Tech Help for Seniors: A Business Any Patient Teen Can Start

What you actually do

You sit next to an older person with their phone or tablet and fix the thing that's been bothering them. Usually it's small. The text is too tiny. They can't find the photos their daughter sent. The video call app asks for a password nobody remembers. You fix it, you write the steps down in big letters on a card, and you leave the card by the phone.

The job isn't really the fixing. It's the patience, and the fact that you'll explain it four times without sighing. Adults in their lives often can't manage the fourth time. You can, and that's worth paying for.

What it costs to start

There is nothing to buy. You need your own patience, a pad of paper, a thick marker for the big-letter cards, and a phone so a parent can reach you.

If you want to be organised, keep a small notebook with a page per customer. Write what you fixed and what they'll probably ask next. That notebook is the reason a customer calls you instead of their daughter in Calgary.

Find your first customer this week

Start with people who already know your family.

1. Ask your parents which of their friends or relatives has a parent who struggles with their phone. There will be at least one. Ask if you can help them for an hour, with your parent along the first time.
2. Do the hour. Fix two or three things, write the cards, and ask what else has been bugging them. That list is your next three visits.
3. Then go to the front desk at a seniors' centre, a library or a place of worship near you, with a parent, and ask if they'd put up a note. "Student, 14, helps with phones and tablets. $15 an hour. Comes to you or meets at the library." Places like that get asked for exactly this all the time and have nobody to send.

What to charge

By the hour, and keep it simple. $15 an hour is a fair place to start. Some customers will want a regular visit, once a month, to keep things running and to have someone to ask. That's the best kind of customer, so offer it: "Twenty dollars a month and I'll come by for an hour whenever you need."

Four regulars at $20 a month is $80 a month for four hours of work. Two extra visits a month at $15 takes it past $100. Small, steady and it grows by word of mouth, because there is nothing a group of retired friends talks about more than the kid who fixed the phone.

Ask around before you settle on a number. A small town and a big city will give you different answers.

Rules and staying safe

Read this with a parent. It matters more here than for most ideas, because you're handling other people's private things.

• Never ask for, write down or keep anyone's passwords, banking details or PIN. If they need to type a password, look away while they do it. If they can't remember it, help them reset it, and let them choose the new one.
• Don't touch anything to do with banking or money apps. If that's what they need help with, say it should be their bank or their family, and mean it.
• Visit with a parent the first time, and only visit people your family or a centre has connected you with. Meeting at a library is a good default.
• Your parent should know where you are and when you'll be done.
• Be honest when something is beyond you. "I don't know, but I know how to find out" is a fine answer.
• Take payment in cash, or by e-transfer to a parent's account.

What Jacob would do

Jacob is 15 and lives in Toronto, in a building full of people who've lived there for thirty years. He wouldn't need a poster. He'd need to help one person on his floor and let her tell the others. He knows that the real product isn't the fixed phone. It's the video call with the grandchildren in Vancouver that now happens every Sunday.

He'd keep a card for each customer with what he set up and the three things they always forget. Then when one of them calls in a panic, he can talk them through it from school in two minutes. That's the difference between a one-time favour and a business.

When it stops being fun

The same question for the fifth time. A phone so old that the app you need won't run. A customer who wants to talk for an hour about their grandson before you can touch the tablet. A Saturday when you'd rather be anywhere else.

The last one isn't a problem. That hour of talking is part of what they're paying for, and if you can see that, you'll be better at this than any tech support line. If you can't, that's fine too. Pick a different idea from the list.