Scheduling question

[Kenneth Jankura]

So how the heck do you know on which side of what you are worth you  
are on?

Anyway, If you're not doing it already, my best advise would be to  
absolutely preschedule 3 or 6 months or a year (or even 2 years) in  
advance whenever possible. This gives you the advantage in scheduling  
drive time. I am more or less a rural tuner (which means there are  
many days I put 70 to 100+ miles on my car).  You get to pick a  
direction to go and then you get  a year to fill that day and area  
with tunings, however many you can handle.  I don't really cold call  
anymore. If I get stuck to fill a slot, it's not too hard to find  
someone who was afraid to schedule that far in advance and call them,  
and it usually works out.

If you have the shop and the shop work, prescheduling lets you do it  
easier. pick your day or two or three for shopwork and then don"t  
preschedule tunings on those days, simple as that. Also, let your  
customers know that things change and you may call to reschedule if  
necessary.

I always struggle over raising my price. There's a fine line between  
satisfying your need or greed and pissing off your customers, and we  
must walk that line daily, or monthly, or yearly, or however often we  
raise our prices.  Being somewhere in the middle is nice. I  
occasionally get the raised eyebrow or comment on my (high) price,  
and if that is balanced out by the occasional comment "Oh, that's  
more than reasonable", I'm cool with that.

Yeah, I'll probably go up in price sometime soon.

As far as knowing what my body can take, well, I've always been a  
little behind the curve on that one. Adding that extra tuning now and  
then  seems to be ok, it's the horrible pin torque on a new or old  
piano that  can ruin my perfectly good (shoulder) day. Like gimme 6  
easy regularly tuned grands one day, I'm golden. Next day, first  
piano is a horrible new upright with bad high torque and a major  
pitch raise, the rest of the day just adds to the damage the first  
piano did, well, that is quite a different day. Our days are not  
homogeneous. So you roll with it.

Massage therapy rules!!  Schedule it in!!

It's ever changing, ever changing.

Ken Jankura RPT
Newville PA


.
On Dec 6, 2007, at 8:04 AM, A440A at aol.com wrote:

> Greetings,
> Annie writes:
>> After seven years of hustling to make ends meet (which meant I had  
>> more than enough time to work at customers' sites and in my shop),  
>> I've moved to a new area which is turning out to be absolutely  
>> wonderful.  Today, however, it became very apparent that I'm going  
>> to have to become much more careful of my schedule if I'm to take  
>> advantage of the work opportunities that are being offered (and  
>> still do my best work, of course).
>>
>> So I would appreciate hearing how other folks do it.
>>
>
> Raise your prices.  When you are working so much that you run out  
> of time, you are not charging enough.  You want a clientele's  
> willingness to pay more for more experience to increase as your  
> worth increases, so you have to ride the curve or slowly become  
> swamped with underpaying work.
>     I know how many tunings a week my hands and tendons are able to  
> comfortably handle, When that time is sold, I don't try to  
> adulterate the appointments by cramming in another one or two.   
> Higher prices allow me to do that.
>    We either shape the clientele to suit our life, or it will shape  
> us to its convenience. The fear of losing a customer because we are  
> charging too much will cost us far more in the long run than  
> actually losing a customer or two along the way.
> Regards,
> Ed Foote RPT
> http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html
>
>
>
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