Photo by Jon Anderson.
Kelly McMahan opened the CPR Cell Phone Repair shop in the Sam’s Club Plaza in June, and now he’s planning to open four more in the Birmingham-Hoover metro area.
With surveys indicating about one-third of U.S. adults break their smartphone screen in a given year, it’s easy to see why Kelly McMahan decided to open a new CPR Cell Phone Repair business in Hoover.
McMahan, a 30-year-old entrepreneur who already ran two other businesses, opened the cellphone repair shop in the Sam’s Club Plaza along John Hawkins Parkway in June. And now he’s planning to open four more in the Birmingham area.
McMahan said he had a friend who owned a CPR Cell Phone Repair shop in the Atlanta area, so he did some research, crunched some numbers and decided to give it a go. “The investment, I thought, was minimal for the return.”
He knew he wanted to get into franchising, and he didn’t want to be in the food business, he said. McMahan found the cellphone repair business model much more appealing. “Everybody has a cellphone. Everybody needs it,” he said.
He liked the CPR Cell Phone Repair name because it shows up high in Google searches, he said. And he liked the fact that there were not any CPR Cell Phone Repair franchises already in the Birmingham area.
His 1,200-square-foot store in Hoover is the first of five CPR Cell Phone Repair shops he plans to open in the Birmingham area. He hopes to get moving on opening a second store in Trussville in January, and other stores are planned for Bessemer and Chelsea, he said. He had not yet identified a location for the fifth store.
“I was just making sure the first one was going to work,” he said.
CPR Cell Phone Repair offers same-day repairs on all cellular devices, computers, tablets, gaming consoles and drones. Most phone repairs can be done within an hour, McMahan said. The company also sells phones, cases, chargers and audio products such as headphones.
Most of the repairs done are to LCD screens. The company does some repairs to internal circuit boards, but most of the time, it’s cheaper to buy a new phone than to repair the circuit board, McMahan said. Repairs on Apple products typically cost $100 to $150, while repairs on Samsung phones typically run $170 to $400, he said. The Samsung phones are less durable and much more expensive, he said.
Photo by Jon Anderson.
Cell phone technicians Mona Amin and Kelvin Johnson repair phones.
Contrary to popular belief, his repair shop is not in competition with the Verizon and AT&T stores, he said. “We send people to them, and they send people to us,” he said.
CPR Cell Phone Repair does work with insurance carriers for phone repairs, but sometimes the claims process can be difficult, McMahan said.
He formerly worked as a fitness club concierge and went to a community college in Atlanta before coming to the Birmingham area in 2012 and finished up his degree work at Samford University, where he graduated in 2014.
He worked as a personal trainer at the Vestavia Hills Country Club for a while and then started his Anywhere Fitness business, which provides in-home personal training services and fitness evaluations and classes for apartment complexes and companies.
He used the profits from Anywhere Fitness to start a real estate investment firm called Multifamily Matters, which invests in multifamily properties in the Birmingham area, and then he used the profits from Multifamily Matters to start his CPR Cell Phone Repair franchise.
He and his wife, Grace, have lived in the Green Valley community in Hoover for about three years.
