[pianotech] Raising rates in recession

[tnrwim at aol.com]

Chuck

Sounds like you've got a great system worked out. Just a couple of things. First, it might pay you to get a computer, and do all that card system stuff that way. It might take you a few days to enter all the information, but once you've got the hang of it, you'll be surprise how easy it is to keep track of all your customers. Second, for your pre-scheduled appointments, instead of calling a week in advance to remind them, I would suggest you send them a post card. That way you can be assured that they get it. You might still want to call them the night before, just to make sure they're home, but I would hate to have you call and leave a message, only to discover that they were gone on vacation, or that someone erased the message. A post card will come back to you if they's moved, and it give the customer a couple of days to call you to re-schedule. It's not fool proof, but most of my customers like the post card. 

And last is the Chuck Bucks. For about 6 months last year I sent a $10 coupon to each customer in a thank you letter. I sent out about 150 letters, and got one coupon, and last week had a customer give me the coupon towards her tuning. In other words, I spent a lot of money on printing coupons and postage, and got one customer.  

Any way, good luck with your pre-scheduling. It has worked great for me. 

Wim 






-----Original Message-----
From: Chuck Behm <behmpiano at gmail.com>
To: pianotech <pianotech at ptg.org>
Sent: Mon, Jun 28, 2010 3:40 am
Subject: Re: [pianotech] Raising rates in recession


>Wally
In April I actually dropped my rate from $115 to $85, to be more in line with the other tuners. But I explain that $85 is my "basic" fee, and is only for tuning. Then I tell them that my "full service" tuning fee is $115, (which used to be my basic fee), but includes minor repairs and minor pitch adjustments and regulation. For my regular customers, I charge the basic, if all Ii do is tune. But I do sell extra's like rust blocker, and maybe try to sell them on cleaning and polishing the case. For new customers, I tell them I have to see the piano before I can tell them what the fee will be, but the lower rate at least gets me in the door.
I had to do this because my business was down about 30% from the previous year. I had to do something to get customers. It's starting to turn around. but I'm planning on staying at the "basic" fee for at least another 6 months. I'll see what the economy is doing by then before make a decision as to whether I'll go back up to my "normal" fee.
Wim<
 
Wally, Wim and others - The topic of pricing and scheduling has been on my mind a lot lately, in that the recession has hit my area pretty hard, and I know for a fact (because customers have told me) that the cost of tuning is a very important factor to a lot of people when they decide whether to have their annual service done. For the first time that I can remember I've had people flat out tell me they don't have the money to have the work done. 
 
Add to the that the fact that for me at least May, June and July have always been slow, while the bills I need to pay of course continue undiminished, and I had begun to to think that I needed to make some adjustments.
 
I've known for a long time that my system (if you could call it that) of booking appointments also needed to be improved upon - it seemed very inefficient, but being the creature of habit that I am, I had just continued on and on with the same methods that I had used for decades.
 
I keep all of my customers data on simple 4 X 6 index cards, sorted by the month of last service, with no regard to location. Part of the problem right off the bat was that in the course of a year I go to 87 different communities. My own town of Boone, Iowa, is simply not large enough at 13,000 to support me. It's a very blue-collar community and I doubt that there are 500 pianos inside the city limits. So I basically go wherever I need to to find pianos to work on. Many of the places I go are tiny villages (one for example, with a populationg of 16 - I actually tune 4 pianos there). I put on a lot of miles in the course of the year.
 
This card system never worked well for lining up tunings, since the focus was always on date of last service, and not location. For example, if I had 6 pianos in one community I might find myself driving there 4 or 5 times during the course of the year, thinking on every trip how stupid it was. 
 
The other problem, which ties in and contributed to the first, was that I never gave pre-booking a try. I always assumed that people wouldn't want to book in advance too far, and always told my customers that I would call them several days in advance before I would be in the area. Procrastinator that I am, this often meant that I would be down in my basement office the night before I wanted to do a day of tuning, desperately trying to find enough people at home to put together a day of work. I hated scheduling, because oftentimes I would end up with a nightmare of a schedule driving to 6 different towns to tune 6 pianos. 
 
A final problem which also tied in was the fact that I would always call my best and most reliable customers at the beginning of the month. By the end of the month, I would always be left with the riff-raff, so to speak, and would have to struggle to find work at all. 
 
This all came to a head late in May, when I had put off scheduling a Friday and Saturday until Thursday evening. I optomistically had marked in 6 tuning spots on my calandar for each of the 2 days. I started calling at 7 p.m., dialing numbers until 9:30 and in 2 and 1/2 hours manage to find one person at home who would schedule a tuning. One person an hour away, and I booked it.
 
This, I remember thinking, is for the birds. 
 
I've got 900 customers (which was ample when I was teaching, but which I am making efforts to increase by 1/3 now that I'm retired from teaching- more on that later). I've got a good reputation with my customers (I can't recall ever having a customer tell me they had employed another tuner). But here I was only able to find one tuning for two days.  My "system" of scheduling, of pricing, of organizing my customers - basically everything - needed an overhaul.
 
The first thing I decided I would do is to lose the monthly organizational scheme. I had to start considering location first if I every was going to cut back on the number of miles (30,000 last year) that I put on my car. I went to Office Max that Saturday morning, bought several packets of clear dividers, and made an index card with a divider for each of my 87 communities. Then I went through every customer card and relocated the card by location without regard to the last date of tuning. I simply alphabetized the cards within the community, counted them up for each town, and wrote the number of customers on the corner of the divider tab. The high was 256 for Boone, with a number of little towns represented with fewer than 10 customers. 
 
Next, I made calandars (I do my own on manilla folders - 4 weeks to the folder, not by month. This is one tradition I like and will carry on with) for the entire year to come in advance (through the end of the summer, 2011, actually). I went over the upcoming year with my wife, and crossed off any day which might present problems in scheduling. Holidays obviously, my neice's wedding date, etc. In addition, we blocked off a number of 3 day weekends and a full week at the beginning of the summer of 2011 for rest and relaxation. 
 
That done, I started blocking in specific days for specific communities. Depending on how many customers might reside in a town (or cluster of little towns) I blocked in an appropriate number of days. I would write the name of the community along the edge of the rectangle for the day, and hi-light it with yellow. I remember thinking how optomistic it all seemed, but couldn't imagine that I could actually pull if off and make it work out.
 
To kick things off, my last change was to adjust my prices. May and June had always been the worst months for scheduling, in that so many people are quitting lessons and would rather put off tuning until fall. For those two months, therefore, I decided on offering a $15 deduction if the customer would have their piano tuned and book ahead for the following year. For July, I decided on a $10 deduction, and for the rest of the year a modest $5 deduction simply for pre-booking.
 
With those changes made, I started calling to schedule June (or later months, for customers who opted for a lower deduction), beginning with the customers who had their pianos tuned earliest in the fall. 
 
The results were amazing. When I mentioned that I was trying to be pro-active in helping the customer in times of recession by offering a lower rate for my slower season of the year, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. I quickly booked in the entire month of June, scheduling an average of 24 pianos per week. Since my goal (for budgetary reasons) is no fewer than 18, and up to 27 pianos a week, this was right where I wanted to be.
 
Granted, I was earning a few bucks less per piano, but I would much rather be tuning a whole lot of pianos for a reduced rate, than doing next to nothing for my full rate. The math just seems to work out better when you increase the numbers. 
 
The other big, big plus was that I filled in each day with either pianos all in the same town, or a morning's work in one town followed by an afternoon's work in a nearby location. With less driving, I was able to book appointments a bit closer together, and either get done earlier, or add an extra tuning onto my day.
 
For those who want to wait until fall, that's fine. I still offer the $5 discount for pre-booking, and that way get them signed up for a day of my choice. Everyone, as in 100%, of the customers that I've reached so far has booked their tuning, either for the $15, $10 or $5 discount. 
 
The biggest surprise, however, was in the ease of pre-booking for the next year. I took my set of calandars with me, and when we settled up at the end of the appointment, I would take out the calandars so we could look ahead for the next appointment. Only one of the customers who I tuned for during the month didn't want to schedule ahead. Everyone else gladly signed up for the next year, usually for the same day of the week, same time, same rate. It's wonderful. I've basically got June, 2011 completely booked in. I explained that I would call the week ahead to remind them of the tuning date, and that flexiblility would be the key. If they needed to adjust their schedule, I would find the next time that I would be in their community to add them in. Also, I stressed that I might need to make adjustments according to circumstance, in which case I would also call ahead to reschedule. I'm planning on leaving a couple days open each month for such contingencies. 
 
Finally, to begin adding in new customers, I came up with the idea of "ChuckBucks." These are a small version of a dollar bill, with my picture in the middle, and the words 15 dollar coupon clearly printed in several spots. The corners all have the number $15 placed over the original 1.  I have these in sheets of 6 or half sheets of 3 that I give to customers. The idea is that any new customer will be given a $15 discount on their first tuning. Then the coupon will be clipped to the card of the customer who referred me, and they will be given a $15 discount on their next tuning as well. (If anyone would like to see a PDF file of these, just drop me a note and I'll send you one. It only took a half hour on the computer to put it together.)
 
In that I just started giving these out (I had a local print shop print 200 sheets for 20 cents a sheet), I haven't seen any come back to me yet. However, people seem very enthused about the idea, and you can just see the wheels turning. I had a couple customers immediately start to jot down a list of friends to call. So hopefully, within a year or so, my customer base will be up closer to where I would like it to be. 
 
Well, anyway, sorry to go on for so long. I just saw that the topic had come up, and had been meaning to pass these ideas along. As I've told my customers, I've been in business 37 years. It's about time I figure out how to do things. 
 
Have a great week, everyone. I envy those of you who were able to attend the convention. Sounds as if you had a great (but somewhat overpriced) time. Don't think I'll ever stay at Bally's, however, from the sound of things. Can you say price-gouging? Chuck Behm

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