[pianotech] Workload

[Chuck Behm]

>I am wondering not only about the number of the pianos some of you CAN tune
but also about the number of pianos you really tune. I mean the number of
customers you have. I live in a city with 280.000 inhabitants, 50.000 of
them being students. It?s a quite wealthy town with a considerable number of
piano owners. At least I was thinking that until this thread came up. Maybe
there are a lot of more piano owners in the USA than in Germany? Or do you
all live in areas without competitors?

Gregor<

Interesting question, Gregor. I didn't really know the answer as concerns my
business, so I opened my data base and looked. I've got 855 customers (a
substantial number being churches and schools with multiple instruments).
What really surprised me was that I counted tunings in *90* communities -
many of them very small rural towns. My own town of Boone only has 13,000
people, but some of these places have less than 100 residents. For many of
these towns, I am told that I am the only one who will go there - so no real
competition in many cases.

As I stated earlier, I did 83 tunings this month. I keep up that rate from
September through February, or half the year. Starting in March, things
begin to slow down, and by mid-June, the tuning business is pretty much dead
in the water. Few of my customers want their piano tuned during the summer
when the kids aren't taking lessons. Therefore, that's when I get the most
shop work done. For probably 5 or 6 years, we've always had the next few
jobs ready to bring in when space is cleared out in the shop. In that we
work almost exclusively on family instruments, there is always a paycheck at
the end of these jobs. I don't buy pianos for resale, therefore it's a
reliable source of income.

I'm just happy to be able to stay this busy. Starting off from scratch in
this area, doing tuning as a supplement to my teaching, it was slow going
for many years. Having the combination of shop work and tuning business
really has helped. I write my Journal articles in the hopes that others are
encouraged to give restoration work a try.  Chuck
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