The key here is that every situation is different. I started out in the business, learning from my father and soon became his business partner. Dad would not give stores any discount. We did frequent jobs for the Yamaha store in San Francisco. Last year, the salesman who sent us those jobs was responsible for helping me get a job working for a store here, in Portland, OR! Since we closed our own business and left California, I have only worked for stores. I wish I had done so in the beginning of my career. The experiences available to me, working for dealers who sell Yamaha, Young Chang, Kawai, Schimmel, Estonia, Mason Hamlin, Boesendorfer, in a large, cosmopolitan city, have been invaluable to my development as a technician and as a person. >From our days of having a very small dealership ourselves, I understand the problems that dealers have and am interested in helping them solve some of those problems. Therefore I am sometimes willing to give them huge discounts, because I know what pressures they are under. For their part, they sometimes give me the cream of the work, because they know my needs. I am currently working for a store that I was warned to avoid when I first moved into the area. The owner is known for being difficult to deal with. However, it is not easy to hurt my feelings and I am finding it very interesting to learn how to work with him. It is very easy to assume, from a technician's point of view, that he is always wrong, but I found myself glueing in hammers yesterday,and thinking about something he said a few weeks ago. I realized that HE had been right--not me. I would have had to pay a psychologist hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to come to that. And that was not even his intent. We were just trying to be able to work together on a common goal--to earn a living for each of us and our families by dealing with the instruments we both love--pianos. Diane Hofstetter EveryationEE[pianotech] Dealer labor feesRyan Sowers tunerryan at gmail.com Part of the trick of dealing with dealers is to know how to work quickly andefficiently. I generally give dealers a 25% discount on my hourly rate, butcompared to a retail tuning it comes out more like a 50% discount.My retail appointments take 1.5 to 2 hours whereas my dealer tunings usuallytake an hour.Most dealers don't expect perfect work. They are hiring you to help themmake money. If you can help them make money they will love you.Diane Hofstetter
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC