts on services for employees.
• Agreement to keep a company’s smart phones operational and billing them at the end of the month.
• Contract-based model that cuts the standard deductible charged by cell service providers by one-third and does away with monthly insurance fees.

The biggest demand they see from businesses is a need to cut downtime. Even if a company has an insurance contract with a carrier, businesses don’t have time to wait for a new unit to be shipped, leaving employees without a phone for even a day or two.

“That’s what happens to a lot of businesses: ‘I’ll get it fixed, but in the meantime I have to buy another one,’” Lyons said.

Colin Colbert, the manager of myPhoneMD’s store in Charleston, is a College of Charleston graduate. He said his staff’s focus isn’t on fixing every single phone that is brought through the door. If there’s a better option for the customer, based on a previously purchased insurance plan or an existing warranty, staff members can arm customers with information and send them to the cell phone store. In many cases, myPhoneMD can fix something quickly and for less money than the turnaround would be worth.

“If they come in with a screen that looks like that,” Colbert said, pointing to sign showing a completely shattered phone screen, “then they’ve already voided their warranty.”

The company hasn’t gotten big enough to be seen as a threat by some of the large cell phone companies and manufacturers, Lyons said.

“It’s not something we’re too concerned about yet,” he said.

If the partners go to a franchise model for the business, he said it would rely on hands-on training and a standard of customer service that goes beyond signing a contract. Their biggest challenge is staying up-to-date, as the technology and different models of phones changes about every two weeks, Lyons said.

“That’s what we’re working against. We’re working against the clock,” he said.