Some of our good experiences working with churches: When we were younger--and still able to move pianos--I was called by a church conference center to tune a piano for a ladies' retreat group. The old upright was untuneable. We loaned them--at our cost--a nice new studio piano for the conference and moved it ourselves. The ladies, who had a conference there annually, were so thrilled, that they raised the money themselves to buy the piano for the conference center. Within a month we had a sale. At another church, we were contacted to rebuild their old Chickering grand. Instead, we told them to not hire us, but to buy a new Kawai. We loaned them our Kawai--at our expense--twice, to help raise the money. Theirs arrived in time for Christmas, fully paid for. We made less money in the short run (although the dealer did pay us a reasonable commission and we sold them a Damppchaser system and a cover from Instrument Covers), but we had an annual service contract with them for the next 20 years (when we moved out of the area) on a wonderful Kawai GS-60. The service contract was pre-paid annually, four tunings/full maintenance--good money, good work. It was a joy to work with them! One bad experience. Another church in town called us twice for estimates. We had never tuned for them. We didn't realize it the first time, but did the second. They had received price quotes from their regular technician and were using us to find out if his prices were OK. We declined to give them an estimate the second time, after we realized what was happening. Diane rental agreement annie at allthingspiano.com annie at allthingspiano.com Thu Jan 17 08:38:29 MST 2008 Previous message: rental agreement Next message: rental agreement Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That's a good idea, thanks. Much simpler than a contract, too. My shop is 160 miles from their church (in my previous service area)... and she wants to play the piano on site, having had such a frustrating experience with the current instrument. I don't blame her a bit, as I'd feel the same way about all of it: the current piano's inadequacy, the desire for a grand, and the wanting to try it out in the space. (Maybe I'm identifying too much, eh?) But I am SO glad they finally decided to actually solve the problem, rather than trying to work around it. Annie G. Diane Hofstetter
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