There are a lot of variations depending on what region of the US someone is in. Chuck mentioned 855 customers. My database, collected over 28 years, has nearly 6,000 entries. That would include some contacts that were just for estimates or appraisals. I would imagine more than half of them have moved out of the area. We are a very transient society. If one is in the mid-west where pianos are tuned four times a year, 500 clients would keep you quite busy. Here in the Pacific Northwest, most clients are once a year, a few more often, and some can get away with once every two years. Hence, I need a lot more customers to stay busy. In a city the size of yours, there would be more than a dozen tuners. There was a figure from a study bandied about twenty years ago that there was one piano to every seven households in the US. If that were still true, and they were all tuned once a year, none of us should have the spare time to stop and get coffee. Dave Stocker, RPT Tumwater, WA From: Gregor _ Sent: Saturday, October 31, 2009 10:06 To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] Workload 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 ------------------------------------------ piano technician - tuner - dealer Münster, Germany www.weldert.de -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:08:12 -0500 From: behmpiano at gmail.com To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] Workload >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 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So gehst du mir nicht vor die Tür! Herbsttrends entdecken -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091031/d1027fd1/attachment.htm>
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