New Cu$tomer Fee

[Roger Jolly]

Hi Ed,
          Like you I have a booking problem, just not enough hours in the
day, tuning calls I charge double the going rate in our area. 
But I only accept clients that will allow me to look after their instrument
in a holistic manner, typically a house call takes all morning, tuning, a
little voicing, touch up reg, a little hammer mating, in general an hour or
so of fiddling.
A new client must have their instrument brought up to an acceptable
standard before they qualify for the routine call list.
Owning  2 retail outlets gives me way more clients than I can handle, but
there is quite a pool of teachers that get their pianos tuned twice a year
by an associate, and once a year check up when the extras are looked after.
Once teachers are educated about the subtleties of voicing and touch, you
can be pleasantly suprised how responsive they are to pay for competent work. 
Once they see positive results, they become positive with pen and check book.
Regards Roger


At 08:53 PM 21/11/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Clyde writes; 
><<   I just assume that the first call is likely to take a few minutes 
>longer.  Clients will
>balk at being charged extra just because it's your first time there, but
they 
>can
>easily understand paying more for additional needed services you provide. 
><snip>
>     You could call the client to the piano and say something like this:  
>"Mrs. S, I looked over your piano, and there are several additional things I 
>noticed that need attention>>
>
>    Greetings, 
>   I also assume that the first call will take longer,  and since all I have 
>to sell is my time,  I have to tell them that the first time costs more.  I 
>don't charge more simply because it is a first time, but because,
invariably, 
>there is an additional amount of time that I have to spend to leave a job I 
>can be proud of. I find that customers HATE to be pitched additional work 
>after the initial price has been quoted, so prepping them in advance has 
>avoided a lot of bad PR.   
>
>>>It is hard to be humble saying this, but I am now taking
>new client orders four months in advance. >>
>
>   With all due respect,  if a technician is booked four months in
advance, I 
>suggest that they are not charging nearly enough for their services.  If the 
>price were raised by 40%, and it cost you 20% of your customers, would this 
>not leave you with 20% more income and 20% more time, and would that be bad? 
>I think not!
>    We have a finite amount of time on this Earth, and when it is gone, it's 
>gone for good.  I submit that the constantly improving skills of a tech must 
>be matched by constantly increasing returns.  The tech with 20 years of 
>experience should be more valuable than the one with three or four years in 
>the trade.
>    There will always be a range of prices that techs in any given locality 
>charge.  Some want to be at the very top of the range while others don't
want 
>to risk losing a customer.  For myself,  if I am not tuning for a customer 
>because of the price, that is a far better situation than not tuning for
them 
>because I don't have the time.  I am not selling a cure for cancer,  I am 
>selling my life's reservoir of time,  and I want it to be worth as much as I 
>can possibly make it.  
>     The customer without the resources to engage me has a broad range of 
>other techs to call upon, so it is a win-win approach for everyone except
the 
>customer that wants the "best for less", and those are the customers that 
>are, (thankfully), repelled by paying more for the first visit.   I don't 
>want to compete with others on price, I want to compete on the basis of 
>quality, and the only way I know to do that is to charge more than others
and 
>see where the chips fall.  
>       I would certainly be interested in other list members views on this ?
>Regards, 
>Ed Foote 
> 
Roger Jolly
Saskatoon, Canada.
306-665-0213
Fax 652-0505