Sep 16, 1996, 12:00am EDT
Family energizes 44-year-old electric appliance repair shop
When Mike Triolo's father started Lake Electronic Service Inc. in 1952, people bought electronic equipment the way they now buy a car--carefully, with the intention of keeping it a long time.
When the radio or the blender or the phonograph broke, they fixed it. Or better yet, they brought it to Vince Triolo to fix. As the post-World War II economic boom filled people's houses with more appliances, Lake Electronic prospered.
But today we live in a throwaway world when it comes to consumer electronics, said Mike Triolo, now president of Lake Electronic in Colonie.
A television set that used to cost thousands can be had for less than $500. When it breaks, it often is cheaper to replace than to repair. A $20 toaster just isn't worth fixing.
Lake Electronic has responded by dropping the small household appliances that once were its bread and butter and concentrating on bigger things like camcorders, photocopiers and facsimile machines.
"Most people don't want to put in more than half of what they paid for the item," Triolo said. The company charges between $15 and $25 just for an estimate, which eliminates most of the smaller items.
Still, Lake Electronic is known for taking equipment that is odd or hard to fix, if people are willing to pay for it. Turntables, reel-to-reel tape recorders and even 8-track tape players occasionally show up at the shop at 1650 Central Ave., although Triolo said sources for parts are drying up rapidly.
Another big change has been the shift to digital equipment, with the microchip replacing many of the old mechanical parts. For Triolo, this means devoting a lot of time to recruiting and training technicians to keep up with rapid technological changes.
"There are not a lot of new people getting into the field," he said.
Since the beginning, Lake Electronic has been family owned. From the age of 10, Mike Triolo was there, sweeping floors or tinkering alongside the technicians at their benches. A tunnel under Central Avenue provided quick access from Colonie Elementary School to his father's shop across the street.
Vince Triolo died in 1973; the school building now is a community center. But Lake Electronic is in the same building and continues as a family business.
Mike Triolo, now 48, owns the business with his uncle, Tony Mirabile, who retired three years ago but still works there a few days a week. Mirabile's son, Andy Mirabile, is vice president.
Despite the changes in technology and the kinds of things Lake Electronic works on, it still has the look of an old-fashioned repair shop. Technicians work at individual benches with tools and parts spread out before them, taking things apart and putting them together.
Lake Electronic's 20 technicians work in groups, specializing in one kind of equipment. Three people work only on videocassette recorders and camcorders; another five do nothing but stereo systems or televisions. One technician handles car stereos (a relatively new service); another does air conditioners.
Much of the 8,300-square-foot building is used to store pieces that are coming in or are ready to be picked up. One closet-sized room is full of vacuum cleaners; another is devoted to equipment that is boxed and ready to be shipped to customers.
Eighty percent of Lake Electronic's business comes from walk-in customers--about 200 a day, Triolo said.
In a recent remodeling of the lobby, the company installed a number system for customers, like a supermarket deli. This removes some of the anxiety of waiting, Triolo said, and allows customers to browse over the electronic equipment for sale, mostly items that other customers never picked up.
There often is a wait to get service at the counters, even when they are all staffed. It takes time for people to explain what went wrong with their television or microwave or dehumidifier, Triolo said. And then there are the quirky requests.
People have brought in metal detectors for repair, portable scoreboards, even a pitching machine, he said.
Recently a customer said he needed four Toshiba coffee makers, the kind that grind whole beans and brew the coffee all in one step. Toshiba had discontinued the model and no longer had the parts, but Lake Electronic had enough parts lying around to put together a single coffee maker, Triolo said. (There weren't enough parts for four.)
Altogether, the company repairs between 450 and 500 units a week, Triolo said. Business is slightly better so far this year than in 1995, which he described as "awful." Lake Electronic grossed about $1.9 million last year, down from well over $2 million the year before.
Triolo blamed the soft economy in general and state government staff reductions in particular for a weak 1995. People put off getting equipment fixed if the home budget is tight, he said.
"If you have four TVs in your house and one goes down, you can live without it," he said.
Getting parts for equipment has become faster and easier than 30 years ago, when Triolo started working full time at his father's shop. But that also has meant that customers expect quicker turnaround. "People really want stuff back fast," he said.
Triolo said he is considering adding computer repair to Lake Electronic's services, by becoming part of the service network for Sony Corp.'s new personal computers.
Computers would be a big departure for Lake Electronic. Most of what the company does is still based on finding the bad component of a piece of equipment and replacing it. A lot of computer repair, on the other hand, is done by replacing whole circuit boards when something goes wrong.
Such a shift would require a lot of retraining of technicians, but many in the fast-changing electronics repair business, including Triolo, see this as necessary.
"We have to change with the times or get left behind," he said.
The training schools, too, constantly are updating their courses to graduate people who are marketable in the changing workplace.
"We view the traditional bench technician as becoming obsolete," said Helena Powers, administrative manager at Spencer Business and Technical Institute, a technical training school in Schenectady.
"The majority of items run on microchips. As the price of chips comes down, it is definitely cheaper to just replace them than to hire someone to diagnose the problem and spend the hours to repair something," she said.
But Spencer still teaches "the basics," said August Bicknese, an electronics instructor. "As long as people have TVs and VCRs, there will be a need for bench technicians."
But the school is putting more emphasis on data communications, which Bicknese said is the wave of the future in electronics. He recently added courses on communications protocol and fiber optics, noting that they have wide applications.
"My goal is to get people out there who are marketable, who can work anywhere from the A&P to NASA," he said.
Ralph Folger, director of research and development for a NYNEX Corp.-sponsored training program at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, said fewer people are going from the school into the kind of technical bench work that Lake Electronic traditionally has offered.
"Vocational training programs used to produce a lot who would go directly into the work force," said Folger, who formerly chaired HVCC's electrical engineering technology department. Some still go out as technicians at the end of HVCC's two-year program, but more are going on to graduate programs at other schools, he said.
HVCC, too, has adjusted its curriculum to meet the advances in technology. Folger said the program has added an introduction to computer technology course, reflecting the increased reliance on personal computers in consumer electronics, and the concurrent shift from analog to digital technology.
Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/1996/09/16/smallb1.html?page=all
