I agree with this idea. If your home is only being used as an office and a starting point for your day's work, it should be able to pass through the net of an angry bureaucrat... If this doesn't work, I'd see if I could find a more sympathetic higher-up. Dave Dave Stahl, RPT Dave Stahl Piano Service dstahlpiano at sbcglobal.net dstahlpiano.net -----Original Message----- From: J Patrick Draine <jpdraine at gmail.com> To: pianotech at ptg.org Sent: Thu, Jul 15, 2010 6:07 am Subject: Re: [pianotech] Probelm with Business License. Please help! Hi Hy, You might consider that you're still creating and modifying your business plan. As such, I suggest you consider (in the short term) focussing SOLELY on in home service. For those occasional jobs that involve off-site repairs, make an arrangement with a (reasonably) nearby colleague who may be able to allow you to do the repairs in his shop (for a mutually agreeable case by case "rental" fee), or to subcontract the repairs to him. This should work for the bureaucrats (as long as home offices are allowed by local regulations), and you could make your relocation plans at a more leisurely pace. Patrick Draine On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 5:47 AM, Hy Cohen <frowninverter at gmail.com> wrote: Hi everyone, I just moved here to California a couple of weeks ago, and am working on getting my business plan assembled so I can soon start my piano tech business. As part of that process, I gave a call over to my county to find out how much a business license would be (I live outside the city limits). They told me $415. But then they asked where I would be operating my business, so I explained to them that it would be a home-based business where I will perform a majority of my services at my clients’ location and that once in a while I would take a part home to work on using manual hand tools which are pretty quiet, and that my business would not generate any additional traffic, etc. She then asked me for my address, so I gave it to her. Just as soon as I gave her my address she announced that I could not run my business where I live! She said the property is zoned as agriculture, and because I would occasionally bring something home with me to work on that it would be considered a commercial operation which would not be allowed under the property’s zoning. Any thoughts…besides moving or pretending I didn’t hear what the lady said? <grin> I’ve left messages for the city to find out if I lived there if I would run into the same problem, but they haven’t called back. In your experience, am I likely to run into this problem living in a city? We are planning to move into a city in the near future. But with this goofy problem, we might be moving sooner rather than later. <grin> Thanks for your advice! Warmly, Hy frowninverter at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100715/e97f8658/attachment.htm>
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