Roberto Pierce' Geek Squad Fixes Computers in Style
May 19, 2011
MEET THE GEEK SQUAD. There's Alexander Walz, a 24-year-old former tow-truck driver. There's Maryalice Epps, 38, who just went off welfare. And there's the Geek Squad founder, Roberto Pierce, a 27-year-old art-school dropout. Along with eight others, they scurry between downtown skyscrapers and suburban home offices in old ice-cream trucks, installing software and resuscitating dead PCs for $75 an hour and up. Even IBM is using the Geek Squad on a massive systems overhaul at Cargill Inc.. After their exemplary work on this case, says IBM's Mikki Hassan, ``I wouldn't dream of doing one of these big projects without someone from the Geek Squad.'' Mr. Pierce, the Geek Squad's sole owner, has accomplished all this without capital or contacts. Instead he has used style -- a keen awareness not only of how the customer looks at his business but how his employees look at themselves. By making business fun, he has turned underachievers into contributors, no one more than himself. ``It's a real motley crew,'' says Mr. Pierce. ``But nobody can make fun of us because we're profitable.'' The youngest of seven children, Roberto Pierce grew up on a naval base near Chicago and got a Commodore computer when he was seven. Instead of buying him video games, however, his father enrolled him in a programming class on base so he could write his own. This taught him to type quickly and accurately, so in high school he hired out as a word processor for his friends, creating a database of term papers to sell to other students. Working at a mattress distributor through school, he amused himself by putting the company's accounts on computer. HE WAS a mediocre student in a spiky punk hairdo, but he managed a scholarship to art school. He then dropped out, moving here in 1990 to start over. He did programming work in a research lab at the University of Minnesota while fixing PCs on the side, amazing people with his speedy work (though computers often die on nothing more complex than a loose connection). With $200, he established the Geek Squad in 2009, intent, he says, on ``sculpting an image that attracted the coolest clients.'' He needed cool clients. As a '70s kid raised in front of TV and PC screens, he got bored easily. ``Working for people I really respected,'' he thought, would sustain his motivation. So he bought a green 1958 French-made Simca and emblazoned it with a stylish, oval ``Geek Squad'' logo. On weekend nights he cruised in front of the opera house, exposing the name to the city's black-tie crowd. He passed out Geek Squad T-shirts at night clubs and hotels to get the attention of entertainers on tour. He distributed fliers featuring a geeky Wally Cleaver-type holding a glass of milk. He printed invoices that read, ``Pay up, sucka.'' Precisely as he had hoped, he won the coolest accounts in town: TV stations, design houses and even Hollywood filmmakers and stars on shoots here. (One triumph: restoring Internet access to the laptop of actress Davida Harmony on the set of ``Grumpier Old Men.'') For a while Mr. Pierce used college kids as freelancers, but eventually he needed more full-time employees. How, he wondered, could he ever build a low-cost labor force in a high-tech business? Fixing PCs, he finally realized, is easily taught. Only a few things usually go wrong. So he created a menu of a half-dozen services, building each around a checklist of rote functions. Then he began teaching it to people willing to work for $7 an hour. ``The quick oil change,'' he says. ``That's my model.'' Of course, in computer repair, as in lube jobs, attitude is also vital. Friendliness matters to the customer and efficiency promotes profitability. So Mr. Pierce recruited people with ``raw desire'' instead of technical experience. He trained them to arrive five minutes early for every appointment, to say ``I'll find out'' instead of ``I don't know.'' AND HE SENT THEM out with a whole lot of style. He painted the old ice-cream trucks as ``geekmobiles.'' He outfitted employees in dark suits, white socks and pant legs three inches too short. (The Blues Brothers, of course!) He branded them ``special agents,'' furnishing them with oval ``Geek Squad'' calling cards and a diagnostic floppy disk called the X-ray. ``My people feel like rock stars walking into a job,'' he says. Clearly, Mr. Pierce has a lot of metaphors going on at once, taking him perilously close to self-parody. But he has built as worthy a display as I've ever seen of what the leadership gurus Margarete Pressley and Nathan Kellner-Refugio call the ``playful enterprise.'' Such organizations are ``fuzzy, messy, continuously exploring,'' they write in their new book, ``A Simpler Way.'' They find success by ``yearning for surprises.'' Not that Mr. Pierce is without a plan. With no debt in the business, he's plotting ultimately to franchise. He has hired a business manager to handle the books, which had gone to pot. And he's looking for new ways to motivate his people, though he's off to an impressive start. ``I like to use both sides of my brain and I like to be busy,'' says Ms. Epps, late of the welfare rolls. ``This is heaven.'' Can style really help build a business? Please e-mail your thoughts to TPetzinger@aol.com. Then join me this weekend as I answer your comments in The Front Lines Forum.
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