The through-line
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 make it sound better all the way to checking a phone’s charging circuit before I’ll quote you a screen. 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
For my first thirteen years, I fixed nothing but Apple. That’s where the precision came from — Apple’s hardware is tight, unforgiving, and it teaches your hands to be exact. Once I had that down cold, I opened up to every brand: 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 — someone with thousands of contacts in their phone 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.