500 customers in 2 years is excellent. What is your biggest source of new customers? I get about 50% from the yellow pages. Al G From: wimblees at aol.com Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 5:24 PM To: Pianotech at PTG.org Subject: [pianotech] economic update A lot of you at the convention, and also privately on line, asked me how I'm doing here in Hawaii. Let me give you a brief update. We moved here exactly 2 years ago with basically no clients. (I was promised a lot of work, but that didn't materialize). Yesterday I entered my 500th customer in my database. A little less that half of those are pre-scheduled to be tuned within the next year. Financially I'm not quite where I want to be, but even with the economic downturn, I'm actually doing a little better than this time last year. With the little good news we're getting about the economy, I am getting a sense that this fall will be pretty good. Obviously tourism is the driving force behind the economy here. It's down 30% from a year ago, but even that is showing signs of turning around. We're getting more and more visitors from Asia and South America, which is helping. Jan teaches piano lessons and has gotten a dozen phone calls in just the last week. Not all of them are scheduled yet, but just getting the phone calls is a big improvement over last year. She's up to 15 students, and it looks like she'll be getting more soon. All in all, my wife are very grateful for the work we're getting. We're also thoroughly enjoying the weather and the beaches. Jan spends at least 3 days a week snorkeling and swimming with the turtles. I'm just glad to be working, but once in a while I actually put a foot in the water. Willem (Wim) Blees, RPT Piano Tuner/Technician Mililani, Oahu, HI 808-349-2943 Author of: The Business of Piano Tuning available from Potter Press www.pianotuning.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20090804/db33f257/attachment.htm>
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