Believe it or not, 21-year-old Taylor Hooks, the sole employee of the Bend refurbished cell phone store TechXchange, is not obsessed with her Android smart phone.

“This is kind of funny, but I’m not a cell phone person, meaning, like, I don’t really have to have my cell phone by my side,” Hooks said. “I’m not texting 24/7. But I understand cell phones really well. I’m kind of a nerd that way. But … I’m not passionate about my cell phone.”

A native of Burien, Wash., she obtained her first cell phone when she was 13.

Her professional affiliation with the technology came years later, after her mother, Lisa Perra, who had been general manager of the Bend GetWireless! store, an authorized T-Mobile dealer, established a separate operation just for used phones inside the shop in late 2007 or early 2008. The GetWireless! store closed soon thereafter, and Perra put the used-phone business on hold, her daughter said.

In 2009, when Hooks was 19, she saw her mother not doing anything with the business.

“I really just didn’t want to work for anybody else, and I didn’t want to work in just a folding-clothes type of situation or, you know, working in a restaurant, that kind of thing, so, I said, ‘I have a couple of options,’ ” Hooks said.

She remembers telling her mother, “If you’re not going to do anything with it, I’ll take it over.”

The mother and daughter started a miniature TechXchange operation out of their Bend garage.

In May 2009, Hooks opened a 100-square-foot store near the corner of East Third Street and Greenwood Avenue in Bend. The following year, with more and more sales coming in, she found a bigger spot across the street, a converted house, and she still runs the business there.

Used and refurbished cell phones tied to various service providers hang on the wall, as do accessories.

Hooks answered several of The Bulletin’s questions about the business.

Q: What goes into running this business? What knowledge do you tap on a daily basis?

A: I do everything, so the knowledge is pretty much multitasking, multitasking, multitasking, and learning how to balance your time.

Q: What providers’ phones do you carry?

A: We just deal with the major carriers — Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, US Cellular. Those are the large ones in our area.

Q: Are you planning to open other TechXchanges?

A: Yeah, definitely in the future. We’re going to work on opening our online store to sell everywhere online, and then we hope to open physical locations in, like, Eugene, Portland.

Q: Do you have any idea when?

A: No idea when. Not right now. Hoping within the next couple of years.

Q: Do you envision doing this for the rest of your life?

A: I love owning my own business. I don’t necessarily know if I would be in TechXchange for the remainder of my career. What I do love is marketing. And so I’d love to do like marketing/consulting-firm stuff.

Q: Do you do anything on the side?

A: I do not. This is my full-time gig.

Q: Have you seen any other cities having this kind of store?

A: A lot of places just do, like, repairs. There are repair places in larger places. I believe there are places that do sell some used cell phones. A lot of times the buildings are not really in nice areas, and they’re kind of pawnshoppy, I guess. This is what I’ve seen. So our goal is just to kind of create, like, another Verizon, except we sell used cell phones.

Q: How have you raised the money to expand?

A: It was, like, grass-roots. It’s really just been growing from itself. I mean, we only had a few phones when we were in the garage, so you would buy your own couple of cell phones, and then you’d sell those, and you’d use that money to buy more. And it’s eventually just grown into this.