Wetherill: It was me, David, Eddie and Carlos.Īdams: Didn’t you get bored doing the same repairs over and over? Wetherill: It was $18,000 in the first month and $28,000 in the second month. We did some pay-per-click, we made a Google Places page.Īdams: What was your revenue in the beginning? Wetherill: We barely did any advertising. Wetherill: People wanted to get their phones back the same day. That’s when the light bulb went off.Īdams: Why did the store do so much better than the online business? Wetherill: The second month the store was open, it eclipsed the website’s sales. The rent was $800 a month and we hung the drywall, we put the floors in. Wetherill: In a not-so-nice part of town. He’s like, I’ll put up the money for the store, and he did. You’ve got to open a store and have people come to you. Wetherill: A friend of mine, Eddie Trujillo, came over and said, you’re driving yourselves crazy driving everywhere. It only took us 10 minute to fix a phone and we were out.Īdams: How did you make the leap from Panera to your own store? Wetherill: We moved the business from my bedroom to my living room and then we started meeting people at Panera and fixing phones there.Īdams: Panera didn’t mind you using it as your repair shop? At that point we were only fixing screens. Subscribe Now: Forbes Entrepreneurs & Small Business NewslettersĪll the trials and triumphs of building a business – delivered to your inbox. Me and my friend David Reiff, who had a good internship at Lockheed Martin, were convinced that we didn’t want to work in a cubicle for the rest of our lives. I took a job doing database design for outsourcing company Aeon Hewitt. I was a staff accountant for six months and decided it wasn’t for me. Justin Wetherill: I was 21 and I had graduated from the University of Central Florida, where I went to school for accounting. Susan Adams: What were you doing when you started uBreakiFix? In this interview, which has been edited and condensed, Wetherill, now 29, explains how he grew uBreakiFix to 262 stores in 25 states, Canada and Trinidad and Tobago with expected systemwide store sales of $98 million in 2016 (corporate revenue should exceed $52 million). When Wetherill decided to turn uBreakiFix into a franchise operation in 2012, he offered extraordinarily generous terms to store managers who wanted to become owners, charging them only one month’s worth of sales and financing the transaction at 0%. Within three years, the company had 47 stores and $27 million in revenue. They then realized customers wanted same-day service and opened a low-rent brick-and-mortar store. He first teamed up with a buddy and ran a mail-in repair operation. Trained as an accountant, he taught himself to fix phones after he dropped his iPhone and smashed the screen. In 2009, Justin Wetherill cofounded uBreakiFix, a cell phone repair service, out of his bedroom in Orlando, FLA.
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