It was July of 2001 and Dave and I were in Dave's old red Chrysler driving up and down Mass Ave. in Lexington and Arlington posting handmade flyers for the newly founded Geek Housecalls. It was a time when people didn't know quite what to make of a company that took pride in calling themselves geeks, and a time when the idea of geeks traveling to your home to help you with your computer troubles was unheard of.

"When we started out," says Dave, "the idea didn't really catch on for the first few weeks, so we had a lot of time on our hands and spent most of it in the car looking for new places to put our flyers. We must have made friends with every Cafe, Pizza shop, and Laundromat Owner in the area. In fact, our first customer was my dry cleaner on Mass Ave."

But as it turned out, the idea worked, and before long, the phone started ringing in the tiny one-room office on Mass Ave that we jokingly referred to as "Geek Housecalls world headquarters".

By the end of 2001, we had 118 customers. Those days, Dave stayed in the office and took the phone calls, while I drove out to the customers and serviced their computers, then we'd usually end our day by piling a box of flyers into Dave's car and driving around looking for places to post them. It was a kind of mobile working management meeting where we'd review how the day went for each of us, and what customers were saying and how they were reacting to our approach and pricing, and every now and then I'd jump out of the car with a handful of flyers and some thumbtacks as we'd come to a shop or restaurant with a bulletin board.

It wasn't long though, before customers started to catch on to the idea of convenient in-home computer support, and in November of 2001, we hired our first two geeks (besides me), one to cover the South Shore area, and one who was an Apple Mac specialist. The following January, we brought in another Geek to cover the North Shore area.

We generally plodded along through that first year into the spring of 2002 at which point our rental agreement on the tiny space we were in was up and we went searching for a new, slightly larger home. It wasn't long before we discovered our "geek's dream office" on the second floor over the Lexington House of Pizza. Going downstairs for lunch was almost like having our own corporate cafeteria.

So one day Dave announces that he's going out of town for a few days and would I mind dispatching while he's gone? I'm thinking "I can handle this" and settle in at the phone all prepared to book a few calls then go out and service them. What actually happened though, was a disaster, the geek in me handily overpowered the businessman in me, and for three solid days I walked callers through fixes over the phone for free and landed no new customers. The first thing Dave did when he returned, was place an ad for dispatchers, and before the month was up,we had brought aboard two full-time dispatchers. This was a relief to me because this let me get back to what I did best, which was geeking out in the field, and cooking up new advertising messages. It was also no doubt, a relief to Dave, since he had a weeklong vacation coming up and didn't relish the idea of me giving away any more business...

By the summer of 2002, things were moving along pretty smoothly with dispatchers dispatching and geeks geeking, and Dave and I scrapping for customers and looking for new ways to attract attention. Then, that August, Jim Flanagan, principle of IR Strategic Advisors, a friend and customer whom we had previously shared office space with, introduced us to a contact at the Boston Business Journal, and things began to percolate for us.

Sean McFadden of the Boston Business Journal interviewed us and sent in a photographer to catch Dave and I in the hallway outside our office looking authentically geeky by toting a laptop and a computer bag. The result was a small-business feature titled 'Geeks' to the Rescue which started out by expressing an idea what would become a bit of a novelty for the press over the next few years. "Call them geeks, and Dave Ehlke and Andy Trask swear they won't be offended. In fact, when it comes to solving the assorted computer-related crises of their clients -- everything from nasty viruses to system crashes -- these computer geeks are more like computer gods."

I was never that comfortable with the computer gods thing, but that's because I think it's in the nature of the geek to be humble and that feels a bit 'over the top', but the local TV stations ate it up and within weeks of the story running, we were featured twice in local Television news stories. It was fun going out on housecalls with a camera crew in tow, and a little exciting not just for me, but also for the customers who's homes (and computers) played host to the stories. Needless to say, business was thriving and by the end of 2002, we had gained a thousand new customers.

Now one of the things that happened in the spring of 2002 was that we went to the Providence Business Expo tradeshow where we were approached by a gentleman from Delta Dental of Rhode Island. He explained that they were making major upgrades to their website and online services and that they were concerned that many of their member dentists would be too technologically backward to take advantage of the new online services. He asked if we'd be interested in working with them as a preferred vendor to help member dentists get up to speed on technology. Now while this really represented a whole new market for us, we welcomed the opportunity, and although it took more than a year to finalize, in the spring of 2003 we were officially recognize by Delta Dental as a preferred technology service vendor, and with that, our entry into the Rhode Island market and to a certain degree, the seed for the future "Geek Officecalls" division was planted.

more to come...