I've had my tuning business in the same suburb of Chicago since 1979, started to learn tuning ten years earlier when I was in high school. My two sons are nine and ten years old now. My wife works full time for a large corporation. Her schedule does not offer flexibility, it's nine to five. When the boys were younger in grade school, they went to a kids care program before and after school. That allowed me to work 8 to 6 if needed. My normal would be four tunings per day if tuning was all I was doing. I usually stayed in the shop on Wednesdays. My oldest son started having behavior problems, so things changed. Now I see them off to school in the morning and am home when they get back in the afternoon. That gives me 9 to 3 to tune. A normal day, going from home to home is three tunings. I usually schedule a half day to do some cleaning, regulating, and voicing at least once a week. When I am home with the guys, I will get some shop work or office work done. if it's not so nice that we have to go outside to play catch or something. The decision to tune less had to be part of a business plan. In part it meant I had to sell more shop work, which I have. Mostly this is action work, regulation and rebuilding. I am not set up to do complete rebuilding, and there are folks in the area who specialize in that and do a real fine job. The other part of the plan was raising the tuning fee. Over the last three years, as the economy has gone down, I have raised my basic fee by 25%. The net effect is that I am making about the same tuning money while tuning less, and the shop work has provided an increase in income. I also offer formal appraisals. Not too many techs here do. This economy has more people trying to sell their pianos and more folks deciding to buy used pianos, so I help them both. I do have a few large high schools where I will tune 8 or 9 pianos per day. One of the important skills for tuning in schools is being able to do 45 minute tuning. That is a typical class period here. It is often the only time room may be available during the week day. A few months ago (half year maybe?), Linda Martin wrote a short series in the Journal about doing a half or full day servicing in the home. I feel that doing once a week is not near what I should be doing. These pianos really need so much more care than they get from most techs. When I studied voicing with Virgil Smith around twenty years ago, he made me realize there is no big trick in making this happen. We just need to explain to our clients what is needed and offer them the price or choice of prices. Offer a complete regulation or just a half day of regulation. If we are consistent in educating our clients and reminding them of the benefits they will receive, many of them will say, "Yes, let's do it!" I guess I am going on about this because everyone is posting about how much tuning work they are doing, but not much else, with the exception of the rebuilders here. Now I know many of you are doing complete piano service, but I haven't seen it in this discussion. I know also, it wasn't the question. So I will just say that regulating, voicing and such is a great change of pace from tuning. It will save your body and mind from too much repetition. The pianos and pianists really need the work done too. Make sure you offer the benefits of this work. Do not expect clients to ask you about it; very few will. Many more will want the work done when you show them the wear on their hammers, the lost motion, the poor let off, the unevenness of tone. If they understand what's going on in their piano, and you give them a price they can live with, you will find yourself making more money while stressing yourself out less. OMG, it turned into a sermon, oh well it's still Sunday! Have a great week! Bruce Dornfeld, RPT bdornfeld at earthlink.net North Shore Chapter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091101/f10f7910/attachment-0001.htm>
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC