Hi, Tony, thank you. Without the necessary skills to operate any business, nobody will be successful in any endeavor. This business might be one of the most difficult to be successful, I'm not sure about that one but, I do know that I see an awfully lot of unsuccessful piano technicians. Highly skilled, yes, but still unsuccessful, an even bigger yes. Matthew, you are right, I am a 3rd generation RPT my son, if he continues, will be a 4th generation. I learned a lot from my father who taught me much of what I mentioned below along with reading a lot of business websites. Stay one step ahead of your competition at all times. Yet, I do not recommend stepping on anyone's toes either. Not as easy to do as one thinks but, once one learns how, it becomes easier than one first thought… Sounds like a Chinese proverb. :-) Jer From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Matthew Todd Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 12:06 AM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] Raising rates in recession Hi Jer, You also forgot to mention that you are, what was it? A third generation in the business? I can't remember what you said before. That sure has contributed, I am sure, to everything you mentioned below. Others on the list are starting their business from ground zero. Maybe if their sons and sons sons take over they will be booked in advance such as yourself. TODD PIANO WORKS Matthew Todd, Piano Technician (979) 248-9578 <http://www.toddpianoworks.com/> http://www.toddpianoworks.com --- On Mon, 6/28/10, Gerald Groot <tunerboy3 at comcast.net> wrote: From: Gerald Groot <tunerboy3 at comcast.net> Subject: Re: [pianotech] Raising rates in recession To: pianotech at ptg.org Date: Monday, June 28, 2010, 4:53 PM Hi All, For me, I am already booking action jobs for next summer and in fact, I already have 3 scheduled. I am currently doing and have been doing, 2 reconditioning jobs per week from May through July. I have no slow times. I often begin action jobs prior to May, it just depends on what I have lined up and how many tunings I have lined up as to when I have the time available to do it. I sub contract out many different jobs including all rebuilding, I haven't done that myself in many years. So, for the slow times, I plan as far ahead as possible. I know what months they will be and try my best to plan accordingly. I always have. That is the reason why I have no slow times. From this point forward, I will be lining up jobs for my slower times for next summer. I cannot tune all of the pianos I have to tune during only a few months of the year. That is totally impossible for me and ridiculous to attempt. Pianos need tuning at various times of the year here in Michigan. I plan that accordingly as well and will explain that a little further down. I've always been a leader in price increases. My costs of living, health insurance, taxes, cost of supplies, phone lines car repairs and any other expense has not gone down. They have however, gone up and some of them considerably. If we rely strictly on what comes IN via the phone lines to live and work off from, you will not be nearly as busy as the person that calls his clients as I do. As I mentioned in another email, I am currently booked solid all the way through September as of today. (I have my son doing action work for me in my shop as I type this) I hear more often "I am as busy as I want to be." My first thought is, Good excuse and I think, OH REALLY? And, how busy is that? 1-2 tunings a day if that? Booked for 1 week ahead? Do you have any sort of business plan? Any goals set? I'll bet they are not booked as far ahead as I am tuning as many a day as I have in the past 35 years of full time tuning. I have cut back some being 54 years old now. I no longer care to tune 8-12 pianos a day and only do so when I have to do so. Otherwise, it's 3-7 per day. I have all of my churches, my college, my schools and all other organizations including my homes set up to be called at certain times throughout the year. I absolutely HATE making these calls to schedule in advance myself. I hate that more doing anything else. That is my biggest weakness in business. Therefore, knowing this, I hired a gal back in the early 1980's to do this for me. I set up my college tunings myself and in fact, have already set aside all of my college tunings dates required through January of 2011. I STAY AHEAD of the game and ON TOP OF THINGS AT ALL TIMES! This is a business and MUST be run as such. This is most important of all. Staying ahead and on top of the game. My gal came last week and scheduled 48 tunings for me for the fall months in 2 days, working a total of 4 hours. I pay her $12 an hour and $1 per TUNING scheduled. If a school has 15 pianos, that's $15 for her. As mentioned above, I pre-set up everything. The first thing I did and still do, was/is to find out when our clients have special events coming up? Concerts? Recitals? Whatever… We ask what time of year would you prefer sometimes upon my recommendation, 1, 2, 3, 4 + tunings a year depending upon the use and location of the piano. All of this information then gets entered into my database and pops up months in advance that so and so in big red letters IS DUE FOR SERVICE. All I need to do is look to see what month/s they are due, which pianos are due to be tuned and have my gal contact them and set them up. They have come to LOVE that I do this for them. They thank me for it constantly. They have no more need but for emergencies, to contact me first and know, I will stay on top of it always contacting them well in advance of the preset months that we have agreed upon. I keep my quality one step ahead of my competitor's. This IS possible. I set very high standards not only for myself but, for those that do subcontracting for me. Screw up and you'll know it. Screw up again and you're fired. My sub contractors know this. It is my reputation at stake. I make THEM match my standards not me, theirs. I am on time as much as possible and I am extremely dependable. I rarely cancel appointments unless I am sick or something like a funeral takes place. If a client calls and I'm booked and cannot get the job done, I find someone that can or go after hours to do it myself instead. One way or another, I will get it done. I do all the billing so my name remains on their contact list not the person I sent in and I pay the sub contractor myself. If I tell a client that the job will be done by this date, it is done by this date come hell or high water! If I quote $1,200 for example, and I find something else wrong that I missed due to it being my fault, I absorb it and learn the lesson. I learned that I must look it over better in order to not be screwed later on. With the above things in mind, that is worth more to me and to my customers than matching competitor's pricing. That said, I am currently charging $140 in town for a standard tuning with no pitch raise and with no repairs. Tuning only. I quote $140-$180 for a tuning and P.R. I charge $160-$200 for traveling out of town for tuning and P.R. I have NO complaints about my pricing. But, I do get plenty of compliments of how can I manage to arrive on time every single time (?) along with how much it is appreciated. As for traveling…. Why should I after all, absorb the cost of driving an additional 1 hour or longer round trip? I should not. Again, it is a business. Running it as one will give us and our clients the best service and benefits possible. Giving a bunch of stuff away will in fact, cause you to be forced from that point on, to continue to give things away for free because not only will the client expect it but, they will tell everyone else that you do this and that for nothing… Try reversing it and it will not be easy. Never start it and it won't have to be reversed. As Chuck mentions, location saves time and money. There is nothing wrong with traveling but, traveling from one side of town to the other and back again is nuts yet, sometimes to fill in a last second cancellation, we all do it. 1 tuning is better than no tuning. I have always aimed my sights at the higher end clientele. My college comes first and foremost. My family has been servicing there since 1926. My churches come 2nd. Schools 3rd. Other organizations such as retirement homes and the like, 4th and homes last. Taking care of our most dependable clientele is first and foremost. They will remain as such. Reading business related sites is important to continued education on how to properly run a business. I stopped using a card file system in 2004. I use Filemaker Pro. My friend set it up for me according to my needs. It pops up the clients as mentioned above when they are due to be called for service. I also use it for billing. It has never ONCE failed me or crashed nor have I lost any information. With all that this said, YES, I most certainly believe that we should all increase our rates every so often and not once every 5-10 years like some people I know. I raise mine on a regular basis. Clients get used to it and then expect it. They know full well that we too, have a need for a price increase just like any other business. Again, service is everything. Make quality and customer service a priority and your business with thrive even in the slower economic times. I am living proof of this. Jer From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Behm Sent: Monday, June 28, 2010 9:18 AM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] Raising rates in recession >Wally In April I actually dropped my rate from $115 to $85, to be more in line with the other tuners. But I explain that $85 is my "basic" fee, and is only for tuning. Then I tell them that my "full service" tuning fee is $115, (which used to be my basic fee), but includes minor repairs and minor pitch adjustments and regulation. For my regular customers, I charge the basic, if all Ii do is tune. But I do sell extra's like rust blocker, and maybe try to sell them on cleaning and polishing the case. For new customers, I tell them I have to see the piano before I can tell them what the fee will be, but the lower rate at least gets me in the door. I had to do this because my business was down about 30% from the previous year. I had to do something to get customers. It's starting to turn around. but I'm planning on staying at the "basic" fee for at least another 6 months. I'll see what the economy is doing by then before make a decision as to whether I'll go back up to my "normal" fee. Wim< Wally, Wim and others - The topic of pricing and scheduling has been on my mind a lot lately, in that the recession has hit my area pretty hard, and I know for a fact (because customers have told me) that the cost of tuning is a very important factor to a lot of people when they decide whether to have their annual service done. For the first time that I can remember I've had people flat out tell me they don't have the money to have the work done. Add to the that the fact that for me at least May, June and July have always been slow, while the bills I need to pay of course continue undiminished, and I had begun to to think that I needed to make some adjustments. I've known for a long time that my system (if you could call it that) of booking appointments also needed to be improved upon - it seemed very inefficient, but being the creature of habit that I am, I had just continued on and on with the same methods that I had used for decades. I keep all of my customers data on simple 4 X 6 index cards, sorted by the month of last service, with no regard to location. Part of the problem right off the bat was that in the course of a year I go to 87 different communities. My own town of Boone, Iowa, is simply not large enough at 13,000 to support me. It's a very blue-collar community and I doubt that there are 500 pianos inside the city limits. So I basically go wherever I need to to find pianos to work on. Many of the places I go are tiny villages (one for example, with a populationg of 16 - I actually tune 4 pianos there). I put on a lot of miles in the course of the year. This card system never worked well for lining up tunings, since the focus was always on date of last service, and not location. For example, if I had 6 pianos in one community I might find myself driving there 4 or 5 times during the course of the year, thinking on every trip how stupid it was. The other problem, which ties in and contributed to the first, was that I never gave pre-booking a try. I always assumed that people wouldn't want to book in advance too far, and always told my customers that I would call them several days in advance before I would be in the area. Procrastinator that I am, this often meant that I would be down in my basement office the night before I wanted to do a day of tuning, desperately trying to find enough people at home to put together a day of work. I hated scheduling, because oftentimes I would end up with a nightmare of a schedule driving to 6 different towns to tune 6 pianos. A final problem which also tied in was the fact that I would always call my best and most reliable customers at the beginning of the month. By the end of the month, I would always be left with the riff-raff, so to speak, and would have to struggle to find work at all. This all came to a head late in May, when I had put off scheduling a Friday and Saturday until Thursday evening. I optomistically had marked in 6 tuning spots on my calandar for each of the 2 days. I started calling at 7 p.m., dialing numbers until 9:30 and in 2 and 1/2 hours manage to find one person at home who would schedule a tuning. One person an hour away, and I booked it. This, I remember thinking, is for the birds. I've got 900 customers (which was ample when I was teaching, but which I am making efforts to increase by 1/3 now that I'm retired from teaching- more on that later). I've got a good reputation with my customers (I can't recall ever having a customer tell me they had employed another tuner). But here I was only able to find one tuning for two days. My "system" of scheduling, of pricing, of organizing my customers - basically everything - needed an overhaul. The first thing I decided I would do is to lose the monthly organizational scheme. I had to start considering location first if I every was going to cut back on the number of miles (30,000 last year) that I put on my car. I went to Office Max that Saturday morning, bought several packets of clear dividers, and made an index card with a divider for each of my 87 communities. Then I went through every customer card and relocated the card by location without regard to the last date of tuning. I simply alphabetized the cards within the community, counted them up for each town, and wrote the number of customers on the corner of the divider tab. The high was 256 for Boone, with a number of little towns represented with fewer than 10 customers. Next, I made calandars (I do my own on manilla folders - 4 weeks to the folder, not by month. This is one tradition I like and will carry on with) for the entire year to come in advance (through the end of the summer, 2011, actually). I went over the upcoming year with my wife, and crossed off any day which might present problems in scheduling. Holidays obviously, my neice's wedding date, etc. In addition, we blocked off a number of 3 day weekends and a full week at the beginning of the summer of 2011 for rest and relaxation. That done, I started blocking in specific days for specific communities. Depending on how many customers might reside in a town (or cluster of little towns) I blocked in an appropriate number of days. I would write the name of the community along the edge of the rectangle for the day, and hi-light it with yellow. I remember thinking how optomistic it all seemed, but couldn't imagine that I could actually pull if off and make it work out. To kick things off, my last change was to adjust my prices. May and June had always been the worst months for scheduling, in that so many people are quitting lessons and would rather put off tuning until fall. For those two months, therefore, I decided on offering a $15 deduction if the customer would have their piano tuned and book ahead for the following year. For July, I decided on a $10 deduction, and for the rest of the year a modest $5 deduction simply for pre-booking. With those changes made, I started calling to schedule June (or later months, for customers who opted for a lower deduction), beginning with the customers who had their pianos tuned earliest in the fall. The results were amazing. When I mentioned that I was trying to be pro-active in helping the customer in times of recession by offering a lower rate for my slower season of the year, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. I quickly booked in the entire month of June, scheduling an average of 24 pianos per week. Since my goal (for budgetary reasons) is no fewer than 18, and up to 27 pianos a week, this was right where I wanted to be. Granted, I was earning a few bucks less per piano, but I would much rather be tuning a whole lot of pianos for a reduced rate, than doing next to nothing for my full rate. The math just seems to work out better when you increase the numbers. The other big, big plus was that I filled in each day with either pianos all in the same town, or a morning's work in one town followed by an afternoon's work in a nearby location. With less driving, I was able to book appointments a bit closer together, and either get done earlier, or add an extra tuning onto my day. For those who want to wait until fall, that's fine. I still offer the $5 discount for pre-booking, and that way get them signed up for a day of my choice. Everyone, as in 100%, of the customers that I've reached so far has booked their tuning, either for the $15, $10 or $5 discount. The biggest surprise, however, was in the ease of pre-booking for the next year. I took my set of calandars with me, and when we settled up at the end of the appointment, I would take out the calandars so we could look ahead for the next appointment. Only one of the customers who I tuned for during the month didn't want to schedule ahead. Everyone else gladly signed up for the next year, usually for the same day of the week, same time, same rate. It's wonderful. I've basically got June, 2011 completely booked in. I explained that I would call the week ahead to remind them of the tuning date, and that flexiblility would be the key. If they needed to adjust their schedule, I would find the next time that I would be in their community to add them in. Also, I stressed that I might need to make adjustments according to circumstance, in which case I would also call ahead to reschedule. I'm planning on leaving a couple days open each month for such contingencies. Finally, to begin adding in new customers, I came up with the idea of "ChuckBucks." These are a small version of a dollar bill, with my picture in the middle, and the words 15 dollar coupon clearly printed in several spots. The corners all have the number $15 placed over the original 1. I have these in sheets of 6 or half sheets of 3 that I give to customers. The idea is that any new customer will be given a $15 discount on their first tuning. Then the coupon will be clipped to the card of the customer who referred me, and they will be given a $15 discount on their next tuning as well. (If anyone would like to see a PDF file of these, just drop me a note and I'll send you one. It only took a half hour on the computer to put it together.) In that I just started giving these out (I had a local print shop print 200 sheets for 20 cents a sheet), I haven't seen any come back to me yet. However, people seem very enthused about the idea, and you can just see the wheels turning. I had a couple customers immediately start to jot down a list of friends to call. So hopefully, within a year or so, my customer base will be up closer to where I would like it to be. Well, anyway, sorry to go on for so long. I just saw that the topic had come up, and had been meaning to pass these ideas along. As I've told my customers, I've been in business 37 years. It's about time I figure out how to do things. Have a great week, everyone. I envy those of you who were able to attend the convention. Sounds as if you had a great (but somewhat overpriced) time. Don't think I'll ever stay at Bally's, however, from the sound of things. Can you say price-gouging? Chuck Behm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100629/b6c2ab95/attachment-0001.htm>
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