This Wausau teen repairs iPhones. Will he one day be making their replacements?

WAUSAU - The stickers on Logan Fike's laptop tell a story.

This guy, they say, has a lot of interests. There are Scouting stickers because the 18-year-old Wausau East High School senior is one step away from achieving a long-held goal of becoming an Eagle Scout. There's the sticker of an X in a black circle, like the head of a Phillips screw, to represent his lifelong obsession with the way things work and his penchant for taking things apart to find out. There are a couple of stickers paying homage to DECA, a national student organization that aims to prepare leaders and entrepreneurs for the future. Logan is the president of the Wausau East DECA chapter and will compete in an international competition in Florida later this month.

They are all important components of the kind of person Logan is now and the kind of person he plans to be. But three more stickers might get at the heart of his drive. The Repair Manifesto, which outlines an ethos of fixing things; a sticker that says CODE, as in computer programming; and the I Fix It sticker, which is the slogan of a business that he's run since he was in sixth grade, The Wireless Clinic.

The Wireless Clinic recently put Logan in the spotlight. Because of the business, he was one of four teens to compete for a chance to win a $10,000 scholarship in the Junior Achievement of Wisconsin Young Entrepreneur Live Competition. The event was held in February.

Logan did not win, but he and his competitors received a $1,500 prize for being selected, and he was awarded $500 for being selected for the Viewer's Choice Award.

Even though The Wireless Clinic is six years old, Logan and the business are just getting started. He'll be taking the repair business with him to college next school year. He plans to study computer engineering and is leaning toward attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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A cracked phone screen leads to a new business

Logan was about 12 or 13 years old when his older sister's iPhone 6 broke; its screen cracked and "she couldn't hear when she was on a phone call," Logan said. His family found out that repair shops would charge about $200 to get the phone repaired.

"That was more than she paid for the phone," Logan said.

He tagged along to repair shops while the family was getting the quotes, and he'd quiz the workers at those places about what they would do to get the phone running. He learned that the procedure was relatively simple: taking the screen off, transferring some of the parts off the old piece of glass to a new one and then resealing it.

"I'm sure they didn't realize they were telling the competition how to run a business," Logan said.

Logan started researching the process and found videos online that explained the steps. The boy thought he could do it, and got the OK from his parents and sister to try.

"When I sat down to fix the phone, I had a video playing in front of me, kind of guiding me through the process," he said.

When he was done, the phone worked. It cost about $36 to make the repair, he said. And that's when he knew he might be onto something. He printed out some business cards and started handing them out to his friends and teachers at school.

Word of mouth spread and The Wireless Clinic, operated out of Logan's bedroom, wasn't just born, it was thriving.

By the time he was a sophomore in high school, he had fixed his 1,000th phone, and he has calculated that the business has increased in repair volume 14% per year, on average.

"It's been a pretty steady rise, besides for COVID, because not as many people were out and breaking their devices and stuff," he said.

Right now, the business is on a back burner. "School comes first," Logan said. "Always."

Logan estimates that he spends about 10 or so hours a week fixing a few devices. But he plans to ramp up his time devoted to the business this summer, making it a full-time endeavor until he goes off to college.

Starting a business is a bold move for a sixth grader

Logan already had plenty of sales experience by the time he started The Wireless Clinic. His father dabbles in selling items online, and he showed Logan how to do it when he was younger, maybe a fourth grader.

Logan remembers his father taking him to Walmart about that time, and the boy went into the technology section and looked at items that were on clearance, such as cellphone cases. Then he went to a display computer that was connected to the internet and looked up the prices of those items on eBay. He found that if he bought some of the items and resold them online, he could make a profit. He remembers making about $20 the first time he did that.

From that start, he began to buy and sell other items, such as collectible cards, sports items and antique toys. That too became a kind of business for Logan, and it continues to this day. He doesn't spend a great deal of time on it, but he said in the summers he regularly cruises thrift shops and garage sales looking for items that would be an easy flip online.

It all leaves you to wonder where he aims to go with this experience and drive. First off, he said, he'll learn about coding, and he aims to get a job in the tech sector, hoping to glean information in the field while earning a salary. Eventually, he hopes to parlay that knowledge, experience and capital into becoming an entrepreneur.

"My ultimate goal is to own a technology company that researches, designs and manufactures sustainable products. Things that won't break down, won't harm the environment," Logan said. "And if they do break down, they're something that you, as a consumer, are able to fix yourself."

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Features reporter Keith Uhlig is based in Wausau. Contact him at 715-845-0651 or kuhlig@gannett.com. Follow him at @UhligK on Twitter and Instagram or on Facebook.

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This article originally appeared on Wausau Daily Herald: Wausau East student starts business to repair cellphones, other tech