A while back we got to work with a friend who owns a mini-call center at night that doubles up as a computer rental during the day.

Our main KRA was the handling of key personnel and maintenance of the equipment. The shop had around twenty or so older model Pentiums so aside from managing the shop we had to keep on schedule preventive maintenance once or twice a month. This was to ensure that all available computers are in tip-top shape.

In addition to this, we made daily audits on sales and had this deposited within the next working day. Operations were running smoothly that we could run and monitor this remotely. One day, our friend, the owner, message me and he was complaining that Weekends sales were either at a minimum or were zero.

Problem with this setup was that he still had two alternating crew with all the electricity and air conditioning running. On the majority of Weekends, he would be at a negative.

Our main problem was that there were very little patrons on weekends. Most of the people who come to use our computers are usually students, that stay in boarding houses in the area. A lot of them were “gamers”.

We put our thinking caps together and thought of how to attract these “gamers” to our store on weekends. And we came up with a promo aptly named “Addict ka ba?” (Are you an addict?).

We normally charged P10/hour of use. We were open 12 hours a day. On a good day, a computer would be earning around P120/day. Multiply that by 20 computers, we had a potential of P2,400 per day.

To attract students to play we reduced their cost to play per day from P120/day to P80 for Saturday and Sunday.

The mechanics were simple. They had to pre-pay the P80 upon entry. They were assigned a computer for the whole day. They cannot do less than 8 hours or they would be charged the regular rate per hour.

Students liked this so much that we were always full. Meaning we had 20 seats paying a sure amount of P80/day, a guaranteed income of P1,600 per Saturday and Sunday, or a weekend total of P3,200.

Our friend was happy we were able to turn around his weekends into income days.