Keith Gillis owes a lot to the customers of his Truro, N.S. computer store. Earlier this month they helped save it from being burned down.
“It was a scary experience,” Gillis, owner of G & G Computers, recalled this week from a temporary store a block away from the partly-charred remains of his original location.
It began as a Saturday “LAN party” for computer gamers in a building up the street from G & G’s Prince Street location, which attracted about 20 high school and university students who live in Truro, a town of 40,000 people.
About 5:30 p.m. Gillis and store manager Mike McGuire decided a few more PCs were needed, so they began walking towards the store, one of several in a two-storey L-shaped corner building with second floor apartments.
Then they saw the smoke. Apparently a pan of grease ignited while a tenant in the unit above theirs was cooking, which spilled and sparked a fire.
“We ran up to the building and started pulling things out,” said Gillis. Word got back to the party and within minutes people were driving up with pickups to help salvage what they could.
Gillis was stunned at the thought he could lose the business he’d patiently built up over four years ago when, as a St. Francis Xavier University computer science student, he decided to open a computer store of his own.
Catering at first to gamers who wanted “crazy machines,” as McGuire put it, the business grew from first-year sales of $20,000 to a staff of four helping bring in revenues last year of over $900,000 from building computers for consumers, servers for business and repairs.
“All told we were in there for 40 minutes pulling things out, saving as much as we could,” said McGuire. “I just wanted to save my business,” said Gillis.
He estimated there was about $80,000 worth of inventory and customer equipment in the store, but thanks to the help perhaps as much as $70,000 worth of it as well as valuable business papers were saved.
The upstairs tenant suffered burns and had to be airlifted to a hospital and other residents suffered smoke damage. But there was no way G & G Computers could return to its space. The back half of the building was badly burned.
Fortunately, a person Gillis knew had an empty store available and the Tuesday after the fire he was back in business, although under strained circumstances. Computer repairs were being done on several coffee tables until last weekend, when Gillis’ father helped build a proper workbench.
But the temporary location isn’t on a main street, which, along with the assumption of locals that the store was out of business has hurt walk-in traffic. “We were putting through $3,000 to $4,000 a day,” said Gillis. “Now we’re getting anywhere between $300 and $400.”
The business has insurance coverage, but he has yet to see how much he’s lost and how much will be reimbursed.
Two other area computer stores – one of which is closing – have offered to help. An official at Eurocom Corp., one of G & G’s laptop vendors, has also sent out an e-mail urging colleagues to help out by sending the store any spare promotional material, from posters to pens. But Gillis — whose mother helps with the books — and his staff will try to survive by working long hours and doing some advertising.
As for the group that helped save the business, McGuire said he and Gillis are thinking of ways to thank them.
“I’ve never experienced something that bad before,” said Gillis, who is single. “Once we get through the insurance and figure out what’s going on there and try to move to a more central location” things will be better, he hopes.
Meanwhile the plan is to “just keep on truckin.’”