Where it started
I've been taking things apart since I was a kid. I'd open up my boom box or the TV in my bedroom convinced I could make them sound or look better. My dad and my grandfather were both mechanical, and the erector set my dad gave me planted the whole thing, the curiosity about how something is actually built.
It never stopped. Remote-control cars, building computers, even customizing my pager to different colors. I've always been a do-it-yourself guy. There's a straight line from opening that boom box to every repair I do now. Same instinct, thirty years apart.
How I got into this
I spent about fourteen years in restaurants and nightclubs. I was burnt out, I didn't have a college degree, and I was genuinely searching for what was next.
The turn happened by accident. On Super Bowl Sunday, on a touchdown, my phone flew out of my hand in a bar and shattered, an iPhone 4. Instead of just replacing the screen, I ordered the parts and rebuilt it in all chrome. Someone I was learning from at the time saw it and showed me I could pull a phone apart and put it back together. That person turned out to be running a scam, and honestly, watching how he treated people taught me just as much as the repairs did. It showed me exactly the kind of shop I never wanted to run.
So I started small. I'd spot a cracked phone on a table while I was waiting on it and ask if they wanted it fixed, back then Apple didn't even fix phones, and people were locked into two-year contracts with no upgrade. I ordered parts, ran an ad on Craigslist, fixed a few here and there. Then one day I took the last six or eight hundred dollars I had, bought parts in bulk, and flipped them in about a week, and made more than I was making on a full shift waiting tables. I kept waiting tables for a while, but I could see it. I tapered off, ran it from home for six and a half years, then moved into the Sepulveda office eight years ago. Fifteen years later, here I am.
Why Apple made me good at everything else
Apple's hardware is tight and unforgiving, it teaches your hands to be exact. That precision is what I brought to every brand I work on now: Samsung, Google, Motorola, laptops, tablets, consoles, watches.
Apple isn't what I am, it's where I learned to be this good. And it's why I can go just as deep on everything else.
The repair I still run the shop on
Early on, when I was living repair to repair, I replaced a battery for a customer (a genuinely famous one), someone with thousands of contacts in their phone (contacts just as famous) and, back before iCloud, no backup anywhere. I made a mistake: I accidentally knocked loose a connector on the board, and at that point in my career it was beyond me to fix.
But I figured out that if I pressed down hard in exactly the right spot, the phone would transfer its contacts to a computer, and the second I moved even slightly, it stopped and started over. So I sat there for hours, my thumb pinned to that phone, restarting every time it dropped, until every single number was saved. Then I told them I was buying them a new phone, out of money I genuinely didn't have at the time.
That's the lesson I still run the shop on. When you make a mistake, you own it, and you make it right, whatever it costs.