Well, yeah, things do look a little more sparse in those photos that what I commonly see around here! Travel is always an expense. I guess I just figure it into my hourly fee and be done with it. But I can see that if half your clients are within 15 miles and the other half are up to 50 miles away (or whatever), that you might want to apply the travel expense differently. My philosophy is that if I can work an appointment into my schedule for a given area, I have chosen to service that area - so in my book no extra fees apply. Certainly, if a client wants me to come out to tim-buck-too on a given date when I don't have any appointments in that far-away area, then indeed I will apply an extra fee (I usually just charge my hourly rate for one way of travel to the special distant location. But hey, whatever works best for you. I would just wonder if some folks don't get a little antsy wondering where these "extra" fees are coming from. I certainly may be wrong on that, 'cause I haven't done that, but it's something I would consider. I surmise Wim suggested a flat fee. I would ask why doesn't someone who charges a flat travel fee for every appointment - why not just lump that into your standard tuning fee? That is basically what I do. I just figure that if I tune three pianos on a given day, I will spend, on average, and hour or an hour-and-a-half driving (or riding my motorcycle!!!) and maybe four hours tuning (and nothing else). So maybe six hours total. I just take my hourly fee (what I need to charge to make what I want/need/feel-entitled-to/whatever), multiply it by 5.5 and divide that by the three tunings I did. That would equal my tuning fee. Basically, all I'm doing is incorporating my average travel time into my standard tuning fee. Works for me. Maybe your great distance would make something else work better, I don't know. Terry Farrell On Oct 12, 2010, at 8:25 PM, Daniel Carlton wrote: > hi terry > > I figure that if I need the work so bad that I have to go long > distances, that's my problem. > Out here there's lots of distance between towns, with lots of ranch > and farmland in between. If the population were denser(?) in between > I definitely wouldn't be driving this far for work! So basically, I > have to. If I were in Tampa, (where I did live for about a year and > half) I can see not having to do this. I lived there '95-96, and it > seemed denser(??) between surrounding towns, than out here (see the > photo) > > Seems like it would be onerous to try and figure all that out..... > ...yeah, it is. > > dunno. maybe i'm too worried about covering every single cent. i've > thought about a flat fee for each customer, as Wim said. > > :) > > daniel carlton > <texas panhandle.jpg><tx panhandle.jpg> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101012/8c261eab/attachment.htm>
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