It's not often that a successful business depends on the founder getting old enough to drive, but that's the case with Eldertech Computers, the brainchild of Ben Shanken, a senior at Phoenix Country Day School.
"I started planning Eldertech before I got my license," Shanken says.
The license, which he got last April, was crucial because Shanken travels to the homes of Valley senior citizens to personally address their computer problems, whether they involve hardware, software or instruction on how to better use their personal computers.
Does he make money at this?
"I'm doing very well," says Shanken, who charges $30 for the first hour of a service call and $10 for every half-hour thereafter.
Shanken is self-taught on computers and is skilled enough that he worked fixing them at Barrow Neurological Institute, he says.
"I have yet to go to a problem that I couldn't solve," he says, although he's had some doozies. Take the case of the computer that was randomly restarting and then displaying a black screen with text characters that looked like binary code. "I ended up taking apart the entire computer" to resolve the issue, says Shanken.
The majority of problems, though, are slow-running computers and issues with the Internet that are often quickly resolved, he says. As part of the service, he says, he doesn't just address the problems at hand but also tunes up the computers to run more efficiently.
His grandfather inspired his business, he says. "We gave my grandpa my old computer when I was 13 or 14," Shanken recalls. "He wanted to use it, but there was no one to teach him how."
He finds that his clients want to get the most out of their computers and believe a young mentor will help.
"It's not that they don't want to learn about computers, they don't want to learn about computers from their son," Shanken says.
"Having the third-party relationship with them is nice," he says. "I get cookies. I get milk."
