Keeping customers, phones connected

GOOD RECEPTION: Cellular Medic was born in 2009 in Massachusetts, expanding to a second shop on Atwells Avenue in Providence in March. Pictured above are co-owners Eli Acevedo, left, and Derek Coelho with customer Raylah Philip. / PBN FILE PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
GOOD RECEPTION: Cellular Medic was born in 2009 in Massachusetts, expanding to a second shop on Atwells Avenue in Providence in March. Pictured above are co-owners Eli Acevedo, left, and Derek Coelho with customer Raylah Philip. / PBN FILE PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

One week after the iPhone 5s came out, the Cellular Medic shop on Atwell’s Avenue in Providence had four calls about repairing the new Apple phone.
“People dropped them,” said owner Derek Coelho, whose goal is to minimize that potentially nerve-wracking time of being disconnected from a smartphone. “Our goal is to get people in and out in an hour,” said Coelho.
Timing is everything at Cellular Medic – more exactly, part of everything that represents traditional measures of good business.
“We provide fair, honest, reliable and fast service. We’re the type of business that if we repair your phone today and you have a problem six months down the road, if you’re in the system with the same phone, we’ll give you a discount because you’re a repeat customer,” said Coelho.
“We get a lot of students. They break their phones,” Coelho said. “We have a lot of faculty come in, especially from Johnson & Wales.”
Public servants, including police officers and firefighters, also get discounts at Cellular Medic. That could be a tribute to Coelho’s first intended career – when he went to Bridgewater State University, he planned to be a police officer. Many members of family are police officers and it seemed like his natural path.
Then he got married and had a child. Having a child made coming home every evening jump to the top of his priority list.
Coelho worked in construction for 10 years, until the company he was working for downsized in 2009.
“I wanted to do more with my life, but I wasn’t sure what it was,” said Coelho. “So I stayed home for six months to figure out what I wanted to do.”
Not knowing it would be a move that defined his career path, Coelho bought an iPhone off Craigslist. He had a problem with it, so he went back onto Craigslist to find someone to repair it.
“I went to the guy’s house on a Friday night and he replaced the battery and the speakers,” said Coelho. “I was in and out in 10 minutes and he charged me $80. I noticed there were four other people in his kitchen waiting to get their phones fixed.”
Suddenly, a bolt of entrepreneurial lightning struck.
“I want to do that,” Coelho thought. So it was back to Craigslist. He bought an another iPhone that needed repair, so he could see if he could fix it.
“I was successful. A few years and two stores later, here I am,” said Coelho, who’s had no formal training in electronics. He could always repair motorcycles, but that was about it.
“I can’t fix anything inside my house without breaking something,” said Coelho. “But when it comes to opening an iPhone or a computer, I understand how to take things apart, figure out what’s wrong with them and put them back together.”
He combined the talent he discovered for electronics with a bit of informal market research. He saw that consumers often have unappealing choices when they break a phone. Send it off for repair or be pushed into buying a new phone because they’re locked into a contract – and those new phones come with price tags in the hundreds of dollars. He didn’t see a good choice.
“I created this business to fill that void,” said Coelho, who is 40 years old and lives in Brockton, Mass. He launched the first Cellular Medic shop in 2009 in Stoughton, Mass.
“I started the business with $2,000 out of my pocket,” said Coelho.
He later moved the shop to Randolph, Mass., and business was pretty steady repairing iPhones, iPads and computers.
Coelho noticed a common element among many of his customers – they came from Rhode Island.
At first, he was a one-man-shop, but as the business grew, he added employees and took on a partner, Eli Acevedo, who’s from Attleboro.
“So it just made sense to open a shop in Providence,” said Coelho. The Atwells Avenue shop opened in March and business has been good. There’s a steady stream of items that need repair, from all brands of old cellphones to students’ computers that crash the day before a project is due.
Employment is up to a total of three full-time positions and one part-time worker for the two shops.
“We’re considering a third location in Framingham or Boston,” said Coelho, who is deepening his roots into what’s proven to be a promising and fulfilling career: “I like the challenge of figuring out a new device.” •COMPANY PROFILE
Cellular Medic
OWNERS: Derek Coelho and Eli Acevedo
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Cellphone and computer repair
LOCATION: 123 Atwells Ave., Providence and 1101 North Main St., Randolph, Mass.
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 2009 in Massachusetts and March 2013 in Providence
EMPLOYEES: 3 full time and 1 part time
ANNUAL SALES: WND

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