Good technician now in Sales

[Horace Greeley]

Mike,

You raise several interesting points...

At 09:57 AM 1/29/1999 -0500, you wrote:
>> Steve is a first-rate technician - who moved into sales to stay
>> alive.
>
>Do you mean physically alive or financial?  

Yes.  Actually, I think that his move into sales (as mine into
computer networking) has actually lengthened his professional life 
as a technician.  Tuning is sort of like having only a limited 
number of units of something to sell - ever.  Once gone, it's gone.
If, as some of us do/have done, you choose to sell all of your
tunings in one decade or two, you reach 50 (or so) without many
left.  (It is, after all, hard work to tune well.  Some folks
never seem to learn that.)

>Just how much do these persons make who sell pianos?
>I know car salespeople can make a bundle,
>(80-100k/year) while the poor guy working in the shop up to his eyeballs
>in grease, makes only 30k.

The range is really quite large.  In the "halcyon" days (now long gone),
salespersons in spiffy areas made $50K and up - not bad money, 40 years
ago.  (There are, after all, reasons why so many talented sales types stayed
with pianos so long.)  As a point of reference, for those who may wonder, 
in the 60's (when I was getting started), the sales force at the Wilshire
Blvd., Penny-Owsley ne: Sherman, Clay store in LA were doing at least 
that well ($50k and up/year), or they got the door.  At the same time, with
one exception, the going rate for floor tunings was $5 for uprights and
$7.50 for grands, and the post-sales service rate was (roughly) double
that.

Also, as recently as 3 years ago, one person in the Bay Area was writing
over $1M in sales volume - several years in a row.  That person was
making (roughly) $125,000.  Significantly above average, I would imagine.

Along the same lines, I was doing a little online research recently
(amazing what you can find on the net), and discovered, on the web page
of the music department of a mid-west university, that, based on figures
ostensibly obtained from the ptg home office, the average annual income
for a piano tuner, last year, was just over $26,500.00.  I frankly
do not know whether to be amazed or appalled.

Sufficient Cartesian ruminations for a Friday afternoon.

Hope everyone has a good weekend.

Horace


Horace Greeley, CNA, MCP, RPT
Systems Analyst/Engineer
Controller's Office
Stanford University
email: hgreeley@leland.stanford.edu
voice mail: 650.725.9062
fax: 650.725.8014