Having said all I said, what's hard is knowing how many of the no-callbacks are from my lack of disorganized, largely unsystematic and unmethodical way of running my business... and how many are from people that are putting piano service at the bottom of their to-do's, for whatever reasons. I guess what I'm saying is I wish I knew how much of a chance my business has at coming back. daniel carlton Daniel When I first started in this business 35 years ago, an old timer, who had himself at that time been in the business for 35 years, told me this. For no reason whatsoever, the phone will stop ringing, and then for no reason, it will start again. It has nothing to do with the economy, or the time of year, or the weather. And when I'm sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, the other tuners are running like crazy trying to get all the work done. This will last for a month or two, and then business will OK again for a year or two, and the cycle happen again. Just hang in there, and you'll be fine. I've found that to be true. When I've checked my income from one year to the next over a 5 year period, there never seems to be a pattern of when I'm busy and when I'm not. One year January will be busiest, the next year, January will the slowest month. All I can say is hang in there, and your business will come back. You also said: The reputation of being hard to get and way too busy spreads just like any other kind of reputation (like being prone to nag about repeat tunings, or not returning calls, or being slipshod, or always coming late, or charging a lot more than others... Of the five things you mention I would say that not returning phone calls and always being late are probably the two worst things you do. Customers don't like to be kept waiting, and they expect someone to call them back in a reasonable amount of time. If you can't do that, you need to re-evaluate your business practice, or perhaps think something else to do. But communicating with customers is as important, and sometimes even more important, than the quality of the work you do. Wim -----Original Message----- From: daniel carlton <carltonpiano at sbcglobal.net> To: PTG Mailing list <pianotech at ptg.org> Sent: Wed, Aug 18, 2010 9:00 am Subject: Re: [pianotech] repeat business Having said all I said, what's hard is knowing how many of the no-callbacks are from my lack of disorganized, largely unsystematic and unmethodical way of running my business... and how many are from people that are putting piano service at the bottom of their to-do's, for whatever reasons. I guess what I'm saying is I wish I knew how much of a chance my business has at coming back. daniel carlton -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100818/27ae5ffd/attachment.htm>
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC