University PC Care taps into new audience

Ashton James considers himself lucky. Even before he was a teenager, his choice of a career essentially was planned. He had a knack for working with computers, and friends and family recognized it.

“I was running myself to death doing all this free work,” James said. “I was like, ‘I need to do this for a living.' I found out at 12 or 13 years old what I wanted to do, and it just hasn't changed yet, and I don't see it changing.

“I feel like everybody gets a gift,” he said. “It was easier for me to see. But everybody gets a gift, and if you can put it to work for you, that's what you need to do because you're going to like it, and you're going to end up being the best at that.”

James has put his talent to work. He and longtime friend Josh Harrison opened University PC Care about three years ago, catering primarily to East Carolina University students. Now they're looking to tap into a more diverse audience with a move to the Convengton Shoppes on Fire Tower Road, giving them not only more room to operate but introducing their name to another part of the Greenville community.

“We're happy about being on this side of town,” James said. “We went from a 200-square-foot operation to a 1,200-square-foot operation. ... It's a really big upgrade from what we had before. We can actually stretch out our arms. If you did that before, you would knock something off the shelves.”

The extra office space enables University PC Care to stock more computers to sell to businesses and individuals, as well as keep older models on hand for repair parts. That's one way of helping customers save, James said.

‘You don't always want to put new parts in a system that they just want to make it another six months,” he said. “So we try to offer them used parts at next to nothing and get them going again.”

Providing a reasonably-priced service was the premise when James and Harrison started repairing computers in a small space inside University Auto Care, which is owned by James' father. James already had plenty of experience working in the computer department at Pitt County Memorial Hospital for nearly seven years, some of that time while he was attending D.H. Conley High School.

He earned a degree in business administration with a concentration in management information systems from ECU.

Harrison attended N.C. State University and Pitt Community College before transferring to ECU, where he received a degree in business administration with concentration in accounting. He is working on a master's of business administration degree.

They have known each other since first grade, as neighbors in Cherry Oaks, students at Conley and roommates at ECU.

“We get along; we don't argue,” James said. “We've kind of got a mutual understanding. It works out great. It seems to at least.”

James said he and Harrison are capable of handling most any PC issue, from programming to repairs of screens, keyboards and power jacks. University PC Care provides some content management systems that can be updated and edited and offers Web hosting, but James added, “we don't really like to call ourselves Web creators necessarily.

“We're a small business aimed toward the home and small business,” James said. “... We're trying to kind of stay small. We don't really get into phone systems, servers and too much of all that. We can always help people out, but we just try not to do a whole bunch of big stuff, keep the customer service up.”

Harrison said service is the key.

“The biggest complaint I hear is customer service,” he said. “We really do try to keep an open mind when we talk to anybody and try to help them out as much as we can.”

That's all James has wanted to do since he was a kid.

“Everybody says you're going to get tired of it ... you're going to get burned out,” he said. “I think we were both good in math. I think it comes down to liking math problems and trying to figure out problems. Every day you've got a different problem; you've got a puzzle to figure out.

“I enjoy coming to work every day,” James said. “I tell my wife, if she doesn't enjoy her job, then she needs to find another job. I don't think you should dread going to work every day. As long as you like it, I don't see why you should go anywhere else or do anything else.”