A small operation, on purpose

Who we are

Why a business this size exists at all

I'm Travis. Refit Computing is me, a workbench in Lake County, and a growing pile of other people's retired computers.

The idea came from noticing the same thing over and over: business computers get retired on a schedule, not because they stop working. A law firm cycles its laptops at four years. A dental office replaces the front-desk machines when the practice software updates. The hardware coming out is usually fine — a business-class Dell or HP built to survive being carried around by someone who didn't buy it.

But almost none of it gets a second life, and the reason isn't money. It's that nobody in the office wants to be the person who decides. There might be client files on it. Somebody heard you can't just throw computers in the dumpster. It's not anyone's actual job. So the machines go in a closet, and two years later they go in the dumpster anyway, with the drives still in them.

Meanwhile the companies built to handle this properly are built for scale — fifty devices, multiple sites, an account manager. If you have eight laptops, you're not really their customer, and it's not worth their truck. That's the gap this business lives in. I'm small enough that eight laptops is a good day, and close enough that driving to Painesville on a Thursday is nothing.

How I work

• I answer my own phone. No queue, no ticket number, no account manager. If you call during the day, you get me.
• The data is handled first, not last. Drives come out and go into the sanitization queue before a machine is cleaned, tested, or valued. Each one is logged by serial number and you get that documentation whether you ask for it or not.
• I tell you when I can't help. If something on your list is outside what I take, or your compliance requirements genuinely need a certified vendor, I'll say so and point you somewhere useful. It costs me nothing to be straight with you, and I'd rather be the person you call next time.
• I show up when I said I would. Which sounds like a low bar until you've waited on a contractor.

The part I actually enjoy is the bench work — figuring out whether a machine needs a $22 drive or is only worth its screen and palmrest, and getting a good laptop back into service instead of into a landfill. The pickup side exists because that's where the machines come from, and because the alternative for most offices around here is worse.