you can pay me now....

[Wimblees@aol.com]

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Dear CAUT Freinds. 

First of all, again, thank you Don McKechnie for organizing the CAUT 
symposium. I learned a great deal. It was also great to meet some of you for 
the first time. 

There were many subject discussed and some very interesting concerns raised. 
One of them is the economic impact of the formula we have been working on. 
Although it is great to be able to figure out how many techs are needed to 
maintain an inventory in a school, we now need to take this to the next 
level, and figure out what will this mean to an administration. I think it 
was mentioned several times, that what administrators want to know is, how 
much is it going to cost, and what will be the financial benefit to the 
school, if another tech is hired, or if a full time tech is hired. With that 
in mind, there are some questions we need to discuss. 

"You can pay me now, or you can pay me later." Know all know the Fram Oil 
commercial. It advocates changing your oil filter every 3000 miles. Not doing 
so will result in having to pay to replace your engine. This, I think, is the 
scenario we need to pose to our administrators. 

We have spent a lot of time creating a formula showing how many technicians 
are required to maintain a certain number of pianos. But other than 
justifying our jobs, and perhaps convincing a chair that you need help, I am 
afraid the formula will do little to help our cause, unless we can show a 
cost benefit to the unviversity. In other words, when we tell a school 
administrator to spend more money to maintain pianos, the first questions 
that they might ask is. "What's in it for me?" 

To show you what I am trying to say let me give you a scenario. By yourself 
you're trying to maintain 130 pianos in your school, worth approximately $1.2 
million. You make $40,000 per year. You ask the school to provide you with an 
assistant. First of all, the moment you ask for help, you now become an 
administrator. So that by itself creates a problem. One of the things I have 
been warning everyone about is the non productive time you spend on the job, 
the administrative part, keeping records, talking to teachers and students, 
writing reports, answering e-mails, etc. When you get someone to work with 
you, or for you, your administrative hours will increase. So if you think 
hiring another person will automatically take care of half of the pianos, you 
are mistaken. You will wind up taking care of 50 of those pianos, and 
spending the rest of your time doing paper work, and supervising the work of 
the other person.  

But getting back to the scenario. Let's say you convince the school to hire 
an assistant at $35,000. (Lets not complicate the numbers with inflation, but 
lets look at today figures). What will be the financial benefit to the 
university to spend another $35,000? If the school spends another $35,000, 
what will happen to the value of the instruments? Will spending that money 
increase the longevity of the pianos? Instead of the $1.2 worth of pianos 
lasting 20 years, will they last 30 years? 

You will make $800,000 over 20 years, before the inventory will need to be 
replaced. If you work 30 years, the university will spend  $1.2 million. 
However, if the school spend $75,000 over 30 years, it will cost them 
$2,250,000, before it has to replace $1.2 worth of instruments. As you can 
see, from a strictly economic viewpoint, it does not make sense for a 
university to hire another technician.  

This is the way I am looking at this. Am I wrong? Are there some things I am 
missing? Obviously, the numbers will be different in each situation. But we 
need a constant to evaluate. What are your thoughts?  

Wim 


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