welcome to the secrets of college planning host anthony uva and today we're going to get some insight into computers and what type of computer students should have at the college level my guest today is joshua stone from digital doc and he's the owner of in time before we get into your business what what happened in high school how did you pick rockers university was when did you start thinking about it was a freshman year senior how did it all start that  so when i graduate high school in one thousand six as i mentioned i think i was i was the first year at my high school that had a computer programming class and back then is pascal which nobody learns anymore and we fascinated by it actually i was kind of an oddball in the sense that i had that technical geek side but also i loved to read and i was very avid reader both the science fiction fantasy and that kind of stuff so i ended up at wreckers for really a couple of reasons one is i didn't want to go too far i did want to real university experience which you know workers to the police for that the camps is gorgeous and you live it way from twenty five looking to go into the details on that but if you could think of it as like a technology for communicating across computers disparate computers contra and transferring lots of information and so i did that at the core hill for about seven or eight years and decided at that point now it's going to do my m b a and you know between my work experience and my previous creeds i was able to go to stern which i still think is easily one of the best business schools planets they had a great time there yeah so so how did you go from graduating from rocker's to n y u to where you are today what's the process that you took studying operations management so in the tech world you know those two areas come together really in a couple places one is bending the technology for employees of companies  what i ended up doing was you know for various internet startups running beared data center operations plus the every company needs somebody to manage the employee's technology so they always do that under me so he's ended up doing both  lot of different companies for the next twenty three years and that's where it kind of buried my business i command from my m b a plus my technical expertise just from the from the years of you know to excel on my own ok so so how did how did that come about where you developed digital doc how did that all come about well the last company i worked for in new york it was a global conference think up and i ran the operations for north america and it was anything set up because i was based in new york the headquarters was in atlanta we had done a big acquisition in chicago said huge staff and chicago and then the global parent was headquartered in paris so i personally ended up traveling between atlanta chicago and paris on a rotation that's just kind of like my baseline travel living in a small part in a new york city and it was all just becoming you know kind of difficult to manage i have around twenty fourteen twenty fifteen we started looking to sell the company and ended up selling that company to me and my wife and i decided that point we're going to move out of new york city and so he was searching around what is what is going to be the next good for me and i guess my as i mentioned at the beginning my dad was taught to put or my you know my brothers in on peru so a lot of that in my family made me think of ok let me let me think what kind of a business can i start that is both interesting to me and meets the need of whatever community i had up and and i kind of gravitated towards helping people with their technology needs and there was a little bit be some personal experience  like anybody else i've had awful experiences getting things repaired from the manufacturer you know for third parties and i differ different reasons you know they both kind of fell short of my expectations and i felt like this got to be a better way to do there's got to be a way to run a business profitably in a small community where you're serving their needs or a report of a community and you're a little bit who are customer focused in how you handle the your customers technology needs and some nameless faceless company that you're shipping your device to getting back three weeks later and saying i started looking on a different page tries this that or for that type of service and i came across digital dock technicians because they need to understand the type of customer service i want to write and so you know digital doc feels the same way at the corporate level in all the stores that they operate around the country and that was important to me and then on the sales and marketing side you know they're very fairy everything's about you know we're going to win together we're going to have a fair price is fair you know good quality parts trained technicians we're going to a great job for our customers so they get they get good you know what i can say is i know you know most students at the university level have one of each laptop tablet or they need one of each that that and it's a question i think probably yes and let me explain why the if you're a parent looking to outfit your your child who's going into the first year college i think you need to think of your technology needs in kind of three buckets one a lot of them are online nowadays you know the days from from when i and probably you hear undergrads of lugging around your fifty pounds a book you know some students probably do that and probably need to do that but for a lot of people it's no required and so the technology or to be able to enable the student to have their textbooks or e books plus take notes and highly ok those are important productivity  tasks the second bucket would be what i would call communications though we have productivity second one is communications and that in that area you know students need to communicate need to communicate with each other with their social network from home and with their family and that that's just part of being a social being and living in a community and so it's important for parents to kind of consider ok how does my student communicate w needs and then the third one which you know most people don't want to think about but it's certainly a fact of life is entertainment right technology is or into their entertainment devices when i went to school you know you  your roommate assignments before you went to school and you quit date of the summer ok who's going to create a refrigerator who's going to bring you know the dish rack or whatever and then there's always who's going to be television so that would that was always  big are you going to get a color when you know by the way what you know what is but these days you know there's kids don't watch television necessarily on the big box and they're in their room laptops or is that that function perfectly fine what device makes the most sense and unfortunately as expensive as it is the reality is kids really should have one from each category so you really need a tablet to take notes during class  is kind of a need these days and for something quick that they could bring around just to read a book at site or whatever laptop is you know for more heavy duty work you know you're writing a long report you can't really get to them and i mean you can get  like a keyboard cover for a tablet and have like a full size keyboard but even there it's a little cramped for writing over you know a few hours of reading a long report but you're really going to want a laptop for that and then for electric communication i mean you really need a phone right now so i would think so one of each device for those reasons and then from the entertainment side you know a good sized display on a laptop probably makes sense i don't required in the computer category but most of the kids seem to be getting back books that are probably the most common laptop well that was my next question is there is there any particular model that is better than others or is it because of but say communications majors or things like that they go towards the the mac computer compared to a p c do you see any difference between using a mac using a p c or all the other different devices well i mean even so today macs are considered to be the ideal device for graphic design  publishing and web development that kind of stuff and but i have much your i think that maybe a little bit of a legacy way of looking at it because the all the software that you're using for those applications is available lower level schools so pure in high school in lower those schools are all using google products which are based so as long as your laptop is running a web browser it really looks to see to you whether you're on a mac book or a laptop p c based laptop so i'm not sure it really matters anymore in fact i would say it does and it's kind of like the reasons that people gravitate towards mac books if they're in the graphic  including more damage ok cracked screens are pretty common the nice thing about apple products is wooden there was always prepared because it's really it's a rare case that somebody has done some damage to an apple product and it can't be a product made by a company called ok it's probably an ok product it's probably good value but if you're if you're concerned it's repair you're going to probably find it coming up a little bit short because you're going to have issues around  just the construction of it in the first place is maybe not as solid as you know more recognized brand like apple and then the expertise is sometimes not always there to deal with that specific type of product now how do how do  schools work with you because some schools have their own like i t fix it type place race and some schools don't how do you work with the universities to help the students out certain amount of support for students in terms of software support and they are able to help students get discounts on new products but for hardware repairs generally speaking they either don't offer it or they're just they're very expensive and i'll give you some examples of if you crack the screen on your i phone they don't do that repair at all but it will give you my card and  cracked screen on your apple macbook they might do the repair but they're probably going to be about fifty percent higher than than what i would do it for so they probably wouldn't were free to me but if you did mention that you your price was an issue then in that case they would probably mention that oh there's another location you can take a look at those guys and that's on the universe who also turn we will have an i t department but they won't do all the repairs at a store like mine would  e high school level i work the private schools he generally will ensure the devices you know like i'll give you an example princeton day school all of the students have papers and when they break relationship with the school and during the school year i'm probably beer three or four times a week picking up or dropping off the place and then there's other places like princeton high school way or bunkum or high school where they have a group of students who or each student doing repairs and they those students who are pairs of the school devices in the use me in cases where either they are overloaded and the students can't people people will not go without their phones for more than an hour ok that's even stretching it for some people so we make sure that we have all the parts at all times for any any i phone and almost tablets are a point to people but not as important in my experience generally speaking people can go one or two days without their tablet where they start pulling their hair so we don't have any so obviously we've already been without a tablet so those will take what two days and then to make sense actually from a repair side on tablets because you do want that he said secure when i say there's some technical reasons why that helps but you know for the for the most part it's driven by customers and their tolerance for delay on getting that i expect and then computers are and i guess the third category most people can probably live with that without a computer for maybe three to five days them primarily i would say google is number one for a way number one number two would probably be help and then number three public facebook but then even beyond that there know it's not because i think i might break my phone in two weeks i might have a need for your services one day it's because something happened and you never appear immediately and for that type of for that person to find me the first thing most people are going to do in that there my daughter's high school play i'll be that playbill of sponsoring the my mother my high school football team so i'll do like all the different things that the community that you would write that you might expect so you get more and more involved in the community and it gives you more attention for people to come to you it's very important to me that that i'm at the community is aware of my services infused be as a local person that you know that it's a lot about it and it looks like that everything is pretty much fixed within anywhere from a day to three or four days so people are going to get their devices back pretty rapidly exactly exactly because there's a rare case where a part is only available from overseas for example and something wait a little bit longer but you know that's it's just the world we live in you know the myth of these parts are manufactured to us and so we're coming to the end of our show and i usually ask my guests what advice do you want to give to the parents out there sons and daughters are looking for computers going to college what advice you want to give them assurance the the what i would say is a couple things one is think about when you're going to need a and will never be happy one day you'll need it you need to repair it will break and if you're thinking about it only at that point it's a little too leeks you're going to find that it's way more expensive than you expected and the parts you can take forever to com in you might have trouble finding a facility that can do that type of repair and so i generally advise people to kind of stick with some of the bigger manufacturers like apple h three years from now four years from now five years from now and at a price that's that's that's that's good for you and now the the other thing just will briefly and especially for the younger kids you need to think about parental control and you really need to have some controls around that that will let you either supervise or restrict or at least some help be notified if they're if your child is kind of getting into an area of the that they should write well thank you