Several of you have said, (Joe, specifically), that all service calls should be premium, in that we should do what needs to be done to make the piano play and sound as well as it can. I totally agree with that. But when a customers calls to ask what I charge for a "tuning", most of them don't understand the reason for me being one of the highest price piano tuners in the phone book. I give "premium" service, and most of my customers appreciate what I do for them. However, and this is where I have a dilemma, I'm not making any money giving "premium" service, when most of my customers only want a "tuning". I charge about $15 - $30 more for my tuning than most of the other piano tuners on Oahu. For my fee, I do spend a little extra to regulate, voice, clean, etc, not to mention rock solid unisons. But when a new customer calls, they don't know I will do that. All they know is I charge a lot more for my tuning than most of my competitors, including the 2 other RPT's. This week so far, I've gotten 6 phone calls asking for the price of a tuning, but have only scheduled 2 of them. The rest are price shopping. I'm getting to the point where I would rather tune 6 pianos at $75, than 2 at $115. I would still like to be able to make about $100 - $120 per service call, provided I spend the time with the piano. So I have though of quoting $55 for the first half hour and $25 per 15 minute intervals after that. I'll say that my basic tuning takes about 45 minutes to an hour, which will bring to total fee to about $80 - $100. But then, when I get there, I "sell" them on doing additional work. It's not what I'm used to doing, but as I said, I'm getting desperate. Do any of you charge by the time, with a minimum fee just to show up? Willem (Wim) Blees, RPT Piano Tuner/Technician 94-505 Kealakaa Str. Mililani, Oahu, HI 96789 808-349-2943 www.Bleespiano.com Author of: The Business of Piano Tuning available from Potter Press www.pianotuning.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100310/ae08da76/attachment.htm>
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