For 19-year-old Joe Natan, entrepreneurship had humble beginnings in the hallways of Great Neck North High School, where a broken iPhone and hours of trial and error led to a business fixing smartphones for friends and classmates.

Now Natan’s repair shop, Manhattan iPhone Repair, has opened a midtown Manhattan office, where boxes of iPhone parts sit on desks as Natan and another technician fix up to 40 devices per day for individuals and wholesale customers.

“I basically figured out how to do an iPhone. Once that happened I started doing it for friends – it got out to kids in high school,” Natan said. “Slowly I started doing repairs here and repairs there – I started learning how to do home buttons, lock buttons, back light, whatever it is – all the little tiny parts in the phone.”

Natan, who is studying digital marketing at Queens College, said the seed for the business was planted when he learned to fix his broken phone rather than pay another student to do the repair.

“I told my parents I broke my phone, I’m going to have to pay the kid 100 bucks. They were like, do it yourself. If not you don’t have a phone,” Natan said.

That first repair took four and a half hours of tutorial videos and experimentation. Now, Natan said, fixing a phone typically takes about 12 minutes.

Early word of mouth promotion in Great Neck’s Persian community helped the business grow quickly in its early months, and soon Natan was working weekends at a Manhattan office where his brother Avi runs his own business.

The business grew through personal recommendations and with marketing expertise provided by his brother, and Manhattan iPhone Repair expanded to its own office space several months ago.

“Once it started to take off we didn’t have much room,” Natan said, as orders for parts got larger and business intensified. Natan moved into a suite downstairs from his brothers business and hired a technician, and the business now services both individuals and businesses who purchase broken phones and send them to Natan for repair.

“If a previous customer wants to sell a phone that’s broken, they’ll send it up here, we’ll fix it up and give it to them,” Natan said.

Manhattan iPhone Repair has built up a positive web presence, with more than two dozen mostly laudatory reviews on Google and Yelp. But Natan has greater ambitions for the enterprise.

“Basically what we’re doing is trying to expand all over,” Natan said.

He said he has planned trips to California and Miami to scout out new markets, as well as the opening of an uptown Manhattan location.

It’s all part of a bigger plan, Natan said – both for the business and himself.

“Once I start making a profit there, you start taking the profit from three companies and then move to another populated locations,” Natan said. “I don’t plan on just staying in Manhattan for the rest of my life.”