>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. JF< John and others - If you're curious as to what it's like running a restoration business on the side, and tuning as your main source of reliable income involves, I'll give you my numbers for the month of October. My wife and I got back from the convention in Charlotte late on Monday, the 5th, so the first few days of the month, I was not working. Since starting up on the 6th, I've done 83 tunings this month, and spent 9 1/2 days in the shop working on an upright restoration. The shop time consisted of both 1/2 days, and several full days. A full day of tuning for me is 8, although many days I schedule in less, depending on what's available in the area I'm traveling to. Since I've never advertised, my customer base is completely word of mouth, which, in the words of Monk, is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is I've never paid a cent to advertise. The curse is that my business is scattered over several dozen counties in Iowa - thus I put 30,000 miles on my business car a year getting to my appointments. I envy folks who don't have to travel outside of their city limits to fill their calendar. Many days I have a 2 hour drive to get to the area where I'm tuning for the day, and the inevitable 2 hour drive back again at the end of the day. It makes for a long work day. With 8 in day, I'm tuning just standard family instruments - Kimballs, Wurlitzers and the like - and mostly pianos that I've tuned yearly for 20 or 25 years in a row. Definitely not concert hall work. If I'm tuning a piano that I haven't done before, especially when it's a call from a new customer who tells me that the piano hasn't be done in several decades, I allow considerably more time. I can't imagine trying to do 18 pianos in one day, Wim. You would have to waggle a $1000 bill in front of me to keep me going. That might not even work after the first 8. One of the best things about doing the restoration on the side, by the way, is that it gives you something to fall back on when the tunings just aren't there. You don't have to sit, twiddling your thumbs, wishing you had something to work on. There is always work in the shop to be done. In fact, after I have breakfast, that's what I'm off to do. I'm finishing shimming, then shellacking a soundboard this morning. I love Saturday mornings in the shop! Chuck -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091031/8c03b861/attachment.htm>
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