I’ve been tuning two a day. I’m slow, and normally go through twice so it’s like four. But that kind of work has gotten me into major concert halls, and my customers almost all come from word-of- mouth reference. I don’t call, don’t send post cards. I DO however return calls which come to me. I just don’t go chasing people. It looks like I’m going to have to do some “3-days” because people are actually calling me. Keeps amazing me. I think each tuning is going to trash my reputation, but so far I have managed to fool the general public, and some concert venues too. les Bartlett www.bartlettpianoservice.com _____ From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of John Formsma Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 8:48 AM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] Workload Gregor, Some of us from the US also have a much more free schedule. :-) After today's tunings, I will have done 36 tunings this month, along with some repairs. I consider a good week to be 8-10 service calls. However, my personal life doesn't allow for much more than this right now. I have two young boys (ages 8 and 6) that I'm taking care of by myself. It doesn't work well for us if I am working 40+ hours a week, and being with them only during the hours of breakfast and right after supper. Not good. Plus, I've gotten into cycling -- gotta make time for that. :-) So I'm quite content to work less now. If things change in the future, that will be fine too. My ideal daily workload would be 3-4 a day, maybe 4 days a week. Or, if I ever get into rebuilding like I hope to one day, 2-3 days in the shop, and 2-3 days doing service calls. I used to be able to comfortably do 6 a day. But, at nearly 40 now, I see the wisdom of not overloading oneself in one's youth. Different people have different outlooks on life. I like to live life -- not just work all the time. There are more important things than earning a dollar or Euro. -- JF On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 4:31 AM, Gregor _ <karlkaputt at hotmail.com> wrote: Usually I tune 3-4 a day, but not always there are enough customers for that. If it is a must I will tune 5, but I don´t like to tune more then 4 per day. I tune on only 3 days a week, the rest of the week I am in my store to sell pianos. Because of the economic situation and the number of competitors I would say that a month with 30 or more tunings is an excellent month for me. So I am astonished about the figures given by some of you. Gregor -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091030/a8c79732/attachment.htm>
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