He’s a marketer without peer in his trade, though the doctor hangs no shingle outside his Yonkers office. His office occupies an unremarkable two-story brick building amid the recycling and salvage yards and auto and machine shops that line Saw Mill River Road.
The doctor is in, wearing a black beret and loose hanging green shirt as he fields messages from a busy office staff of women. His white physician’s lab coat and stethoscope hang from a hook on his office door: branding at rest. The phone on his desk rings repeatedly. He has given his cellphone to his daughter in the outer office to answer more urgent calls while he talks to us.
“It’s like this every day,” says Anthony Attanasio hanging up the phone, “always putting out fires.”
Anthony Attanasio. Photo by John Golden
One of his technicians who makes house calls forgot to bring a repair part to a job on an ailing apartment appliance in the Bronx. Another employee will have to be dispatched from Yonkers to deliver it. Attanasio, aka The Appliance Doctor, keeps his professional cool, although the repairman’s time-and-money-costing mental lapse could make a boss blow a gasket.
If Attanasio seems familiar, you might have seen him on one or more of the 130 videos on YouTube that he’s shot — with his own purchased equipment, after taking a course on video production — for his 35-year-old business. Or maybe you caught one of his 8-minute shows that previously was on cable television. “Hi, my name is Anthony Attanasio,” the guy dressed like a surgeon at a desk tells his viewers, “and I am the chief of staff at the Appliance Doctor.”
It’s a mobile healing practice that treats household appliances — washers, dryers, microwave ovens, stoves, dishwashers, refrigerators — at homes in Manhattan, the Bronx and Westchester. From a fleet of 12 company trucks — their side panels display a fetching caricature of Attanasio in Appliance Doctor smock applying a stethoscope to a feverish refrigerator — its repair technicians service more than 450 apartment and commercial buildings for 45 management firms. Columbia University calls on the Appliance Doctor when appliances go haywire in student dorms.
New York City, that pricey haven for apartment dwellers, provides 65 percent of his company’s repair business, Attanasio says. “I’ve got one landlord that has 100 buildings. Another has 140.” One is Stanley Wasserman, the metro New York real estate mogul whose family-run business is headquartered in New Rochelle.
“It’s a little quiet today,” says the 57-year-old Yonkers native, “but we have 10 full-time guys on and four part-time” making house calls. “Yesterday we did 78” — sick appliances, that is — “and the day before, 77. Today we’re doing 69.”
Most are high-end patients bearing reputable family names like Bosch, Miele, Thermador, Dacor, Asko — manufacturers for which Appliance Doctor is an authorized factory service center. “That has really put us over the top,” says Attanasio, the company’s sole owner and president.
“We’re in an industry where jobs are 2, 3, 400 dollars. That was the problem 15 years ago,” when his company was servicing cheaply sold appliances for which the repair bill could be more than the customer’s initial purchase price. That led Attanasio to go after the authorized factory service business on the high end.
Now his company is replacing parts on better machines on $500 and $600 jobs. “People don’t bat an eye because for that $600, we’re working on a $6,000 stove,” he says.
Attanasio got his start in the repair trade on a more modest line of appliances. Graduating from high school in Yonkers, “I was an electrician for about a year and didn’t like it,” he tells us. His mother recommended air conditioning school, and the dutiful son enrolled at Technical Career Institutes in Manhattan. “I got a job at Sears the day I graduated.”
After 2½ years, “I decided I could take care of the consumer better on my own than what Sears was doing,” says Attanasio. He quit his corporate job shortly after a maddened Bronx resident, frustrated by the slow response from Sears to his call for service on his service contract, “went for the knife drawer” with seeming intent to attack his visiting repairman. Attanasio thought it prudent to flee the apartment without his toolbox and get police backup to retrieve it.
He was 22 when he began advertising his one-man appliance repair business in Pennysaver. He picked up as a client a landlord with about 30 buildings in Queens and the Bronx. After six months in business, Attanasio bought his first office building in downtown Yonkers, where his company stayed for 28 years.
Two decades passed before the business owner had a revelation that would send him shopping for a doctor’s smock, a good caricaturist and video training and equipment. It’s a revelation that, 15 years later, has the Appliance Doctor spending $12,000 to $13,000 a month on marketing for his 25-employee company.
“About 15 years ago, I realized that for me to make this business grow, I had to one, take off this technical repair pouch and be more of a manager. And number two, I’m in marketing. I’m not really in the appliance repair business.”
“I was going to be the leader … I realized I was in the marketing business and the thing I’m marketing is appliance repair.”
“There’s a lot of one- or two-man companies” competing for repair jobs in this area, he says. “Some of them are really good. I decided I was going to be a little bigger than that. I don’t know why — you get more headaches.”
“The days of ‘Hey, I’m taking out a $5,000-a-month ad in the Yellow Pages, those days are over,” he says. “I don’t advertise to get a job, I advertise to get a customer. You gotta look at long-term value for customers. … It’s our job as businesses to make sure that the consumer remembers us by touching them once, twice a year.”
With printed brochures and monthly newsletters, individually customized calendars, cookie drop-offs at appliance retailers, regular thank-you notes, $20 gas cards, occasional price breaks on repairs and incentives for customer referrals, Attanasio has developed and nurtures a wide network of business relationships with retail stores in New York City, building superintendents and repair customers. He belongs to three clubs in the city for resident managers, as building supes have come to be called.
His myriad marketing efforts are paying off. The company is getting about 200 referrals a month. “We hit $2.5 million last year in gross revenue,” he says.
“We’ve always made money. I’ve always had my finger on the pulse because I’m a workaholic. I work three hours after work at home. I’m always looking for that next idea that can get me into somebody’s house.”
“This is the easy part,” the Appliance Doctor says as we talk about the business he built and loves while he tries to ignore his ringing phone. “As soon as you leave, I’ll have 13 things to take care of here.”
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